Peter Viney's Blog

Based on the film by John Cassavetes
Book by Ivo Van Hove
Music and lyrics by Rufus Wainwright
Conceived and directed by Ivo Van Hove
Set, Lighting and video design by John Versweyveld

The Gielgud Theatre, London
Tuesday 12th March 2024, 19.30

MAIN CAST:
Sheridan Smith – Myrtle, a famous actress
Hadley Fraser- Manny, a theatre director
Shira Haas- Nancy, a 17 year old fan
Nichola Hughes-Sarah, a playwright
Amy Lennox- Dorothy, Manny’s wife
John Marquez – David, the producer
Benjamin Walker – Maurice, the leading man

plus (named in programme but we never heard names)
Ian McLarnon – Leo
Cilla Sylvia – Carla
Joe Slovick – Gus
Rebecca Thornhill – Kelly
Robert Finlayson – ensemble
Daniel Forrester – ensemble
Jennifer Hepburn – ensemble
Issy Khogali – ensemble
Chrissie Perkins -ensemble

Ivo Van Hove likes adapting films as ‘Conceived and directed by …’. This is adapted from a John Cassavetes ‘art horror’ film from 1977. The film was a total flop and did not get a proper US release until 1991, when it acquired an art house reputation in Europe. It centres on an actress at a point in her career where age is affecting her roles, a casting problem that afflicted women far more than men in 1977. Less so nowadays as so many female stars have aged gracefully into roles written for maturity. As my male actor cousin said ruefully to me once, “I’m at the point where I’m too old for romantic leads and too young for character parts.’ Myrtle, the actress of a certain age is flanked by the 17 year old fan, “youth”, and the old playwright, “age”. I didn’t see Nicola Hughes as the playwright as ‘old’ though. She is 65 in the film.

The exciting thing here was a Sheridan Smith leading role, especially as she has had her stage demons in real life in the past. Then there is music by Rufus Wainwright- we have seen him twice on stage and have several albums. The last time we saw him, he stripped down to Stars and Stripes bikini briefs and made the backing band do the same. I’ve never seen musicians look so sheepish, but still he was enjoying himself. Twenty years have passed and he’s done his operatic thing since. And so to stage musicals.

There are issues. The glaring one is that the plot is hard to follow. I strongly advise reading the Wikipedia article on the Cassavetes film first if you go to see it. I didn’t until afterwards. It explained the plot in a way the stage version didn’t get anywhere near. The programme didn’t help at all. I discovered afterwards the play they’re performing is called The Second Woman. Neither of us picked that up on the night.

Did we lose the plot or is the plot convoluted, messy and circular? We said we had best watch the John Cassavetes film to discover what it’s about. I fear the film will be pretentious. The stage play is.

Also, for a stage musical, there is no dancing at all. The ensemble, who we expect to be dancers and singers, mainly stood about watching the action with their mouths open as if stage crew. Why did they need so many? They added vocals. Sheridan Smith is Myrtle a stage star, traumatised by the death of a young fan, killed crossing the street after getting her autograph, the fan then appears throughout though but only Myrtle sees her. I think. Finally Myrtle kills her, which is hard to do as she is already dead. This would be the art-horror sequence then.

So throughout Myrtle declines to stick to script, and is traumatised again and again and again by a stage slap which is part of the script of the play which they are doing. Or are they rehearsing or previewing ? I had assumed we were watching rehearsals. Back to Wikipedia on the film. We are not. These are three out of town previews for a Broadway opening. This is an American phenomenon, lampooned in Joseph Heller’s play title based on Catch 22, ‘We bombed in New Haven.’ If a play bombs in New Haven, a favourite preview venue, it doesn’t get on Broadway.

So we have to assume that when the dresser removes Myrtle’s jeans and blouse on stage and puts on a bad dress, this is a preview performance not a rehearsal. Neither of us got that at all, so she is cracking up on stage, not in a rehearsal room. Sheridan Smith is continually dressing and undressing, as the dressing room is the rear of the set. Also the scene she and Maurice play at the end is apparently her improvising the last scene of the play on Broadway ‘to rapturous applause.’ That didn’t come across. We just thought it was a scene we hadn’t watched before, though beautifully done by both actors.

We have fabulous lead singers and the songs utilise full range and power. Sheridan Smith, Hadley Fraser and Nicola Hughes are all first rate singers. The duet between Sheridan Smith and Nicola Hughes which opens part two is outstanding from both. The best thing in the play.

Sheridan Smith is always a pleasure to watch, though as in her Funny Girl you have to wonder who on Earth designed such an awful frock. Costumes throughout were nondescript to outright bad. They were awful on Maurice, who had normal jeans – rehearsing, or baggier jeans – on stage. It was very hard to note which was which. A clear strongly differentiated costume (as with Myrtle putting on a dress) was absolutely necessary. The whole production looks drab.

American accents took us back a couple of decades to seeing Gene Wilder in The Front Page with a British cast just up the road from this theatre. They slip all over the place and sound forced. Nowadays, they’re usually better.

Video projection is used 90% of the time. It should have been used to indicate ‘on stage’ or ‘off stage’ but it isn’t. It’s like seeing a big star perform at Hyde Park with 100,000 people. You stop watching the live action in front of you and watch the blow up on the video screens instead. They are wildly over-used, so much so that it becomes irritating. Some is live feed filmed on stage, and the film of Sheridan Smith drunk in the street as she arrives for the Broadway opening is shot live every night.

It definitely is live too, according to the Mail Online which has been showing passer-by reactions on different days. The Sun and Express have taken up the theme and say crowds gather to watch her nightly and it brings extra business to restaurants (Bollocks, every restaurant in that part of Shaftesbury Avenue is full anyway). The crowds will be tabloid photographers waiting to capture her nightly. There must be a dozen different photos online.

The Mail say it’s her return to the stage after her own alcohol problems with Funny Girl. Bollocks again. Did they miss her award-winning Shirley Valentine last year?

She performs brilliantly. The fall looks totally real and is on hard wet dirty pavement – and it was raining heavily outside when we saw it. The same idea was used in Sunset Boulevard at the Savoy last year. That was better because the actor came through the audience with the Steadicam operator to prove it was real. Here she appeared on stage. Admittedly it is easier to do in reality at the Savoy, set off the street, than at the Gielgud theatre on the much busier Shaftesbury Avenue. Both owe a debt to the film Bird Man. When we switch to the Broadway actual opening night we get film of the audience arriving projected. That shifted our attention too because we wondered if it was really this night and were looking to see if we were there. We weren’t.

Sometimes, as in the last scene (the actual first night of the supposed play they are rehearsing) the close ups on actors work very well, though you stop watching the actual actors. Sometimes I suspect strongly it’s pre-recording. For some long sequences, such as the killing scene, it uses a delay of a few seconds (or is pre-recorded- but I think it’s a delay). Audiences were confused by the delay, and it made it very hard to watch two things happening at the same time (live and video) with a 5 second gap. For the last duet and the full cast finale, they drop the video feed. At last! It was the right time to focus on the real actors and not the screens.

The band were placed stage right out of sight. They did well, with a very good bass line written to most songs. Were there horns or synth? The horns were used sparingly. We never saw them. It could have been virtually a recording, surely a theatre of that age has a pit?

Overall? I suspect van Hove erroneously believed we might know the film he loves so much. No, it is obscure. The fault is all his in not transferring it with clarity to a stage musical. The cast are all very good indeed. The music is pretty good. The singing is fabulous. It is always worth watching the sheer magnetism of Sheridan Smith on stage. It looks dull and drab. Awful set and costume design. The video should be used to purpose. It isn’t.

But sorry, the adaptation fails. The scripted dialogue is patchy with some poor sections. All down to Van Hove too, no reflection on the talented performers. So two stars.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
No press reviews at the time we saw it. We were several days in. Yet there’s a lot of stuff online on that street scene outside. Apparently, the unwritten rule is you don’t review before press night. To me, that’s ONLY with half-price previews which theatres used to do. You charge £75 a ticket (not the best seats)? You’re subject to review. Period. Of course, national press reviewers get free tickets. We don’t.

28 March:
My goodness, they held them back another two weeks. Earlier, a site where people rate online had one star as the largest category, two star as the next. That’s why press night came so late. They are said to have tweaked it. The consensus is two star / one star and ‘pretentious’ is used in several reviews. Ahem. Maybe that’s why The Guardian and The Observer rated it as four stars.

By 31 March the knives were out, with Mail Online reporting fifty people leaving at the interval per show. With three figure ticket prices in the best seats, one tends to stay. However, in West End theatres, people leaving is not rare even for the hottest tickets. Large companies block book in advance (they can’t do this with The National, The Globe, Old Vic, Young Vic or RSC) and present tickets to important visitors from abroad. Wimbledon and the Cup Final are included. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet was the most sought after ticket of its year, yet we sat next to two Russians who examined their mobile phones for much of the first half and hurried out in the interval never to return.

four star
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian ****
 this one seems to shake up musical theatre itself. It may be the most unusual thing on the London stage right now and is captivating in its glittering strangeness

Anrzej Lukowski, Time Out ****
There are no dance numbers, power ballads, lavish sets, or cute romantic storylines. By entering the West End, ‘Opening Night’ is almost inevitably inviting an audience that will be confused by it. And yet: there’s a palpable warmth to it. Maybe it’s a musical, maybe it isn’t, but under all the avant-garde bells and whistles, it unquestionably has a heart – a buoyancy and belief in humanity that’s lacking in the original film.

Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail ****
There are many reasons to be dismayed by this show, but Smith, who at one point is filmed crawling drunk through the street outside, somehow defies Van Hove’s attempt to derail her. For her magnificent climactic number, The World Is Broken, he even tries to bury her inside a crowd of actors behind a see-through curtain. Here she sings movingly of falling apart, of pulling herself together, and of now being ready for battle. And what a battle it is for us, too. A pyrrhic victory perhaps, but a victory I wouldn’t want to miss.

Kate Kellaway, The Observer ****
Opening Night is tantalising. It bewilders, beguiles and overpowers – an almost hit.

three star
Alice Savile, The Independent
Van Hove’s production isn’t sturdily built enough to contain all this emotion: it flattens and muddles where it could heighten. He introduces a documentary crew who are filming the rehearsal process, presumably to make sense of the now-familiar device of live camera feeds magnifying the casts’ faces on big screens. But they’re quickly, inexplicably dropped. The supernatural themes of the second act are hopelessly misjudged, too: Shira Haas is full of punky, oddly sexualised rebellion as Nancy, the ghost of one of Myrtle’s fans, but when she’s dispatched with a standard lamp it’s farcical, not haunting.

Clive Davis, The Times ***
At one point in this very strange musical about backstage drama at a Broadway play, a character remarks that “half the audience loved it, half the audience hated it’’. Those words may well become the epitaph for the collaboration between singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright and that ever-provocative Belgian director Ivo Van Hove. It’s a long time since I saw a show that seemed so determined to wrongfoot everyone. The songs and the script are occasionally inspired, but more often maddeningly opaque.

Marianka Swain, London Theatre ***
The one thing that’s absolutely clear is Smith’s total commitment. She really gives something of herself in an emotionally raw turn, and, using that gorgeous powerhouse voice, lends some welcome dramatic heft to Wainwright’s meandering songs …here, the commentary on women losing all relevance as they get older is dated and misogynistic. It’s also troubling to see the company’s blithe disregard for their lead’s wellbeing, to the point where she’s lying catatonic on the floor.

two star
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage **
In the second half, the efforts of the entire ensemble actually bring about a measure of coherence. It’s not the least engaging evening of musical theatre I’ve ever sat through, but it is one of the most baffling wastes of talent.

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times **
The multi-layering becomes confusing and alienating — it’s often hard to follow what is going on — and seems to swamp the characters, most of whom remain one-note

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph **
Sheridan Smith enthralls, but this play is a pretentious, convoluted mess

Domenic Maxwell, Sunday Times **
There are the scenes where Myrtle rehearses the show. And then there are the scenes where they perform in front of a paying audience. Can you tell which is which, and who is who? Is there a prize if you do? … Confused? I certainly was.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage **
 if Cassavetes’ original succeeds in compelling, thanks largely to striking cinematography and a raw performance from Gena Rowlands, this version, which features live video footage, is so aimless and tonally muddled that it feels downright weird. Which might be less of a problem if it were not ultimately a bit boring

Neil Normal, Daily Express **
Car crash of a production that even Sheridan Smith can’t avert. What could possibly go wrong in this Ivo Van Hove directorial? Just about everything.

one star
Nick Curtis, The Standard *
After disastrous previews, some changes have apparently been made, including the removal of a prolonged vacuuming scene (yes, really). But the show remains a hot mess, unsalvageable … Wainwright’s score skips from a Ravel homage/ripoff to hollow torch songs to footling showtunes. His lyrics range from the staggeringly obvious to the buttock-clenchingly pretentious.

Fiona Mountford, The i *
 Just occasionally a new West End show is so bewilderingly terrible that one can only gasp in quiet amazement at the fact that it has made it before paying audiences in the first place. A customarily effervescent and full-hearted performance from leading lady Sheridan Smith can do nothing to salvage this mess, through which a nasty vein of misogyny pumps insistently, and sections of which are devoid of even basic narrative sense.

Stefan Kyriazis, Daily Express *
Talk about tempting fate… This show actually opens with a car crash. Oh, the irony. The production is more like a multi-lane pile-up. Not even a charismatic, soul-baring Sheridan Smith can save Ivo van Hove’s abominable, misjudged musical adaptation of John Cassavetes’ iconic, challenging 1977 film.

New York Times: (doesn’t use star ratings)
The story never comes to life, and the themes are labored. Van Hove has transformed a taut, subtly observed character study into a sludgy melodrama.

Variety (doesn’t use star ratings)
 One can, of course, weave multiple plot strands together to surreal but emotionally dazzling effect. But that requires a directorial clarity that’s lacking here, and the underwritten book and unfocused staging means the combination merely blurs. We’re insufficiently engaged to care … Van Hove is many things, but the least of them is a playwright.”

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

IVO VAN HOVE (Director)
Obsession, The Barbican 2017
A View From The Bridge Young Vic 2014

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT (music)
Poole Lighthouse, May 2005
Hal Wilner: Leonard Cohen Project, Brighton 2004

SHERIDAN SMITH
Shirley Valentine, London West End 2023
Funny Girl, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2016
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Michael Grandage Company, 2013, Titania

HADLEY FRASER
The Deep Blue Sea, Chichester 2019
The Winter’s Tale, Kenneth Branagh Company 2015
Harlequinade by Terence Rattigan, Kenneth Branagh Company 2015
Coriolanus, NT Live