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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 42 |
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REVIEWS THE LONDON PRODUCTION OF ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER'S NEW MUSICAL BASED ON WILKIE COLLINS' MYSTERY CLASSIC
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‘Cats’ lurk in London’s
New ‘Woman in White’
of TheColumnists.com
Not being much of a fan of the musical stage, I tend to measure the success of a new production by the amount of napping I get done during the performance. The higher the number, the more stinky the production. Unfair, I know. Everyone tries so hard.
I saw Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new London creation, “The Woman in White,” at a preview matinee last week and emerged with a 23 on my scale, meaning 23 minutes of zzz's out of a total running time of two and a half hours. That’s about average.
I came away rather refreshed by the naps but with a bad case of ringing ears from the deafening amplifiers arranged in some kind of spherical surrrrrround sound. Everyone had their body mikes at full volume and the noise seemed to come from all directions, including underneath.
Anything by Lloyd Webber is sure to make it across the Atlantic eventually, but not this time in this form. Reviews by the big critics have been mixed at best and I can see why. Too slow, too confused, too noisy and too long. Even I could improve it by deleting four or five songs--echoes from previous Lloyd Webber work--from the first act. No doubt it will be tightened up in the coming weeks.
The spooky story suits Lloyd Webber, a big fan of Victoriana as a subject for the stage. The story comes from the novel by Wilkie Collins, the Charles Dickens friend and contemporary, considered at the time to have been Dickens’ equal. Collins took his inspiration from a real-life incident in which he encountered a woman dressed in flowing white robes escaping from a villa in Regent’s Park where she was being kept against her will.
The story, adapted by Charlotte
Jones, tells the tale of two half-sisters, Laura Fairlie and
Miss Halcombe, who were victims of a plot to steal their wealth.
The mysterious woman in white (Angela Christian playing Anne
Catherick) comes to the aid of the two sisters, finally resolving
the tension in a lunatic asylum scene worthy of “Marat Sade.”
Michael Crawford as Count Fosco, dressed in a repulsive fat suit
and wearing layers of latex on his cheeks, was so heavily made
up as to be unrecognizable. For me, he was the scene-stealer
with witty lyrics and catchy riffs. He sings “You Can Get
Away With Anything,” with a white rat running up and down
his arms--none too obediently, it seemed.
Some critics have written that the Count is too stylized for
Crawford, wasting his real talents. I disagree. I thought he
stole the show.
“Woman in White” was a huge best-seller in 1860 and
has not been out of print since. The Victorians followed the
story breathlessly for months in magazine serialization, then
bought the book in huge numbers. During serialization, bets were
taken on how various twists in the plot might be resolved. Some
readers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, stayed up all
night to read the book at a single sitting.
In the novel, the story starts with one of the most gripping opening pages in popular literature. But in modern London at the Palace Theatre, despite impressive clouds of stage fog wafting through the audience, it was not very frightening. Maybe we are all jaded by the cinema.
Director Trevor Nunn and his production and video designer William Dudley did however leave a lasting impact with their hundreds of whirling scene changes, using video projections on the revolving stage and curved surfaces to fling you into drawing rooms and seconds later zap you back out into a graveyard. In the second act a train comes hurtling out of tunnel projected on the set, and propelled with body-rattling sound effects seems to leap off the stage into the crowd. Everyone in the stalls gasped and ducked.
This production has been rightly praised for setting a new standard in the meshing of stage and screen techniques. London’s West End can still lead the world in theatre.
Personally, though, I got dizzy watching the spinning images, and could not help but worry for the actors who were hopping on and off the rotating scenery and in and out of doors. How none of them get tripped up is a tribute to their agility and many hours of rehearsal time.
What ALW fans want to experience in these big shows along with innovative stagecraft, is his emotive music. He is, after all, a composer, probably the most successful one alive writing any kind of music. He knows how to use melody and the belting delivery of his singers to enrich whatever drama is going on beneath the score.
In this show he broke some new ground. His opening melodies were refreshingly dissonant, almost atonal. Some critics have compared those sounds with the work of Benjamin Britten. One critic called this musical a “popular opera.” Maybe. The solo numbers lustily sung by Maria Friedman, in the role of Marian Halcombe, left the audience rapt but I could only think of what I remembered of melodies from “Cats.”
As someone said at the exit, “Well, you can recognize Vivaldi in all his work, Mozart is easy to identify, and even Beethoven uses familiar chords and orchestration.” On a slightly more modest scale, then, Andrew Lloyd Webber can be excused for finding combinations that work, and producing entertainment to which millions of people can respond.
©2004 by Michael Johnson. The "Woman in White" logo is courtesy of the London production.
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