Opening Night - Gielgud

What?!?

About time for a Ghost revival

...or a musical adaptation of Ghosts?? (Now THAT'S something I wanna see... where's Stiles and Drewe??)

I thought Being Alive meant 2:22. Tour finishes end of May

It looks like the tour finishes in Salford on 15th June?

Quite. They mean their challenging financial landscape, caused by… well goodness I have no idea.

Empty theatre……upcoming Euros. Cmon Dear England would be great for 6-8 weeks

I know it shocks people, but people are going, even if it's not in big numbers - it had an advance (not huge) because of Sheridan.
People are going because it's Sheridan, and some people are enjoying it (me included)
I'll be going at least once more to see it.

Very sad for the cast - I think they took a big risk with this by going to the West End with Sheridan - on reflection there would have been logic in somewhere like the Almeida to iron out the bits of it that needed work, and then bring it in, but they took a risk with a name like Sheridan and star creatives like Ivo and Rufus. On this occasion it hasn't paid off, but I'm still glad they did it. There has to be a place in theatre for stuff like this or we are doomed to endure musicals that sound like they were created by AI and have absolutely zero creativity (I say this as Heathers is about to return...!)

Okay now THIS I want.

The closing date has even made the BBC Six O'Clock News! Madness.

There really aren't any shows like this, and I'm certainly not one to listen to about this as I'm an outlier opinion.

However. . .

(Some spoilers follow)

. . .the best comparisons I can make are with works where a creative individual is stuck in a rut and a frantic world whirls around them. Such shows are more introspective and static than dramatic and event-filled, though they turn to fantasies to provide an element of drama.

The best such show is "Sunday in the Park with George," which gets into George Seurat's creative head, and is, in my opinion, better than this, a 5 star show, lifted by Sondheim's genius and a clever ending, which time jumps away from the static first act.

Another show like this is "Preludes," which gets into Rachmaninoff's head, and all the zaniness in that head, and personally, I did not enjoy that as much as this show, and rated it 3 stars of passable at Southwark Playhouse.

"A Strange Loop" is a bit like this too, but less so, as it's more an exploration of identity than creativity, but the similarity is being caught in the protagonist's head negotiating creative blocks. I liked that show more than "Preludes" but less than "Opening Night."

The best scenes in this show all revolve around Sheridan's Smith's essentially static character, Myrtle, entering into extreme emotional states, lost in a creative block brought on by aging, while a threatening creative world threatens to eat her up. Like all the above plays (except the clever time jump in the Sondheim final section), there is little real drama going on. That's why this was never a good bet for the West End.

I really don't think that "Preludes" or "A Strange Loop" could have done much better business than "Opening Night" at the Gielgud, though "Sunday" could have, as Sondheim is more universally loved than Rufus Wainwright, and Jake Gyllenhaal is a world famous actor, rather than a UK famous actor, so the tourists could prebook that from abroad for their holiday visits.

Anyway, I think to enjoy this, you must prepare yourself for the stasis, not expect dynamic action, nor must you expect the misanthropic intensity of the movie. Wainwright isn't intense, he's a mournful sardonic observer of life more than a participant.

Instead, just allow yourself to imbibe Sheridan Smith's Myrtle's lostness (has any actor ever cried more tears in a play?), and allow Wainwright's comforting wistful music to sweep you and her into a dreamland for each disconnected, strange moment of her suffering, redeemed by the music.

In Myrtle's eleven o'clock number, "Ready for Battle," which I had thought might be called "The World is Broken," Myrtle, like Seurat in "Sunday," sings of finding "order in the disorder" of her creative life, which is what Seurat does with his painting.

One of the reasons I preferred this to "Preludes" and "A Strange Loop" is the sheer emotionalism of Sheridan Smith's character in every scene. She reminds me of Tracie Bennett's Judy Garland in "End of the Rainbow."

I voted 4 stars in the poll, making my opinion an outlier lol.

Looking forward to the Palladium concert in 10 years

Starter for T'en got some mixed reviews and I found it disappointing, in part because I had high hopes for it. I'd hope that they would take the time to rework it a bit before it reached a West End stage. After all, who would bring something to the West End which hadn't fully evolved?