Let's keep the West End's fizz

Published in the Evening Standard March 16 2006

Well, I'm feeling king of hill, top of the heap, A-number-one, because last week I got to see the new Sinatra show at the Palladium. The critics didn't like it much and I can see why: there is something fundamentally weird about watching a show with a missing star. The live swing band and troupe of dancers gave it all they've got, but they couldn't really hide the fact that the heart of this show is a series of TV screens - projecting a lead performer who is quite literally two-dimensional and, lest we forget, dead.

Still, I'm such a Sinatra fan that I enjoyed it. The songs are classics, his interpretations of them flawless; just to hear them loud and in a theatre was a thrill. Wisely, the producers preferred Trilby Sinatra to Toupee Sinatra, relying on the early Cole Porter gems and keeping the middle-aged, My Way bombast to a minimum. Despite the reviews, the audience is undeterred: the show took £2m before opening night and is booked up till midsummer.

Since leaving the Palladium though, I've had two things on my mind. The first is Sinatra's perfect, aching rendition of One for My Baby, a melody I can't seem to shake. The other is a thought about the state of West End theatre.

For Sinatra is just the latest in what is now a whole sub-genre: shows crafted from the back catalogues of much-loved artists of the past. Mamma Mia pays tribute to Abba at the Prince of Wales; We Will Rock You resuscitates Queen at the Dominion, while Sinatra appears again alongside Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin in The Rat Pack at the Savoy. Coming soon are Motown favourites in Dancing in the Streets at the Aldwych, Billy Joel's Movin' Out at the Apollo and Boney M's Daddy Cool at the Shaftesbury. (I can just about imagine a storyline crafted around Just the Way You Are and Honesty, but pity the scriptwriter who has to conjure a narrative link between Brown Girl in the Ring and Ra-Ra-Rasputin.)

There is something dispiriting about this reduction of the West End to a Greatest Hits theme park, especially when you add those shows which are movie spin-offs, like Fame and Footloose, or revivals of tried, tested and familiar winners like Evita, returning to the Adelphi in June. Tourists flock to Disneyland to experience 'real-life' versions of beloved films, from Snow White to the Incredibles. But is that really what we want from the West End?

Of course, some of these shows are outstandingly good: I cheered for The Producers, while both Billy Eliot and The Lion King won universal raves - and all three began life in the cinema. It's true too that the West End still has some straight plays of substance, whether it's Jeremy Irons in Embers, Woody Harrelson in Night of the Iguana, Kathleen Turner in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or last year's acclaimed production of Schiller's Don Carlos. But these feel like exceptions, green shoots of activity peeking out between the concrete slabs of the musical blockbusters.

What's missing, even among these shows, are productions that are neither revivals of proven classics, nor vehicles for big-name stars, usually imported from Hollywood. It's the new work that's getting squeezed out. If the current trend continues, the West End might well remain a magnet for tourists and coach parties - but it will lose its lustre as a world-class artistic centre.

It's not difficult to explain how this has happened. The chief culprit are the high rents charged by theatres for the use of their space. As the Standard's theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh puts it: "The costs for independent producers coming to the West End are simply far too high." A Lloyd Webber show is fine; it can recover its costs. Similarly, a play first produced outside London, in a subsidised regional theatre, also has a fighting chance: some of its costs have already been met. But to set out to do new work in the West End can be economically prohibitive. Independent producers will go to Sheffield or Leeds or Birmingham first, leaving the West End for those big-money shows which are little more than compilation tapes on stage.

There is a close parallel here with the changing face of London's high streets, the subject of the campaign launched by the Standard this week. Just as too many one-off, independent retailers - the family-run bakery, the quirky record store - are being squeezed out by Tesco and Starbucks, so new and experimental drama is being chased out of the West End. In both cases, the issue is high rents - too high for all but the corporate behemoths. The result is that, while our neighbourhoods are turning into clonetowns, the West End risks becoming a parade of glorified jukeboxes, one just like another, offering nothing more than harmless, nostalgic fun.

What's the solution? A kneejerk response is to revive the tired argument about subsidised vs commercial theatre, as if only a state handout could level the playing field that might enable artistic innovators to compete. I think there are more imaginative solutions. We could decide that the big West End auditoriums represent a national (or even city) asset and decide the state (or London) should own them the way it now owns museums. It could then rent them out, varying the rates it charges in order to ensure a diversity of theatrical fare was on offer. That might be particularly relevant for some of the smaller spaces, like The Fortune, Duchess, St Martin's and Ambassadors theatres which, de Jongh suggests, could become a new Off West End, to rival New York's Off-Broadway.

Or we could simply join the demand of those fighting to stop London's streets turning into clone city: a change in the law to keep a lid on rents, so that smaller players can survive. As Frank himself might have put it: It's up to you, London, London.

Posted on March 16, 2006 09:54 AM

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