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LONDON TICKET by Sheridan Morley RSC '94 Boosted by their best box-office figures in both London and Stratford for a decade, the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director Adrian Noble announces a powerful line-up for the year ahead. At the Barbican Londoners and visitors alike get their chance to see Robert Stephens as King Lear and Alec McCowen as Prospero in The Tempest, both acclaimed last summer by the Avon. Also at the Barbican McCowan stars as Edward Elgar in a new play by David Pownall about the composer's tortured life, and there's the Ian Judge Love's Labour's Lost as well as a rare revival of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Out at Stratford this summer Iain Glen stars as Henry V, Sir Derek Jacobi is Macbeth, Alex Jennings is Peer Gynt and Toby Stephens (son of Maggie Smith and Robert) is Coriolanus, all of which might indicate Noble's success rate in bringing the old giants back to the RSC while fostering newer talents there at the same time. LOST MUSICALS Where in the world can you see, this summer, live stagings of such long-lost classics as Cole Porter's Let's Face It, Harold Arlen's Bloomer Girl, Bob Merrill's New Girl in Town, the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band and old King Cole's Red, Hot and Blue! At the Barbican in London, every Sunday from May through October, where Ian Marshall Fisher will again be persuading stars of current West End shows to give up their weekends in the name of archive rediscoveries. As Cole would doubtlessly have said, delightful, delicious, delovely. COME TO THE CABARET, OLD CHUM At the Donmar Warehouse for a few recent Sunday specials, but hopefully to find a larger theatre before long, By Special Arrangement marked the arrival of a dazzling new cabaret talent. The actress and singer Maria Friedman (best known for Blues in the Night, Sondheim's Sunday in the Park and Merrily We Roll Along and the current West End comedy hit April in Paris) had the bright idea of going to a dozen Broadway and West End musical arrangers and asking them to deliver her a song each in their own unique styles. The result, with a "big band" of a dozen, was just marvelous. A REVAMPED CHARITY Just as the recession has been good for solo shows and one-set, four-character comedies, so it has caused an intriguing rethink of old Broadway musicals. We currently have three in London alone (Sweeney Todd at the National, Cabaret at the Warehouse and now Sweet Charity at the Battersea Arts Centre), which are being revived in studio stagings far removed from the glamour and glitz of their B'way origins. The big surprise of this trio is Sweet Charity: Whereas it might have been expected that by putting Cabaret back to its Berlin night-club roots and Sweeney back to its East London melodrama, a new close-up intensity would be achieved, who'd have thought that Sweet Charity would actually benefit by being stripped of all its Broadway and Hollywood glamour? But here, too, as Phil Willmott's engagingly tacky, no-budget production suggests, is an essentially seedy show about failed cabaret stars being unable to make it once they hit the daylight. Stripped of all the old Bob Fosse knee-jerk choreography, given only a tinny trio where once there was an orchestra, Neil Simon's sly, cynical book at last comes into its own, as do the dour, bittersweet lyrics of Dorothy Fields. This is a show about failure both professional and romantic, something that neither Gwen Verdon onstage nor Shirley Maclaine on film could ever quite bring themselves to acknowledge because it is well known that in big-time American showbiz, failure doesn't sell. "Dances?" says one of Charity's showgirls, "who dances? We defend ourselves to music," and that is what Willmott's grainy, sleazy rediscovery is all about: Brecht/Weill to Broadway. 70 2015.64.12 [[advertisement]] [[image]] Finally, an American luxury sedan that makes these feel like invitations instead of warnings. They're waiting for you. Millions of miles of them, twisting, curving, climbing, meandering through some of the most breathtaking parts of the United States. Not the six-laners. We're talking about the real roads, the ones that exhilarate and turn you on. Of course, to fully enjoy them, you need the Chrysler LHS. It's the first luxury sedan with "cab forward" design, so it has an extremely wide track. It gives you a sense of control and agility you've never experienced in a full-size car before. You glide easily through hairpin turns. Step on the gas and feel the quickness of a 24-valve, 214-horsepower engine. Hit the other pedal and experience the controlled stopping power of four-wheel disc ABS. In short, hit the road, Jack. And enjoy every mile of it. For more information, call 1-800-4-A-CHRYSLER. [[image]] FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION CHRYSLER [[image]] OFFICIAL SPONSOR OF THE 1994 U.S. OLYMPIC TEAM 36USC380
