Follies of 2019

To declare the National Theatre's revival the best ever production, with the best ever cast, of Sondheim and Goldman's layered masterpiece, you'd have to go back as far as the 1971 premiere. My theatre editor on The Arts Desk, Matt Wolf, was sitting next to a man who'd been there, and he declared this was tops. What I do know is that I laughed, cried and cheered my way through the 2017 press night of Dominic Cooke's subtle staging, already the stuff of five-star raves like mine, and that it just got even better (Marianka Swain seems to me to hit the nail on the head, and eloquently so, for TAD this time). Production photos throughout by Johan Persson.

It sounds curmudgeonly to say so, but while Imelda Staunton brought her usual perceptiveness and truth to the role of Sally Durant Plummer, the former Weismann Girl who's been eating her heart out over decades for the man she should have married while wed to the one she doesn't really love, it didn't fit her like a glove in the way that her definitive Mamma Rose in Gypsy absolutely did. The lines lie quite high, really needing an accomplished singer - some numbers were transposed for IS, I'm told - and one hears Barbara Cook sometimes in the true show voice of Joanna Riding.

But oh, we get so much more. It's interesting that, as before, the production images don't give away what happens in the climactic 'Loveland' Follies of the four main characters, working all the better for not coming after an interval. So you see the sweet facade of Sally above, not the raging monster that breaks out of 'Losing My Mind'. The image - slight spoiler notice - of her ripping off her wig and staring terrifyingly with her clown-face at the audience is up there with the great moment of her Julie Jordan bursting out of the house in Act Two of Carousel and crying 'where is he?' (of the 'ghost' Billy Bigelow). I remember how our row rocked with tearful heavings at that point.

The way that key song is played underlines what Cooke does with so many numbers - has them start naturalistically and quietly, at a mirror ('Broadway Baby' and, more stylised, this one) or conversationally to friends, admirers or husband (Tracie Bennett's ever-stupendous 'I'm Still Here' - pictured above, given in full in the YouTube film at the end of this piece - and Janie Dee's cool-beginning 'Could I Leave You?' - Dee pictured below with Alexander Hanson and Christine Tucker) and then rise to heights either of theatrical defiance, on with the motley, or sheer fury. The stage persona can be as 'real' as the inner turmoil revealed.

I was struck this time by how much the young 'ghosts' were interacting with their older selves, more palpably aghast at the way they'd turned out. Having a drink after the show with our former Edinburgh University Theatre Company buddy, and the best Buddy you'll ever see, Peter Forbes (pictured below), he confirmed that Cooke, even in absentia for part of the rehearsal period as he was finishing off a film, had wanted more of this. The excellent junior show singers, therefore (Christine Tucker, Gemma Sutton, Harry Hepple and Ian McIntosh) had to be 'present', emotionally speaking, the whole time. So you looked at them much more often. In any case, 'Waiting for the Girls Upstairs' is as perfect an ensemble (an octet, in fact) as Sondheim ever devised.

Alexander Hanson gave us a different Ben from Philip Quast, the cracks showing from the start, some very sensitive singing going on. Perhaps that meant that the ultimate breakdown felt inevitable rather than surprising, but none the worse for that. I assumed we were seeing the same Hattie 'Broadway Baby' Walker as first time round, since they looked identical, but this was Claire Moore (pictured below) rather than Di Botcher, absolutely terrific.

I was hoping to see Felicity Lott, taking over the veteran Austrian diva Heidi Schiller from Josephine Barstow for this stretch of the run, but she was stricken with laryngitis, and though she felt better on Tuesday morning, she gave it one more day before she was back in the bosom of people she absolutely adores (and it's reciprocated).

I went, lucky me, as a guest of Meyer Sound, celebrating its new partnership with the NT, and it may come across as the kind of commercial plug you keep getting, in knowing inverted commas, throughout RuPaul's Drag Race (welcome, Season 11 - it's going to be good) if I say that, yes, the quality of orchestral balance with well-miked singers really showed their part in the overall success. But what ravishing playing! Jonathan Tunick, Sondheim's master orchestrator, is hugely, sincerely impressed. Peter told us how he was there at an orchestral rehearsal at which Peter's son, a double-bassist, was allowed to sit alongside the professional player. Tunick would tweak a note here and there, hearing everything with the ear of a Boulez, re-allocating a line or two to make all the difference.

That's professional genius. And lest you ever doubted it about the master, I came across an amazing 55 plus minutes of Sondheim in conversation with André Previn which absolutely nail it, making no allowances at all for what the TV audience might or might not know. I found it when I was looking, on the advice of my Arts Desk pal Graham Rickson, for Previn's Pittsburgh Mahler 4 to add to the TAD homage I put up yesterday. I didn't find that, but I came across this - and, better still, it has the three wonderful first performers of Side by Side by Sondheim - Julia McKenzie, Millicent Martin and David Kernan - bearing out what Sondheim says about duet form, pastiche - a chance to hear the first song he wrote for 'Phyllis's Folly', not even heard in Side by Side, and breaking the song-mould. A true and generous insight into the creator's workshop, and what a brilliant interviewer Previn makes.

And we have to end with Bennett's 'I'm Still Here', as performed at an awards ceremony feting the last run. Now, I have to catch Company before it closes. Meant to go over Xmas, but ended up in hospital instead...

She Loves Me: I liked it

Which is more favourable as a three-word review than 'Me no Leica,' Walter Kerr's famous verdict on John van Druten's I Am a Camera (basis, via Isherwood, for Cabaret). But there isn't a lot more to say about the Menier Chocolate Factory's latest exquisitely staged musical. I'm going to say it anyway. Matt Wolf has already hymned the show on The Arts Desk - which is why I booked - and our resident photographer Bill Knight provided the images. He let me choose from a wide selection here, for which I'm very grateful (pictured above, Mark Umbers and Scarlett Strallen).

The problem lies in the mostly anodyne songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (though the book, by Joe Masteroff, is good, and preserves the detail in the conceit that a love of great literature draws the two principals together, sight unseen). I don't suppose anyone's seen Miklós László's Illatszertár (Parfumerie), but if you don't know the most charming of the films based on it, Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, in which Jimmy Stewart spars with Margaret Sullavan, rectify that omission immediately. Bock, Harnick and Masteroff are more faithful to the original, keeping the setting as well as the Hungarian names (Bock had Magyar roots). It was a clever idea of Matthew White's production to give everyone British accents, from the Cowardesque RP of the main lovers to Cockerney for the brash blonde who ends up with an Arthur Milleresque infatuation and Welsh for the delivery boy.

Trouble is that I was expecting something more sophisticated. She Loves Me premiered on Broadway in 1963, not so very long after the most articulate of all musicals, My Fair Lady, and it seems that Bock and Harnick held out for Julie Andrews as the heroine (they got Barbara Cook instead, not a bad deal at all). I can see why Menier chose it: both a good seasonal item - the 'Twelve Days to Christmas' shopping number is a treat - and a chamber piece with a couple of virtuoso ensemble numbers brilliantly choreographed by Rebecca Howell ('Tango Tragique' pictured above). Paul Farnsworth's sets revolve beguilingly and all the roles are well cast.

And yet.... I waited in vain for a witty number to evolve, or an argument to be properly set to music, in Act One. Something like it happened in the finale at the Cafe Imperiale, where shop girl Amalia Balash waits for her epistolary lover (none other, of course, than her envious, angry fellow worker Georg Nowack): the idea that this is a dive with tray-dropping waiters and bad food which prides itself on creating an aura of romance is deliciously exploited. Act Two is better - not often the case with musicals - and there are four strong numbers in a row, starting with the only one whose tune I can remember, 'Vanilla Ice Cream' (Strallen singing it pictured above), the would-be-lovers followed by the shop Lothario and his betrayed gal.

Everyone is right for the specific part. Mark Umbers was a given quality following his triumph in the Menier Merrily We Roll Along, and Scarlett Strallen is a real soprano with a secure top and a pretty look of exasperation (of course both are way too good looking for ordinary people, but that's musicals for you). Katherine Kingsley has an endless inventory of comic gags as the brassy Ilona and Dominic Tighe is a convincing cad (the two pictured above). I was surprised to find out it was Les Dennis who found shade in the tragicomic Mr Maraczek and I also couldn't quite believe that Calum Howells, with his winning bright grin, is only 17, which would be right for the role of the eager-to-please Arpad. They complete the below ensemble along with Alastair Brookshaw as the decent Ladislav Sipos (second from right).

So yes, in the end I succumbed to the romantic warmth of it all. But not much thanks to Harnick, who despite friendship with Stephen Sondheim, ain't a patch on him (though who is, since Loesser, Lerner and Jule Styne?) Just one thing bugs me at the Menier: the use of insensitive amplification. I can't see why it would be necessary in this of all shows, and it made an especially horrid mush of the excellently played, quasi-tziganish violin solos - a wry reminder that Bock and Harnick also wrote the much more laborious Fiddler on the Roof.

Next indulgence in home cinema, at any rate, will be The Shop Around the Corner, which I haven't seen for maybe 20 years and ordered up the minute we got home.

And I did the usual twixt Christmas and our departure for Amsterdam on the 28th, which was to play my two favourite show albums, the original-cast My Fair Lady and the London line-up (glorious Imelda Staunton included) for Into the Woods, one of the best-produced musicals on disc ever. And on stage, directed of course by Richard Jones, with whom I spent an intriguing morning in the V&A cafe yesterday as a kind of unofficial dramaturg for a project (maybe hush-hush, maybe not, I'd better ask) on which he's embarking. Not a musical, but even if you might miss the songs the latest subject he's treating on the London stage really ought to be turned into one (silly young Hart turned down an offer from Irving Berlin, of all people). That's the visually brilliant Young Vic handling of an ephemeral charmer about Hollywood's transition from silents to sound, Once in a Lifetime. You have until 14 January.

Sondheim's Cain and Abel

Well, not quite - I don't think it's a spoiler if I say that no-one in Road Show gets killed, but there are slow deaths of the soul involved - quite quick ones, actually, done with the master's usual succinct virtuosity, since this is a (long) one-act distillation of what started life as Wise Guys in 1998, became Bounce in 2003 and ended up in its present form five years later. Don't know how I missed the UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2011, and only heard of this Union Theatre staging in time thanks to a punter commenting on my Arts Desk review of Chabrier's L'Étoile at the Royal Opera (his gist was that the Union evening turned out wittier and all the more effective for being done imaginatively on a low budget, and he turned out to be right). All production photos here by Scott Rylander.

Anyway, the show smacks neatly of so many American myths - the Cain and Abel aspect of Steinbeck's East of Eden, the get-rich-quick side of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny and the schizoid relationship of their two sisters journeying through America to make money in The Seven Deadly Sins, not to mention its feeling at times like the third in a chamberish trilogy by Sondheim himself (Pacific Overtures and the IMO much stronger Assassins being the first two instalments).  Needless to say, the real-estate aspect is the most pertinent, as a clever final tableau at the Union underlines.

The two facets of the same personality are to be found in Sondheim's and John Weidman's portrayal of real-life Wilson and Addison Mizner, jumpers on the bandwagon of the new (20th) century. Wilson is the brilliant short-hauler, the doer whose plans never come to proper fruition (brilliantly captured in the ensemble number 'That was a year'). Addison has a run of bad luck to start with - comparable treatment in 'Addison's Trip', pictured above, encapsulating two years' of world wanderings - but builds on his mistakes. Quite literally, in his dubious success with serving up the rich villas in hotchpotch styles in Palm Beach. He, at least, doesn't pretend or falsify; but when Wilson comes back fatally into the picture to develop a Mahagonny at Boca Raton (that delightfully hooey fantasy sequence pictured below), it all goes decisively pear-shaped for the last time.

All this is economically staged, with slightly irritating invisible props, by Phil Willmott, whose Lear with Ursula Mohan at the Union I so admired, and the entire company struts its thoroughly professional stuff very well indeed in the tiny space. But what makes this an unforgettable evening is the superb casting of the four main roles. You can tell that huggable Howard Jenkins (pictured up top on the right with Andre Refig) is keeping his Broadway belt in check to suggest the sensitivity of gay Addy, and when he does explode towards the end, it's spine-tingling (I can't tell if the music is up to the mark here, but the performance absolutely is). Refig's Wilson might arguably be a mite more charming, but we do get to see his vulnerability.

Joshua LeClair (pictured above with Jenkins and Refig) is spirited as the poor little rich kid Hollis whose dreams of an artists' colony are doomed along with his reciprocated love for Addy. This is a first for Sondheim, a mutual gay declaration of [You're] 'The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened To Me' that doesn't make a fuss about itself - the relationship just is, even it's bound to be destroyed by Wilson. Cathryn Sherman's Mama Meisner is so good and true that I had to wonder why I didn't know this singer-actress.

Her 'Isn't He Something' is the nearest Road Show gets to deeply moving. But it's always effective, and the contrast between American dreams and the shoddy reality is typically strong. Even middle-range Sondheim is better, in the way the lyrics so effortlessly fit the tunes, than any musical by anyone else currently operating, at least that I've seen (the hit-and-miss Grey Gardens, for example). Fabulous musical underpinning, too, by MC/pianist Richard Baker, violinist Katt Robb and percussionist Richard Burden - and look, no miking (except behind the mirror). I'd like some company to perform all three (or four) versions of this experiment that Sondheim never lost faith in, but in the meantime catch the Union's Road Show if you can, and if/while there are still tickets - not easy to come by in this lovably miniscule venue. It's on until 5 March. In the meantime, I've bought the Nonesuch recording, and perhaps I ought to invest in Bounce as well.

Dazzling woods, stagnant lake

Here's what I want: to persuade as many of you as are interested that the new, Disney-backed film of Sondheim's Into the Woods is infinitely better than any of the lukewarm or downright vindictive reviews I've read of it would lead us to believe, and to urge you to go and see it. Derek Deane's assisted Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake for English National Ballet at the London Coliseum needs no such special pleading, but much as I enjoyed catching the first night as the guest of The Arts Desk's excellent chief ballet critic Hanna Weibye - who raved here - I have more than a few reservations about both the nature of the tradition and even the performance of prima ballerina Alina Cojocaru, my favourite Aurora but not on this evidence the greatest Odette. I know, I know, ENB is so lucky to have her, above all dancing with Ivan 'the Beautiful' Vasiliev (only picture of him below among the selection offered by  ASH for ENB), and in the past I've found her dancing peerless, but this was odd from where I sat in a good seat towards the back of the stalls.

Why? Because I couldn't see any facial expression. It was as if she'd decided Odette has been turned into a kind of mechanical doll by Rotbart (vigorously etched by James Streeter, but our villain has nothing to do other than flap his rather splendid wings). Maybe that's one way of interpreting her, but then what about the poetry of the budding love between Prince Siegfried and the swan-into-forlorn maiden (or male swan, in Matthew Bourne's heartbreaking reinvention, which would have so moved Tchaikovsky)? As Hanna remarked, Cojocaru only let her face light up once, as the Prince pledged true love towards the end of that crucial second act.

My other problem is that I'm perhaps too fixated on a tall Odette - perhaps not an option for the small but perfectly formed Vasiliev. Still, you need to know who the Swan Queen is the minute she emerges from the gaggle. I'll never forget Svetlana Zakharova's infinite, and infinitely expressive arms at the Mariinsky. Cojocaru simply doesn't stand out from the pack, not to the non-connoisseur of dance at any rate.

Cojocaru was, though, superlative as black swan Odile (apart from the dull Drigo-arranged variation where her execution made one fear for the famous multiple fouettés to come, though as it turned out there was no need to worry). Here I could read the switch between smiles and mock-sadness towards Siegfried and craftiness towards dad Rotbart's implausible egging on (and why on earth would a court tolerate those freak-henchmen of his? I know it's not meant to be realistic, but still...)

On the other hand, I couldn't take my eyes off Vasiliev. Not just because he is indeed so beautiful - part of a trio in my books that also includes Ivan Putrov and Roberto Bolle - but also because the slightest tilt of his body suggested his pain and boredom at court, his anguish in the later stages. The trouble is that apart from the leapy-leapy in the 'Black Swan' Pas de deux, Petipa and Ivanov's Prince is a mere support act. A long way indeed from the Spartacus with which Vasiliev burst upon the London scene.

I thought the corps excellent, and the four cygnets mesmerising in their leg-work; it took Hanna to explain to me how certain angles would be more perfect from the Russians, but she was impressed too.

The real poetry comes from all those waving arms, that sea of bluish-white which for me is the real treat of an old-style Swan Lake. Otherwise, Matthew Bourne's storytelling is superior as a reflection of the music at every point, especially in Act Four, so limp here.

Thankfully ENB didn't take over wholesale the Drigo-butchered score which goes with the rehabilitation of 1895: gone were those horrid Tchaikovsky piano-piece arrangements which are so alien to the world of the composer's through-composed final act. Still, the Pas de deux pretext for a borrowing from the otherwise-cut Pas de six of Act 3 does nothing for the dancers and holds up the action just as badly as Drigo's number. The score was well enough conducted by Gavin Sutherland, but clearly hampered by ridiculously slow tempi for nearly all of Odette's music (at Cojocaru's demand? I can't tell).Star for me was an oboe hero of mine, Gareth Hulse. Can't quite make out why the London Sinfonietta's top man has ended up here, but it's a quality band if a bit thin on the violins.

No such extreme musical surgery was applied to Sondheim's masterpiece of music-theatre Into the Woods - now, for me absolutely the tops of all his work for sheer integrated, clockwork perfection - in its fortunately not too Disneyfied version by Rob Marshall. Some songs are cut, though I didn't miss any except the meaningful reprise, with a very different text, of the princes' 'Agony'. Thanks to certain insistences and the guiding presence of original 'book' writer James Lapine, kids may well be disconcerted by the especially dark turn the counterpoint of stories takes in the second half: no fairy-tale happy-ever-afters here. And though I loathed in principle the idea of Sondheim's having caved in to let Rapunzel survive and not bereave the Witch too severely, in practice her riding off with her prince was probably an OK decision; there's enough death and misery around that part of the drama as it is.

None of the stage-show's sharpness has been lost. Indeed, its brilliant first quarter of an hour is paralleled by superlative filmic cross-cutting between the characters. I didn't know the names of about half the members of the great ensemble* but I was convinced by them all.

Well, not perhaps at every point by James Corden's Baker, but he does cry convincingly and he's generally simpatico. It was going to take a lot to convince me that this Baker's Wife could match up to Imelda Staunton (in Richard Jones's original London production - revisited the soundtrack over Christmas, and it's one of the best ever) and Jenna Russell at Regent's Park, but Emily Blunt is so winningly lovely and mobile of expression, and her singing is fine. As is everyone else's, though I wonder if there was a bit of help for Daniel Huttlestone as cheeky dimwit Jack in his number 'There Are Giants In The Sky', which sounded almost too good to be true for a kid.

No doubt about it, Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood is a total star. Good lord, is that Annette Crosbie in about 40 seconds of Grandma time? Not to mention Simon Russell Beale as the Baker's Father and Frances de la Tour revving her contralto register as the Giantess - luxury indeed. Jonny Depp is as surprisingly good smarming up the Wolf in 'Hello, Little Girl' as he was in his off kilter Sweeney Todd (Sondheim's favourite film adaptation until now: does this take pride of place, I wonder?)

All the acerbity of the lyrics bites through, the execution of the G&S-in-black patter song 'Your Fault' is astounding and this time I bought into the possibly oversentimental music of 'No One Is Alone' - well I remember Richard Jones telling me he thought that was a disappointing lie - because the words keep it sharp. So did the fact that we were watching it with a goddaughter who'd still been in her early teens when her mum died. 'People sometimes leave you/Halfway through the woods' is a line that always gets to me.

Perhaps I'd have liked a more active segue into the return of the opening music at the end - it's used to back some of the credits - but that's my only major criticism. Jonathan Tunick is on hand, as ever, to make sure the larger-scale film orchestrations really work (it sounded good, if as ever a bit overamplified, in the Vue Cinema on Lower Regent Street). The woods look sinister-beautiful - do I see my beloved Frithsden beeches? Must check - and the film medium fully exploits the special-effects potential of exploding beans, beanstalk, whirlwind witch, etc.

So what, finally, of Meryl Streep as the Witch, referencing her age reversal in Death Becomes Her halfway through? Sensational. '[The] Last Midnight' rises dizzyingly to its 11 o'clock number status, a sinister Ravelian waltz to set aside the 3/4s of A Little Night Music, and leaves us gasping for breath. It also, incidentally, has some of the best-set lyrics: 'You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right'. So here's one musical they got as right as the cinema ever can, and if you say 'I wasn't going to go but now I shall', then my job's well done.

*Not quite as starry as the cast of the second read-through back in 1995, when Columbia Pictures and Jim Henson were interested. Sondheim lists the names in his second volume of complete lyrics and observations, Look, I Made a Hat: Robin Williams (the Baker), Goldie Hawn (the Wife), Cher (the Witch), Carrie Fisher (Ugly Sister Lucinda), Bebe Neuwirth (Ugly Sister Florinda), Moira Kelly (Cinderella), Kyle McLachlan (Cinderella's Prince), Brendan Fraser (Rapunzel's Prince), Elijah Wood (Jack), Roseanne Barr (Jack's Mother), Danny DeVito (the Giant) and Steve Martin (the Wolf). 

Why did it come to nothing? According to Sondheim, 'because of one of those periodic shake-ups where a new platoon of executives replaces the old one, eager to throw out all projects begun before their arrival in order to demonstrate the freshness of their re-thinking'. Familiar story in all walks of life, alas.

Anyway, let's celebrate that it DID get made nearly 20 years later, and with more of the original material. I can't imagine the opening sequence being bettered.

Divertissement

What’s the vaguely seasonal listening here at home? Bach cantatas, not necessarily tied to the time of year, an always inexhaustible treasury; G&S, thanks to a fellow blogger who may wish to remain anonymous since he dug out some hard-to-find Mackerras radio recordings, including Princess Ida with Valerie Masterson as the heroine and Philip Langridge as Hilarion; and Tchaikovsky ballets, as ever.

I feel I’ve not exhausted the musical strain in my earlier bracketing of Bourne’s and Järvi’s Sleeping Beauties. It seemed only fair to return to Petipa since the New Adventures version had to jettison so much of my desert island Tchaikovsky, in other words most of the fairy-tale homages at Aurora’s wedding. Some earlier fantasy designs featuring high-camp courtiers and animals present themselves online in Bakst’s far from moribund later imaginings for Diaghilev’s surprising 1921 extravaganza. Quite where the Indians, Chinese and blackamoors fit in I’m not sure, but at least we get proper animal heads for Puss in Boots, a passage Bourne ingeniously reinterpreted

and Red Riding Hood’s Wolf, part of a character number not in the Bourne vampire ball.

Poorly filmed though it is, I thought the following link to a strand of the Kirov/Mariinsky’s 1890 reconstruction was worth including because you won’t have heard any of these three numbers in the Bourne version. In the case of the Cinderella/Prince ‘supplementary' as well as the fabulously imaginative Tom Thumb ‘Pas berrichon’, they might not even be on your ‘complete’ recording, and probably not in any recent Royal Ballet production you've seen. YouTube embedding isn't, apparently, allowed but click here to view the sequence. If you want to see the Bourne-absent Bluebird sequence, you can go back to the previous slice.

It seems criminal that the kids-and-ogre routine has been sliced off two CD transfers in order to cram the ballet on to two discs (a feat which Järvi achieves with no cuts but some very fast speeds). This, after all, is the number which a colleague of the young Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire remembers them both especially admiring for the way in which ‘the theme is broken up and scattered amongst various instruments at wide intervals of the register’. No Bakst designs for that number, nor for the Bluebird, but here's the legendary Enrico Cecchetti with his Florine in 1890.

Now for a more extended slice of magic, which Bourne did include closer to its entirety than any other choreographer whose work I've seen - the Entr'acte Symphonique 'Le Sommeil', mentioned in the previous Beauty blogslice with copyright discovery of its string tremolo lasting 100 bars. You can check for yourself in the piano score which accompanies it here, and go on if you will to some of the dances in Act III. Of these, Bourne included only the Polacca, aforementioned Puss and, with special percipience, the 5/4 Sapphire Fairy variation last featured in the wacky Björnson-designed Royal Ballet Beauty. I fear the volume levels may be a bit low, and the first two bars of high violin tremolo aren't there, but the Concertgebouw/Dorati recording is an interesting choice,

As for New Adventures absences, you can't miss them for too long in that mostly wonderful show; unless you’re impossibly Petipa-purist (and heaven knows that master fiddled around with the original score himself), its storytelling ingenuity will be bound to win you over.

May it run as long as a show we should have seen long ago, but somehow never did – One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s updating of Goldoni to 1963. In the mood for froth, J picked up two half-price tickets on Thursday, so off we went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to see how the highly-praised Owain Arthur acquitted himself in the James Corden Truffaldino-ish servant role. I have no comparison to make, but Corden's one-time understudy charmed us even as we sat somewhat nervously on the end of the second stalls row, wondering whether we’d be the next audience participants implicated in the stage mayhem.

As it turned out…well, I won’t spoil the fun, but this is the perfect seasonal treat since it's as close to panto as you can get if you dislike the genre. I was reconverted last year with the Wimbledon Dick Whittington starring Dame Edna Everage, who was wonderful but by no means the only onstage laughter-maker. Likewise Arthur, given exuberant turns from Jodie Prenger as our main man's feisty sex interest (pictured below in the second of two Haymarket production photos by Johan Persson), Daniel Ings as a posturing thesp, Ben Mansfield as arf-arf Stanley Stubbers, Rhona Croker’s dumb blonde and Gemma Whelan excellent in a revival of Vesta Tilly-style male impersonation.

We were also apparently fortunate to be rewarded with the return of the original, award-winning deaf old waiter Alfie, Tom Edden (pictured below by Alastair Muir) in the ever more hysterical slapstick climax of the first half. His walk across the stage with a rattling tray was a consummate comedy turn in itself.

The warm-up skiffle band and the vaudeville musical numbers by various members of the cast added to the simple but uproarious pleasures of the evening.

After the Boheme and Robert le Diable plunges, we’ve been lucky in our catching-up going-out, culminating in as classy and dramatically varied a Handel Messiah as I expect to see and hear at St John’s last night – Arts Desk review (probably the last for a while) here. It’s been a delight to have flying visits from dear friends overseas, encompassing two goddaughters and a godson (our adored Lottie came to London as a member of the Zurich Opera Dutchman chorus, and the Buma-Hills-es, over from Amsterdam, met us for dim sum today).

We’ve enough reading to keep us happy in the quiet spells between the socialising: I’m working my way through Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, a Christmas present two years ago but only sampled until now, wondering at his highly critical masterclass in the art of lyric(s) writing, and Ulitskaya continues to amaze in an affirmative tale about Russians gathered round a dying friend in a New York attic, The Funeral Party (with the stress decidedly on the ‘party’). Season’s greetings to any readers who are still dropping by at this quiet time.

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

Julia at midnight

I'm obsessed. By the master's infernal, internal rhymes; by the little bean-cells that sprout tunes; by the whole intricate fairytale-meets-human-dilemma machinery of Sondheim's Into the Woods. Having seen that far from perfect Regent's Park production, I ordered up the original London cast recording to take me back to the palmy days of Richard Jones's show (I went twice, and the second time I took my pal Stephen Johnson to convince him this was up there with the greats. He agreed).

Well, further examination leads me to an outlandish claim: this stands in the same relation to Sweeney Todd as Britten's Turn of the Screw does to Peter Grimes or Billy Budd. It has something like the same thematic rigour, the same symmetries, and even some equal felicities of chamber scoring from Sondheim's inimitable house orchestrator Jonathan Tunick.

Most of it doesn't work out of context. But the track I've been playing over and over again is Julia McKenzie's Witch delivering the apocalypse-now of 'The Last Midnight'. It's the apogee of what I'm guessing is Sondheim's (and Tunick's) obsession with Ravel's scarier waltzes. Especially the burbling clarinet against my favourite lines (witch to world: 'You're just nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not nice, I'm not good, I'm just right.')

Alas, it's not on YouTube; you'll have to get hold of the recording for yourselves. But what I did find was sublime Julia performing Sondheim's wicked Astrud Gilberto spoof 'The boy from...' She does it deadpan, and savours the place-names like no-one I've heard. All as a riposte, I'm guessing, to Kit and the Widow's famous parody 'People who like Sondheim'.



As for 'The Last Midnight', the best I can do is a piano-accompanied version by the Witch of the Regent's Park production, Hannah Waddingham. It will give you some idea of the number's insidious genius.



The Guardian's Martin Kettle claimed that instead of concentrating on his interview with Tony Blair last week, he was plagued by the 'earworm' of Mahler's First Symphony. But I came away from the beautifully played, more questionably interpreted Berlin Phil/Rattle Prom featuring that wonderful work and found myself earwormed by 'The Last Midnight'.

Careful the things you do...

...children will see and learn. Yes, I know, Sondheim gets preachy here, and preachier still in the climactic 'No-one is alone' as Into the Woods goes all gooey, though I swallow even the latter from direct performers like Jenna Russell in Regent's Park or Jacqueline Dankworth on the London cast recording, which I finally bought off Amazon in an attempt to relive two happy performances. It was that production's director Richard Jones, by the way, who told me in an interview that he parted company from Sondheim in the last stages - 'because it's just not true that "no-one is alone" ').

But it's a sound enough message when linked in - as everything in that uniquely planned, symmetrical score is - with an earlier passage (the Witch's 'Children won't listen'). And it seems to be the message of an almost unequivocally dark masterpiece, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which we finally saw at the weekend. The setting is rural Germany on the eve of the First World War. The first thing to say is that subject and cinematography are one: the dazzling, digitally-enhanced whites of summer party and harvesting scenes, the near-black interiors. Good may flourish in the dark, when for instance the teacher-hero plays the harmonium by gaslight to soothe the distress of his just-dismissed governess girlfriend, and white can be bad, like the painted door behind which the pastor punishes his dysfunctional children.


It's a bit like Bergman, but with less humanity (only the honest narrator and his slightly freaky-weird love fumble towards honest living, though you feel the powerless women of the various households want to help). Indeed, the scene where the doctor tells the midwife he's been sleeping with of his disgust for her smacks of the hapless uncle and his wife in Fanny and Alexander. But there you get to understand why Carl's become the way he has. The parents in Haneke's world are just symbols, it seems, of a decadent old-world, sado-masochistic discipline and carefully concealed abuse that the anarch-children serve to mimic or to challenge. For the whole drama to remain shrouded in mystery, it depends on the victimised children not to identify their attackers, and maybe I found that a bit hard to buy.

Yet the atmosphere of unease is compulsively suggested from the start, and there's something in common with James's The Turn of the Screw, about which the wisest comment I read was that the Governess wants the children to be too good, and the 'ghosts' want them to be too bad. And the performances in The White Ribbon, from the kids especially, are haunting and real. There's a clip on YouTube of the unforgettable scene in which the doctor's young son questions his sister about death.



Taken in the round, it's a masterpiece, and I can understand why Abbado was so impressed that he wanted Haneke to direct a new production of Berg's Wozzeck.

The debate about how much children will listen, see and learn has been a bit stoked up by sundry productions of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Laurent Pelly's reasonably light-of-touch Glyndebourne take on consumerist wastefulness came to the Proms last night, all its messages intact in the semi-staging and all involved glistening and shining under the silky baton of Robin Ticciati.


Needless to say Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke's bald, hairy-bellied fright of a Witch (pictured above with the definitive Hansel of Alice Coote by Chris Christodoulou for the Proms) set some chins wagging, and one old bloke accosted us at the end to tell us he'd walked out in disgust. But children can take it. And of course we all oohed and aahed at the semi-staging's solution to the vast supermarket-sweep 'house' of the original production: a mini Albert Hall. But of course! Yet who'd have thought it - and I wonder what Sir Henry would have made of Rosina Leckermaul sticking her pink wig on his bust. Had a good laugh like the rest of us, I hope.

Wanted: home help for Nuremberg cobbler

It's up on YouTube, and the BBC put it there: the comic highlight of last week's Sondheim Prom. To get the gag, and the headline, you'll have to hang around for the last of the four or so minutes, when the most famous living Welshman other than Tom Jones sashays along with the rest and even does a little skip (especially nice choreography there). The others are Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans and the delicious Julian Ovenden. Best go full-width by clicking on the screen once you've set it going and flipping over to the site.

I put this and the following at the bottom of the Arts Desk review, but since I only discovered them yesterday, and many Proms have passed under the bridge since the piece went up, they might have gone unnoticed, so here's an extra shrine for them.



Seeing Dame Judi in close-up highlights what an unflashy star she is, already preparing to launch straight into heartbreak from the minute she steps on to the platform to receive the roars of the crowd (for some reason the entry seems to have been shorn since I last looked). And I repeat what I think we discussed earlier: not having much of a singing voice doesn't matter if you have the right sense of musical timing. Have you ever heard 'the one that I wanted' done with greater yearning? Takes me back to her treasured Sally Bowles in Cabaret - a performance I'm too young to have seen on stage, but delighted to have it captured for posterity on the original London cast recording. Here she is back in 1968.


It's certainly a bit irritating to be told that she and our Stately Homos Fry and Beale are National Treasures, and to hear how the home counties roar at anything they do, but there's a good reason for it.