Dam(s)e(l)s in distress?

A second viewing of the Maysles brothers' classic 1975 fly-on-wall documentary Grey Gardens after seeing the musical at the Southwark Playhouse makes me wonder whether Edith and 'Little' Edie Bouvier Beale were no more than fleetingly in distress. These one-time socialites now seem more like independent-minded women doing their thing in the dilapidation and squalor of their bohemianised Long Island mansion. And what lovely eyes they both had.

In Charles Court Opera's pantomime Mirror Mirror at the King's Head, which came to an end just after the Christmas season, Snow White was a six foot four dame more than able to look after herself. There, I've tried to justify the links, or not, between two shows with accomplished singer-actors carrying material of varying qualities. My thanks to theartsdesk's resident photographer Bill Knight for the pantopics, and to the Southwark Playhouse photos of Scott Ryland.

If you hadn't heard - and a lot of my friends, unlike adorable Jinkx Monsoon on RuPaul's Drag Race, had never even come across the original - Grey Gardens got turned into a musical giving the Ediths more of what they'd always wanted - more song, more dance. It finally arrived at the Southwark Playhouse with two consummate showgals in the lead: Sheila Hancock - whom I well remember as Mrs Lovett to Dennis Quilley's demon barber in the London premiere of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd - as Edith senior in her old age (Ms Hancock is 80, and still croons rather beautifully), and a personal favourite, Jenna Russell, of whom one can usually only sigh 'lovely lady, lovely lady' as my favourite teacher Mr 'Tibby' Bircher used to do over Desdemona. Here she's only a little bit lovely, but very funny, in a double act as Edith in her prime and 'Little' Edie past hers.

The headscarved, self-styled revolutionary fashionista was a good deal more softly spoken in real life; Russell does a hilarious version which often veers into Australian. No matter; she gets the best number, the opener of Act Two, alongside which the rest tends to be either nostalgic pastiche or sub-Sondheim patter with some infelicitous rhymes and stresses. Composer Scott Frankel is pretty good, but Stevie he ain't (who could be when such geniuses only come along once in a lifetime?) and if Doug Wright's book along with Michael Korie's lyrics are aiming at the sophistication of The Philadelphia Story in Act One, they don't come close. As for the slice of life that is Grey Gardens the documentary, amazingly it's all on YouTube, though can't be embedded, so follow the link here. A still, in the meantime, will have to suffice.

Nevertheless the crazy-family set-up which gives some kind of context to the 'prologue' - a whole act - of 1941 is well enough portrayed in the clutter of Thom Sutherland's slick Southwark production, and though I didn't much care for the token camp bunged into the script, Jeremy Legat as George Gould Strong, Edith's resident musical genius, sure could play, act and sing. Not so certain about Young 'Little'/'Body Beautiful' Edie in the somewhat strident tones of Rachel Anne Rayham - surely nobody needed mikes in that place, stuck on their foreheads like unbecoming tikka marks - but she had a neat song-and-dance number, a bit reminiscent of Street Scene's 'Moon Faced, Starry Eyed', with the dashing Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr of Aaron Sidwell ('somewhere in Athens a plinth is missing its statue' got the measure of it).

Act Two needed better torchsong numbers, but Hancock did carry off 'Jerry [the boy who visits and does small kindnesses for the recluses, also played by Sidwell] likes my corn' . Didn't think much of 'Around the World' or 'Another Winter in a Summer Town', and the sentimental ending dragged; the real crux was 'Little' Edie's cri de coeur in the climactic argument - dialogue, regrettably - where Russell's ever-impressive truthfulness kicked in. Not the greatest of musicals, then, but a real treat at close quarters - and what a luxury to have such an excellent nine-piece band under Michael Bradley (can they make any money at the Southwark Playhouse?).

I love that part of town, Borough heading on towards the hopeless case of the Elephant and Castle, and I love Islington in the patches which aren't chain restaurants and cafes - to whit the King's Head Pub and Theatre where we used to go for supper and shows of high quality, and where we now try to catch everything put on by charismatic singer/impresario John Savournin and his Charles Court Opera. After his triumph as a 'Judge Judy' of sorts in an hysterically funny Trial by Jury,  Savournin gave us Snow White the Dame, mourning her late husband Barry and subsequently the murder of dwarf  Half Baked.

That naming's a result of one running gag - that Disney's copyright-crazed heirs don't like the original names to be used, so out went Dopey, for instance. All seven, being impersonated by Matthew Kellett, never appeared on stage at the same time until the curtain call.

Here's a joke I rather like, not that it featured in the panto: did you know that six out of seven dwarfs aren't Happy? (Audience groans).

As we know, this is a highly professional, energetic company of opera singers who do pretty good dance routines to boot; as J said, you can't fail to like them and laugh along. Lovely work, as always, from Amy J Payne as the Prince and Nichola Jolley as her Dandiniesque sidekick, destined for frogdom. All the ingredients of traditional panto were here. I imagine Savournin has studied the doyen(ne) of pantomime dames and script writers Eric Potts, who held his own alongside Dame Edna Everage in Wimbledon's superb Dick Whittington. There were the necessary couplets, the obligatory kitchen-chaos theme with audience participation, asked for or not,

and while I missed the evening performance not having any kids among us, I'm very grateful to the company for singing 'Happy Birthday' to Dancing Delice aka goddaughter Mirabel when she went with her little friends for a matinee before Christmas. Mother Edsy has seen the show four times, and I can see what appealed to the animal-dressing artist in the glove-puppet backing group for two numbers which made us roar with laughter. It's also all too easy to forget that the entire show is carried by five talented performers on a tiny stage and a master musician at the keyboard(s). Onwards, then, CCO, and may we see your Patience soon, pray.                          

The primrose path

In Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along it leads backwards in time from the hell of compromise and failure to the sunlit plains of youthful optimism. In Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable it meanders ineffectually until finally fizzling out in the face of an equally pallid angelic challenge. Having seen the two works on consecutive nights – the opera first at Covent Garden, the musical next at the Menier Chocolate Factory - I know which path I’d rather take. But let’s put duty before pleasure and have done with the French devil first.

Is Robert really a grand opera? Its length and scenario would suggest so; the music, apart from the passing low brass threat, would better be suited in selective dollops to semi-disposable opéra comique. That Meyerbeer could write a good tune we know from Constant Lambert’s arrangements in Les Patineurs, drawn from Le Prophète – yes, it really did have a roller-skate ballet – and L’Etoile du Nord. There’s arguably one catchy number here, the Sicilian song in the first act. Otherwise you wait and wait for the promised improvements in later acts. Like so many second- or third-rank operas, this one always seems about to deliver and always stops short at foreplay.

 Instrumental colour can be interesting – good girl Alice’s arrival in a dangerous place is marked by a sweet woodwind chorus – and one ungainly novelty stands out, the a cappella trio in which the tenor and soprano shoot up to insane heights while the bass hits rock-bottom (its concluding counterpart makes the most of its half-tune, blueprint perhaps for the better effort towards the end of Gounod's Faust). If Princess Isabelle’s plea to Robert to forsake his wicked ways is another hit, the second replacement coloratura, Sofia Fomina, failed to make it so despite the support of harp and cor anglais.

In fact of the four principals only Bryan Hymel, a surprisingly beefy tenor capable of hitting the top notes, seemed in technically good shape. Usually reliable bass John Relyea (pictured above with Hymel) struck gravel in his upper register and the picture-pretty Marina Poplavskaya did her usual of swooping in and out of focus and tuning (so frustrating – there’s certainly something there if only a good teacher could bring it out). Conductor Daniel Oren didn’t seem to be helping anyone much. Laurent Pelly’s production restricted itself to naff rhythmic steps for the chorus and didn’t bother much with trying to mine any psychological truth from the principals (probably there’s no point). 

Some of the 19^th century style picturebook designs were fun, but only the ballet of zombie nuns in the graveyard where Robert has come to claim a magic branch, strikingly choreographed by Lionel Hoche, managed to triumph over anodyne music. Worth staging? I think not. A concert performance would have been enough to show us the bits that influenced Wagner* – and Sullivan, so much creepier in Ruddigore. If the Royal Opera wants to do a French grand opera, albeit one of less historical significance, it could try Massenet’s Le Cid. But no more Meyerbeer, please.

On, vitement, to Merrily We Roll Along. I hadn’t really wanted to bother with it again, having taken away so little from the Donmar production 12 years ago with Daniel Evans and the gorgeous Julian Ovenden. But then I learned from colleague Matt Wolf's enthusiastic review that the leading trio this time round included Damian Humbley, so dazzlingly good in the ill-fated and unfairly maligned Lend Me a Tenor, and lovely lady Jenna Russell, outstanding star of the Regent’s Park Into the Woods. Josefina Gabrielle, who eclipsed Tamsin Outhwaite in the Menier’s Sweet Charity, was also playing a chunky role. So I decided to give it another try.

Even before the night, assisted by the 1992 Leicester Haymarket cast recording with Maria Friedman – the present production’s clearly able director – I was hooked. The show is based on a Kaufman and Hart play and follows the blueprint of a (usually resistable) self-referencing showbusiness rise and fall, but told in reverse. As Sondheim points out in the excellent Finishing the Hat, Merrily not only traffics in the regular 32-bar songs of the musical golden age but, thanks to the time-travelling premise, previews them in fragmentation or dissolution before piecing them together in their pristine state. Thematic transformation is almost as skilful and pervasive as in Into the Woods, a work of incredible musical sophistication. The winning song penned by the musical’s composer and lyricist, ‘Good Thing Going’, is cheesy but earwormy, and there’s an infallible blend of post-G&S patter with pathos.

The Menier cast was, as anticipated, flawless. Russell (pictured above with Mark Umbers) doesn’t really get the limelight she deserves as Mary, but manages the backward transition from overweight, outspoken drunk to hopeful author beautifully. Humbley brings the house down with impeccable timing in Charlie Kringas’s self-destructive rant against his sellout buddy Franklin Shepard ‘Inc’ during a 1973 TV interview. Handsome Umbers achieves the difficult task of winning our sympathy as we regress to understanding a little more about Frank’s compromises.

The biggest transformation is realized by Clare Foster as his first wife Beth, maintaining a stillness in heartbreaking anguish in the first, divorce-scene rendition of ‘Not a Day Goes By’ – no easy task considering we’ve only just met her – before lighting up the stage with her younger enthusiasm (Foster's in the top picture with Russell, Umbers and Humbley). Gabrielle (pictured below with Glyn Kerslake), like Russell, doesn't quite get to strut all her stuff. She's a terrific dancer and the show number adapted with Sondheim's permission could give more room to that. As her first husband, Joe Josephson, Kerslake comes magnificently if briefly into the limelight in the middle of the fabulous young-professionals number 'Opening Doors'. 

The scene-changes are evocative bearing in mind the Menier’s limited space, the band excellent, but I have the one usual cavil in this place: why mike in a small theatre? You can’t tell where the voices are coming from in ensemble scenes, and you lose their natural timbre. Anyway, on with the West End transfer, and here’s to Broadway for Friedman and Co.

It's been an equally mixed week for Arts Desk assignments. I'll be damned if the Zurich Opera's concert performance of Wagner's Die Fliegende Holländer wasn't the best event of 2012 thanks to the Senta (all-giving Anja Kampe) and Daland (relaxed veteran Matti Salminen) rising to the superhuman level of Bryn's Dutchman.

But then there was a 26th-revival Copley Bohème at Covent Garden cruelly exposing the current problems of Rolando Villazón, and no-one else really making it worthwhile (though Elder's orchestra, despite being too loud and slow at times, revelled in the detailed beauties of Puccini's fabulous score). As for the old Copley production, at least Act Three looks good - below, Villazón with Maija Kovalevska's bright but unItalianate Mimì.

*though I reckon the Abbate/Parker claim that Senta's Ballad would not have been possible without the example in Robert's Act One must be wrong; the one in Marschner's Der Vampyr, which when I saw that opera in Munich struck me as close to the world of Dutchman, predates Meyerbeer's example by three years.

Production photos of Merrily We Roll Along by Tristram Kenton for the Menier Chocolate Factory

Production photos of Robert le Diable and La Bohème by Bill Coooper for the Royal Opera

Photo of the Zurich Dutchman by T+T Fotografie