Short Shorts 80: Live from New York – a tale of two musicals

Can Matilda Reverse the Carrie curse?

Last night the RSC’s Matilda opened on Broadway, which promises to be as big a hit over here as Carrie, its last original musical to transfer back in 1988, remains one of Broadway’s most legendary flops.

By a curious coincidence, of course, Carrie was only last year revived off-Broadway, and as I wrote at the time, “it proves that miracles can happen and a legendary flop rescued.”

But Matilda is a miracle of a different order: it is only Matilda herself who needs, and gets, rescuing in this beautiful theatrical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s story.  As the kids sing in the show, “My mummy says I’m a miracle / My daddy says I’m his special little guy / I am a princess / And I am a prince / Mum says I’m an angel sent down from the sky.”

It’s not quite the sky but this miracle of course came via Stratford and London, the first smash-hit musical for the West End to send over since Mamma Mia! over a decade ago, back in 2001. There was a time, of course, in the 80s when show after hit show came from London, from Cats and The Phantom of the Opera to Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, but our more recent track record in Broadway musical transfers haven’t stood a ghost of a chance over here – not least when Ghost transferred last year.

I went to the last preview of Matilda on Wednesday, and by chance got two miracles for the price of one: midway through the performance, the little girl billed to be playing the title role that night, Bailey Ryon, was suddenly replaced by another of the four girls sharing the role, Milly Shapiro (there was the briefest of pauses as a stage manager made an announcement over the tannoy, and the show seamlessly continued).

That gave us a wonderful taste of two very different physical embodiments of the role, one dark haired, the other blonde – the first also more doleful than the second. It was also a remarkable testament to the second young girl who stepped effortlessly into the show midway.

In either incarnation, the show’s an outright winner, by turns playful and poignant, though I hope that Broadway audiences embrace its darker vision of childhood neglect and abuse. Billy Elliot, for instance, proved too gritty in the end for it and had a disappointing run over here.

But if Matilda introduces new voices to Broadway in composer Tim Minchin and book writer Dennis Kelly, one of the most remarkable sights (besides, of course, the still peerless Bertie Carvel as the monstrous Miss Trunchbull) is the Playbill billing page, which introduces a new practice to Broadway. Instead of the usual clutter of names vying for attention above the title claiming to be its producers, there are only two: the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Dodgers. The other parties, who are not so much producers as investors, are relegated instead to a panel at the bottom of the page, for whose support Matilda the Musical is “profoundly grateful.”

But even more importantly than the reduction in the size of their billing, their returns are also lower: according to a recent Bloomberg feature:

The investors stand to earn just 34 percent of the show’s profits after getting their money-back-plus-50-percent, according to a partnership agreement… Backers of less-heralded productions usually share profits of 45 percent or more.

As Jason Baruch, a partner with entertainment law firm Sendroff & Baruch tells Bloomberg:

If you have a hot show, you have a lot more freedom to structure it in a way that will benefit the producing team.

And the producers here were not short of people eager to invest. Jerry Frankel, a regular Broadway investor and producer who did so, says:

There were people hanging from tree limbs trying to get into it. We’re all grown-ups. If you don’t want to get in you don’t have to get in.

A hard(body) lesson for Broadway

Just as Matilda arrives, so another of this season’s newest local arrivals, Hands on a Hardbody, is already closing tomorrow. The show, which only opened on March 21 after previews that began on February 23, will have run a total of 28 previews and 28 regular performances.

I made it just in time, in every sense, to see one of the final performances this week. My plane landed at JFK at 12.15pm, and luck was on my side – I was literally the very first person to get off the plane, and then walked into an entirely empty immigration hall so was out within minutes instead of queues that I’ve known to take up to three hours to clear. I also travelled with hand luggage only, so I was in a cab to Manhattan within twenty minutes of landing.

I got to my apartment at 1.20pm, where I was met by a friend to help me carry my bag up the four flights of stairs – since my spinal surgery just four weeks earlier, I’ve got to take it easier! I then changed and was back on the street and walking to the theatre by 1.35pm, and arrived at the Brooks Atkinson at 1.55pm – just in time to see Hands on a Hardbody.

A show that is all about a real-life endurance test – a competition in which participants vie to win a brand-new truck by keeping their hands on it until, some 91 hours later, there’s only one left standing – felt a bit like an endurance test in every sense for me, and not just because of the effort I had to make to get there.

Though there’s no doubting the earnest sincerity of the show or its likeable twangy country & western score, I could only wonder who thought this was suitable for Broadway? It’s not as if they didn’t get a chance to see what they had, either, first: it was premiered last year at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, who had also commissioned it.

It struck me that this was more the sort of show that you’d expect to see at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage or Playwrights’ Horizons than a big Broadway house. There, its slight charms wouldn’t have felt overwhelmed by the size of the room or the burden of Broadway expectations.

Quotes of the week

Matt Damon, interviewed in The Observer last weekend, on the subject of fame:

Fame is really strange. One day you’re not famous and then the next day you are, and the odd thing is that you know intellectually that nothing in the world is different. What mattered to you yesterday are the same things that matter today and the rules all still apply – yet everyone looks at you differently. So the surreal part of it is that the world is exactly the same, but it is completely different for you. The way you experience the world is never the same again.

It’s why a lot of people freak out or they become megalomaniacs. They feel it’s all about them, but there’s this disconnect, because they’re going: “Wait a minute, the earth still moves around the sun – what the fuck?” There’s no handbook for celebrity, the surreality of it. You can’t really explain it until it happens because it’s such a mindfuck; it’s such a bizarre experience.

Jonathan Slinger, interviewed in the Sunday Times on March 24 by Louis Wise:

Shakespeare was “always what I dreamt of doing”, he says. “When I went to drama school, most of the people there were influenced by film stars. Their heroes were De Niro, Pacino. And I wasn’t, really. ­Theatre was my main influence. I grew up in the north, and at the time the Manchester Royal Exchange was the theatre ­outside London.” He remembers David Threlfall and Frances ­Barber doing Macbeth in 1988; Derek Jacobi doing both the Richards, like him, in touring productions. “I suppose, in a way, I’ve actualised my dream — which is an incredible thing.

Review of the week

We’re all entitled to a change of heart. And I always appreciate the honesty with which a critic will contradict his own previous opinion; we can all change and admit that sometimes we got it wrong. The latest to do so publicly is Michael Billington, who reviewing a new fringe production of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney in The Guardian last week wrote,

I was wrong about Brian Friel’s play. Seeing it for the first time at the Almeida in 1994, I took it to be an arid rep-play of Friel’s Faith Healer: again two men and a woman engage in monologues on the curative process. But although it is a play that asks whether seeing is to be equated with understanding, it also becomes, in Abigail Graham’s incisive production, a play about a shared, profoundly Irish sense of exile…

I was grateful for a production that enabled me to see Friel’s fascinating play through fresh eyes.