THE ARTS ONLINE - MAR 17-23
RUTH LEON'S THEATREWISE
Good Morning and Welcome to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise
I’m off to New York next week which is usually an unalloyed, much anticipated joy.
I’m planning to see every play and musical nominated for a Tony Award in time for the deadline, which is April 27th, although exorbitant ticket prices may render some performances out of reach.
I’ll be in my ‘other hometown’ for Easter and Passover, as well as for my big birthday and the birthdays, equally significant if you’re 4 and 8, of my god-grandchildren (see above).
Most of all, I’m looking forward to seeing my friends although the waves of gloom wafting across the Atlantic since the full horror of recent presidential edicts, are beginning to take hold. People I know are losing their jobs, many more are in fear of doing so, and arts producers, faced with having to change all their plans to avoid any possibility of falling afoul of the Administration’s draconian strictures, are in disarray. The fallout in the arts is bad and getting worse.
I had thought the idiocy at the Kennedy Center was funny when the old Board, composed of many important arts patrons, was fired and a new Board, without an arts credential among them, was appointed, electing Donald Trump as their new “amazing” Chairman (his description, not mine), but it’s not. None of it is funny.
It's against this background that I set sail, well, board a ‘plane, to New York next week, to a place I love, aware that this is a perilous time. My joy is therefore somewhat alloyed (is that a word?).
However, in my concern about what I’m going to find when I get there, I haven’t forgotten to find you some fine arts programmes to watch online as always. This week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is choc-a-bloc with goodies.
In response to your many requests for Sondheim musicals, when I heard that the original Broadway production of Into The Woods had just been made available online, I jumped on it. Here too is a movie from Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps the last of great studio stars, on the anniversary of her demise, which shows her at the height of her career.
Two short art films today, one from the Met in New York, the other from the National Gallery in London. These are both trailers for exhibitions currently on show in the museums, an appetite-whetter for the visiting visual arts lover. One is a trailer from the National Gallery, for a new exhibition of the paintings of Mexican artist Jose Maria Velasco. No, I wasn’t familiar with him either, but based on this, I’m certainly going to see the exhibition,. The other, from the Met Museum, is a contemporary artist, Sarah Sze, visiting three new additions to the Met’s collection called The Museum as Muse.
And on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s birthday, we take a look back at the most famous song from his most famous show, the phenomenon that was, and still is, Cats.
Just click on the links beneath the pictures for access to all of these.
Into The Woods - Bernadette Peters
Click here to watch
There has been much clamour from readers for full-length Sondheim musicals and this week Into the Woods with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine who also directed, has become available online, free to watch on YouTube.
Two suggestions for watching this show on YouTube. If you have Ad-Block or Ad-free, do use it as the interruptions are many. Also, do choose the subtitles button on your set, not because any of the dialogue or lyrics are unclear but because they are so brilliant, and go by so fast, that even those of us who are famliar with the show and have seen it multiple times, may not have grasped the depth and meaning in almost every line. I found watching it with subtitles a revelation.
For those unfamiliar with the show, the premise at first seems simple, it’s a retelling of well-loved fairytales – Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapulzel, Cinderella, Red Ridinghood, and others, - up to the moment of “and then they lived happily ever after.” That’s the first act. What Sondheim and Lapine do then is to look at what happens after “happily ever after”. In life, says Into The Woods, as in fairytales, getting your heart’s desire isn’t the end of the story.
This award-winning Broadway production opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on November 5, 1987, and ran for 765 performances. it was recorded on stage just before the show closed on September 3, 1989 with the original Broadway cast including Bernadette Peters as the Witch, Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife, Chip Zien as the Baker and the irreplaceable Danielle Ferland as the best ever Little Red Ridinghood.
This is a great show and, like most of Sondheim’s shows, there is so much in it that it’s hard to grasp first time. Each time you see it, the more you will get out of it but, at Broadway prices, going back to see it again and again to wring all the juice out of it is not an option for most theatregoers. That’s why it’s a joy to be able to watch it here, online, free, as often as you like.
Elizabeth Taylor – The Last Time I Saw Paris
Click here to watch
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, born February 27, 1932, died 14 years ago this week, aged 79. She was much more than “the girl with the violet eyes”.
Elizabeth Taylor was one of the last stars to have come out of the old Hollywood studio system. A child actor, she made the transition to adult movie roles easily, her extraordinary beauty easing her path. If her early movies are anything to go by she was pretty wooden at the start. She learned her acting craft on camera, movie by movie, becoming, by the time she was all grown up, a forbidable actor, and over the years taking on many difficult roles, from Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (with Paul Newman) to Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (with Richard Burton).
Along the way, she won Academy Awards for her performances in Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and stared in 56 films between 1944 and 1994. Other awards included the French Legion of Honor and the DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire).
Off-screen, Taylor's personal life was the subject of constant media attention. Married eight times to seven men, she didn’t have much luck with men but she kept trying. She converted to Judaism, endured several serious illnesses, and assembled one of the most expensive private collections of jewellery in the world.
Later, she put her considerable energies into philanthropy. When her longtime friend Rock Hudson died of AIDs in 1985, she helped to establish the American Foundation for AIDS Research and remained committed to raising money and awareness of the disease for the rest of her life, travelling the world as spokeswoman for the organization.
After many years of ill health, Taylor died from congestive heart failure in 2011, She was 79. I was struck by this arresting quote, “MGM taught me how to be a star and I have never really known how to be anything else.”
Of her many films, I’ve chosen this one, The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The cast was immaculate – Van Johnson, Walter Pigeon, Donna Reed, a young actor called Roger Moore in a minor role, and Taylor at the height of her career and beauty.
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico
Click here to watch
Here, from the National Gallery is a trailer of the exhibition of paintings by José María Velasco.
This is the first UK exhibition of Mexico’s much-loved artist, José María Velasco.
Velasco, working in Mexico in the 19th century, was a man of many interests. He was fascinated by advances in geology, the archaeology of his home country, the study of local flora, and the increasing presence of industrialisation.
He painted the sweeping landscapes of the Valley of Mexico, the home of modern-day Mexico City, with exquisite detail. His impressive panoramic views of the valley reveal allusions to Mexico's historic past and its rapidly modernising present.
This exhibition, the first ever dedicated to a historical Latin American artist at the National Gallery, marks the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the UK. And it celebrates Velasco’s place among the great 19th-century landscape painters. The exhibition, curated by Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the National Gallery’s Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, runs from 29 March - 17 August.
The Museum as Muse
Click here to watch
This is slightly different, less a trailer than a mini-tour by an established artist, Sarah Sze, of three recently acquired works by the Met which inspire her and which help to convince her that she is part of the endless continuum of artists.
Andrew Lloyd Webber - Cats
Click here to watch
The most successful British composer of our time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, celebrates his 77th birthday today. Although he and his lyricist partner Tim Rice, had already had a big hit wth Jesus Christ Superstar, and several subsequent successful projects, his next musical idea nearly didn’t happen.
A lifelong cat lover, he had decided to set poems, drawn from the pages of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to music. Theatre sages thought he was nuts. A West End musical with no people, just an entire cast of dancing and singing cats, taking place in a rubbish dump? What, went the conventional wisdom of the theatre world, is Andrew smoking? Nobody he talked to about his idea thought Cats could possibly succeed except the young producer, Cameron Mackintosh.
Cats, directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne exploded onto the West End stage in 1981 at the New London Theatre, now owned by Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and renamed last year as the Gillian Lynne Theatre.
Cats opened to unexpectedly positive reviews in the West End in 1981 and on Broadway in 1982. It won numerous awards including Best Musical at both the Laurence Olivier and Tony Awards.
The London production ran for 21 years and 8,949 performances, while the Broadway production ran for 18 years and 7,485 performances, making Cats the longest-running musical in both theatre districts.
It has been translated into multiple languages and performed around the world many times. Long-running foreign productions include a 15-year run the Operettenhaus in Hamburg that played over 6,100 performances, as well as an ongoing run in a purpose-built theatre in Japan that has played over 10,000 performances since it opened in 1983.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has composed, by my count, 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass and a lot of other music for various purposes, including for the late Queen’s 60th birthday and for King Charles’ coronation. He has a world-beating collection of paintings, particularly Victorian masters, owns at least one horse stud farm and is a lifelong supporter of Leyton Orient Football Club. He contributes mightily to a number of charities for music and children and is President of Arts Educational Schools.
So, in honour of his birthday, let’s return to the beginning of Cats, to 1981. Here, Elaine Paige pulls at the heart strings as Grizabella the Glamour Cat with 'Memory', Cats’ worldwide hit. Lyrics for this song, by the way, are by the show’s director, Trevor Nunn, referencing a different Eliot poem.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANDREW.
Thank you all for being here. Comments, brickbats, even compliments, about Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise, are always gratefully received. Come back next week for more arts online. Please.
Love, Ruth