Saturday 29 August & Sunday 30 August
London
Three musicals were on my plate for this weekend: Trainspotting the Musical at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Cats at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and Midnight at the Never Get at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Three wildly different shows presumably aimed at very different audiences.
Trainspotting, an adaptation of Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, belongs to a well-populated category of British class-conscious musicals — together with Blood Brothers, Spend Spend Spend, Our House, London Road and many others. Despite relying on original songs, which should have been a plus, it felt like a random assortment of scenes and moods whose inevitable bleak ending cast a shadow from the get-go. By the interval, I had disengaged completely and was unable to refocus on the proceedings. Any story or property can be turned into a satisfying musical, but it felt like the creatives behind this ill-advised venture lacked the requisite touch.
Unsurprisingly, Drew McOnie displayed touch in plentiful supply, especially when it came to finding the appropriate atmosphere for a dreamlike, one-of-a-kind, borderline wacky show like Cats, which, 45 years on, still doesn’t really make sense. However, I must confess to a weakness for some of the musical numbers, like “The Jellicle Ball” and “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat”, and the sunset over Regent’s Park provided a fitting mood to get immersed in T. S. Eliot’s borderline surrealistic poetry.
Midnight at the Never Get seemed to have been custom-designed to allow Ben Platt to exhibit his ability to touch souls. In a cabaret setting, an ageing singer looks back on lost love and missed opportunities. Betting full-on on a leading man’s charisma can prove dangerous, especially when he sounds tired and a little bit on autopilot. I found the storyline and the setting formulaic, and my mind soon wandered away in spite of the show’s short duration.
Tuesday 1 September & Wednesday 2 September
Paris, Philharmonie de Paris • Two consecutive concerts showcased the MET Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin — following appearances at the BBC Proms and at the Lucerne Festival. The two performances illustrated the best and the worst effects of applying the star system machinery to classical music. Peter Gelb, presumably delighted at the effectiveness of the MET’s PR, silently watched the audience go wild as Nézet-Séguin indulged in his usual histrionics in an evening of Strauss and an evening of Mahler.
The former was the more successful, especially in the Final Scene from Salome, made delightfully raw by an unbridled Elza van den Heever, who had to fight to be heard over the orchestra. However, the performance started to sound slightly disjointed in Ein Heldenleben, an ominous sign of things to come the next day. After an interesting opening piece by Kaija Saariaho, both Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder and his Symphony No. 4 came across as misfires. Elastic tempos to the point of queasiness, a lack of clear through-lines, and frequent mismatches with Joyce DiDonato, herself not in top form, all seemed to emphasise the absence of a clear interpretative vision and any real performative unity.
Nézet-Séguin can be a brilliant Wagner conductor, which made it all the more painful to hear Mahler mishandled in this way. But it appeared I was in the minority, and I’m glad the audience clearly had a great time on both nights. For the second year in a row, the Philharmonie had removed the seats in the auditorium’s first level, providing ample space for standees, whose behaviour during the performance was a wonder to behold. They demanded and obtained encores on both nights. On the second night, I had already left.
Thursday 3 September
Paris, Théâtre La Bruyère • A delightful new play with music called Le Manuel de la jeune mariée 1957 was based on real advice — the show’s publicity insisted — once given to brides-to-be, expected of course to focus their efforts on domestic chores and making their husbands happy. Virginie Lemoine, the director of the French adaptation of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder I’d seen the previous week, was the author and director of this show, proving there is now a generation of French creatives with a remarkably sure touch when it comes to musical theatre.
Friday 4 September
London, Young Vic • In London again for the second public performance of the Young Vic’s production of Callie Khouri and Neko Case’s musical adaptation of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Thelma & Louise. This new show succeeded everywhere the previous week’s Trainspotting had failed: sensitive writing that made a near-perfect story even more perfect, wise decisions as to which characters to expand and why, fantastic choices in how to stage a story in which entire scenes took place, on screen, in a moving car — I won’t say more, but the director’s decisions in this regard turned out to be both bold and exciting. A matter of touch, indeed.