While I can enjoy an edgy drama, appreciate quirky oddities or savour the catharsis of weeping over a tragedy, my comfort zone is uncomplicated mirth that delivers a happy ending and sends you out of the cinema or theatre dancing on a cloud of happiness. Maybe I watched too much Disney as a child. But I refuse to apologise. In a world full of darkness, infusions of pure joy should be celebrated.
If you need one now, get to the Barbican immediately for their glee-inducing revival of Anything Goes.
With a hit-laden Cole Porter score, a book by P.G.Woodhouse and the glamour of a trans-Atlantic cruise ship between the wars, this may be the best musical ever created. Add Broadway star Sutton Foster reprising her Tony Award-winning Reno Sweeney with a deep cast of West End veterans including Robert Lindsay’s hysterical Moonface Martin, and it’s no wonder everyone’s been trekking across London to see it. (The Barbican lacks the transport links, restaurants and atmosphere of the West End but, to be fair, it is a wonderful theatre for staging big productions.)
The orchestra soared, the set dazzled, the costumes wowed and the dancing knocked Strictly into a cocked hat. Whether it was the opulent, full-cast numbers like Anything Goes or Blow, Gabriel, Blow, the poignant, elegant dance of You’d be So Easy to Love or the laugh-out-loud madness of The Gypsy in Me (with Haydn Oakley putting in a memorable performance as the repressed English lord daring to break free), this production delivers scene after scene of hummable classics you want to watch again and again.
But the reason this production has been such a huge hit this year may be down to the big number as the ship is casting off. Oh there’s no cure like travel, to help you unravel the worries of living today. When the poor brain is cracking, there’s nothing like packing a suitcase and smiling away. Take a run round Vienna, Granada, Ravenna, Sienna, and then around Rome. Have a high time, a low time, and in no time you’ll be singing home, sweet home. In a world where international travel has been almost impossible, that chorus was an elegiac cry from Londoners used to frequent escape from this island. While the virus makes real travel a challenge we can still … for now … escape through the medium of the theatre.
Anything Goes was the best of a quartet of productions I drank in during October. Regular readers of this blog will know that when my Dad visits, he takes full advantage of London (and Basingstoke) to see the kinds of live music, opera and theatre that rarely get to central Missouri. I joined him at these.
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
There are many things I wouldn’t have predicted about my life when I was 17; at the top of the list is probably the idea that I would ever attend Rocky Horror live with my father. I don’t think I’ve seen it in any form since I was 17, when partaking at the midnight show was a daring … but harmless … act of rebellion by Catholic schoolgirls who shouldn’t know about or see such things. (What we wanted to see even more was the banned-by-the-Vatican Life of Brian, but that had to wait until university). I don’t think I really grasped much of what was going on, and I’m not even sure I liked it that much. But the music was good and we thought the weirdness of the whole thing gave us a worldly sophistication.
Forty years later, with more than 20 of those spent in England, the biggest revelation about Rocky Horror was how very, very English it is. Cross dressing! Bad puns! Barely-disguised sexual innuendo! Being weird well, hell, just for the fun of it! Rocky Horror is a very naughty pantomime, infused with a lot of Carry On films and a great soundtrack. Given the numbers of university students in the audience at the Peacock Theatre (which sits in the middle of the LSE’s campus), it seems the bizarre formula continues to entertain.
LEOPOLDSTADT
You’d think there couldn’t be much new to bring to Holocaust drama, but when it comes from the pen of Tom Stoppard you pay attention. Everyone I knew who’d seen the semi-autobiographical story of a family in Vienna before and after the war raved about it, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see it before it closed. Even though I suspected it would make me cry. (It did. A lot. Bring tissues.) The innovation here is following a family for generations leading up to the war; a family that is as close to the establishment as you would think possible, and who practices their Judaism lightly, if at all. In the opening scene they’re decorating their Christmas tree. They’ve intermarried. They’re movers and shakers. They’re rich.
Absolutely none of which helps them in the late ‘30s when the atmosphere turns against them. We are spared the direct horror of the camps, getting it instead as three survivors … one who was raised a Christian Englishman and barely knew his Jewish heritage … talk about all the people who died. Bright, vibrant characters you got to know and care about in the first half. The main point here, for me, was how tenuous freedoms are and how quickly they can be lost. A potent message for these days.
THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT
This is the stage adaptation of the third and final book in Hillary Mantel’s trilogy re-imagining Thomas Cromwell as a good guy, adapted for stage by the author and Ben Miles, the actor who’s played Cromwell in the other RSC productions. It will please any lover of history; a compelling tale of rise, fall and the hubris that triggers it, though I’m not sure it has the dramatic heft of A Man for All Seasons. The vast book takes place mostly in Cromwell’s mind, a spectacularly difficult thing to bring to stage. We get a more pedestrian stepping through the story that most people know here.
The venal, backstabbing politics of the Tudor court is well captured, though I don’t think they delivered the story of class struggle quite as powerfully as in the book. Cromwell was always doomed, Mantel’s story goes, because he was an outsider. It’s there, but doesn’t hit you in the play with the force of the source material. What’s done even better, however, is the meeting between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. It may, in fact, be as close to reality as we’ll ever get. The aging, ill, overweight king who still sees himself as a youthful hero. The young princess who’s been sold a fantasy, The split second when, without warning, she confronts the reality of her husband-to-be and is unable to control her shock. Henry’s enormous but childish ego unable to deal with the “emperor’s new clothes” moment. That flash of pure honesty drives history to unpredictable places, including Cromwell’s downfall. Rosanna Adams’ Anne gives us the best moment in an entertaining if not hugely memorable production.
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