Free Will & Revivals, With Soup
27 September – 3 October 2025
Saturday 27 September
To Washington, D.C., by train. Arena Stage’s “revisal” of Damn Yankees had worried me when I read the promise to “make it relevant” to a contemporary audience, a phrase too often used as a licence to sabotage a perfectly good show. I needn’t have worried: the piece remained essentially intact, its songs all present, with only minor and harmless tweaks to scenes and lyrics. The staging was brisk and dynamic, making shrewd use of the Fichandler Stage’s square in-the-round space, with deft, ingenious projections and lighting. Rob McClure led a strong cast with no weak links.
Back to New York by train. I listened to John Wilson’s note-complete recording of My Fair Lady at the helm of “his” Sinfonia of London, a wonderful and “lighter” rendition than John Yap’s “complete recording” for the TER/JAY label. The recording includes the original ending of the first act, with “Come to the Ball,” “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” as well as the “Dressing Eliza” ballet, itself a sheer delight. I tried to find some corroboration for the oft-repeated claim that Frederick Loewe had been the youngest pianist ever to appear with the Berliner Philharmoniker when he still lived in his native Berlin, but that remained elusive.
Sunday 28 September
New York – Had lunch with B. at La Bonne Soupe, a W55th Street restaurant named after Félicien Marceau’s 1958 play — with a poster for the Danielle Darrieux-led 1980 Paris revival in a choice location on the wall. The play had a very brief Broadway run produced by David Merrick in 1960, as The Good Soup, at the Plymouth Theatre. My friend B. rightly pointed out the troubling similarities between The Good Soup and the musical Little Me, which proved a lot more successful a couple of seasons later.
Back to Paris by plane.
Tuesday 30 September
Paris – Reread Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which took up over 100 pages in an October 1961 issue of The New Yorker — and was, of course, the inspiration for the 1969 film starring Maggie Smith. A strange tale of education, manipulation, and retribution with religious overtones in a world — Europe in the 1930s — falling prey to fascism, the novel also treats time strikingly, with frequent leaps into the future or past.
Wednesday 1 October
Paris – The excellent French-language production of The Producers (Les Producteurs) helmed by Alexis Michalik returned to the Théâtre de Paris after playing about 18 months from 2021 to 2023. There were many new faces in the cast, including two new leads, and the show proved every bit as entertaining, if not even more, than during the first run (which I’d seen five times). The show was still played without an intermission, which must have been exhausting for the cast, even though “Betrayed” was excised — which robbed us of a presumably hilarious performance by Florent Peyre as Max. Thierry Boulanger worked wonders, as usual, bringing the joy and tunefulness of Mel Brooks’s score to life with a reduced orchestra.
Thursday 2 October
Paris – The Orchestre de chambre de Paris under Alexander Melnikov, who directed from the piano, played a strange programme alternating Mozart pieces (the Piano Concerto No. 12 and the Quintet for Piano and Winds K. 452) with both of Shostakovich’s Piano Concertos, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. I couldn’t help feeling the programme was unbalanced by those gigantic chronological leaps. The Shostakovich concertos didn’t fail to impress: percussive and wry, yet deeply expressive.
Friday 3 October
Paris – Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 British play Rope (known in the US as Rope’s End and the inspiration of Hitchcock’s 1948 film) was an unexpected choice for a slightly adapted French-language production at the Studio Marigny, under the title La Corde. This tale of free will and acte gratuit provided a delightful evening of entertainment, even though I spotted a couple of weaknesses in the dramatic structure. It also made me want to go back to André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican, a book I loved reading as a teenager.
In honour of the passing of Patricia Routledge, aka the irresistible Hyacinth Bucket/Bouquet, I listened to her rendition of the moving “Take Care of This House” from Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as the biting “I Went To a Marvellous Party” from the 1972 Noël Coward revue Cowardy Custard.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.