Some American travelers treat London as a one stop shop for all things cultural. Want to get some theater mixed in with your history, or a side dish of art, music or dance? Well, you can do that in the Smoke.
This year your theater fan correspondent traveled to the U.K. with his brother, a fellow who likes painting. So we spent days in the National Gallery and evenings in the National Theater and managed to work in a few walking tours (“Wren Churches” was the subject of one) and the occasional long lunch.
The notable gallery shows included a spectacular one in Trafalgar Square, where the NG’s Sainsbury wing is open again after two years. The show is “Sienna: The Rise of Painting,” which demonstrates how a small group of painters working in this small city between 1300 and 1350 helped get the Renaissance started. Exciting stuff.
The King’s Gallery show is more about the Windsor family in the Edwardian period than it is about the paintings on display. The Tate Britain and the Wallace Collection, the Estorick and the Saatchi—there are lots of places in London to go to see historic and vital Art. And we mostly went, also visiting the National Gallery of Scotland.
For theater, the West End is still suffering from producers’ misgivings about what will sell tickets post-lockdown. The Disney musical continues to attract lots of package buyers. And there are always musicals based on fairly recent movies that seem to appeal to the public. “Mean Girls,” “Back to the Future,” and jukebox musicals like “M.J. the Musical” and “Mama Mia” fill a lot of the area’s thirty commercial theaters.
We saw a new musical version of Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless,” a movie based on Jane Austen’s “Emma,” and found it to be surprisingly satisfying. In comparison the show based on the Netflix series “Stranger Things” didn’t have enough of a story to make it go. Good effects, admittedly, including a slow motion fall down a flight of stairs. But the prequel really didn’t pay off as a narrative.
Not that it was the sort of failure “My Master Builder” was. Lila Raicek’s take on the Ibsen did no favors to stars Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki, who had to rep its sophomoric story with dialog that frequently sounded as if it were out of an old play.
The sort of play Mischief Theater’s “The Play That Goes Wrong” is pretending to tell over at the Duchess. This is about an amateur company trying to do something like Agatha Christie’s “Mousetrap” while cues are ignored and props fail. The show has not only run for years, but it has also thrown off a TV series and several theatrical cousins, including “The Comedy About Spies,” which we saw this trip. The second generation stuff isn’t as good as the first act of the original.
Last year’s Olivier winner (best West End play) is “Giant.” In it John Lithgow is Roald Dahl, the writer of the ‘50s and ‘60s who gave us “Matilda” and “James and the Giant Peach.” Dahl once caused a stir by supporting the notion that Israeli violence directed at Palestinians doesn’t get Western scrutiny because out media are all owned by Jews. The play is about his publishers trying to get him to apologize for his remarks.
The great David Mamet’s movie “House of Games” is getting an airing as a play up at the Hampstead. Adapter Richard Bean has taken some of the teeth out of the original.
As has producer Cameron Mackintosh in preparing Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” for another production. But the Dickens play is directed by Matthew Bourne, and the dancing makes up for the editing.
Over at the National they are doing the late Stephen Sondheim’s “Here We Are,” his last musical. The story is based on a couple of Bunuel movies of the 1970s. They share a substantially altered tone and regulation Sondheim gangling songs. The stars include Jesse Tyler Ferguson (of “Modern Family”), Jane Krakowski, and Martha Plimpton (Keith Carradine’s daughter), and the production is bright and goofy in a pleasant way.
So there’s reason to cross the Atlantic, even if there isn’t a new big show at the British Museum. Next year: History. This year: Painting.
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