More on "Oliver"

I said I'd write some more about the musical, Oliver, which I saw again the other night. The last time I saw it, it was also done by the Taieri Musical Society. At that point a friend of ours played Fagin (singing about his cheap insurance of jewellery in a not-particularly well-guarded box) , and one of his older sons - he's now 27 or 8 - was in the kids' chorus.

Anyway, just some thoughts about Oliver as a musical, especially in the light of my trying to write a musical myself. It primarily consists of a bunch of set pieces: there's a minimum of dialogue, and a good number of songs that are intended to make you go out of the theatre whistling the tunes - and to buy the original cast LP when it comes out a few weeks later.

Some of the songs merely create atmosphere - Oom Pah Pah, for instance; others offer insight into characters: I shall scream, or Fagin's solos, or even As Long as He Needs Me - which is also in the vein of a show-stopper. Few of them carry the action forward in any way, something that one of the interviewees in Talking Theatre, by Richard Eyre, says annoys him. I can't remember which interviewee it was, just at the moment, but he complained that many of the most popular musicals come to a halt when a character sings - he even cites Oklahoma in this regard, even though it's often thought of as being a musical that changed the genre from merely having songs for the sake of having them, to having songs because they were part and parcel of the story. R&H musicals vary in this regard; some of the songs do move things forward; some are show-stoppers.

Stephen Sondheim's musicals tend to incorporate character, forward movement and plot into the songs, which is why his musicals don't often produce 'hit' songs; they're too integrated into the scheme of things. I'm not sure whether it was the same interviewee as I mentioned above who applauded this approach (though it may have been) and who also said that there comes a point in a musical where the passion is aroused to such a degree that singing is the only option.

Well, that may be a bit extreme. In Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, the characters sing most of the time; there are scattered sections of dialogue, some of it stand-alone in the sense that it's not underpinned by music, but for the most part the music pushes things along as much as anything else. So does that mean that the characters in Sweeney Todd are particularly passionate, or that Sondheim works to a mostly music format? As does Lloyd Webber, whose musicals are almost entirely sung - for better or worse.

The musical I'm writing started out in this way, but the more my collaborator and I worked on it, the more it seemed that some scenes were better driven by dialogue. Things will continue to change, but at present the opening two (shortish) scenes are mostly sung, then there's a mostly dialogue (again shortish) scene, and then there's a long scene where singing is spasmodic, but where there'll be an undercurrent of music accompaniment. And so the rest of the piece goes. The music will occupy the sort of space that it does in movies, but there'll also be songs of the kind that are Sondheim style rather than R&H style, or Oliver style. My aim is to make them catchy and the sort of tunes that grab you on first hearing, but they're not likely to be regarded as 'hit' songs.

I was interested to see that Oliver almost falls apart at the end. Even though the plot is working like mad to keep us interested in Oliver's fate at the hands of Nancy and Bill Sykes (who has the worst song in the show: My Name! - what does it mean, for goodness' sake?), the show ends with Nancy's murder, lots of running around by various extras, Bill's appearance on the bridge with Oliver, his rather off-hand shooting by a policeman (at least so it appeared in this production) and then....not the restoration of Oliver to Mr Brownlow (that happens fleetingly) but a last scene with Fagin, who's suddenly becoming the most interesting character. There's no rousing final chorus, oddly.

I think the problem is that Oliver gets less and less interesting as the show progresses - he's tossed about like a prop between various adults, and they take up the slack. Nancy certainly becomes one of the main characters, even though she arrives on the scene relatively late, and Fagin, who also doesn't appear until well into the first act, gets to appear to be the star of the show. As it happens, the two singers in this production were both capable of stealing the show - Nancy with her singing, and Fagin with his characterization. I suspect that was the same in the original London production, which may be why things are tailored in this fashion.

Theatre is not all one thing....

One of the shortest interviews in Richard Eyre's book of them (Talking Theatre, Interviews with Theatre People) is with Cameron Mackintosh, the extraordinary entrepreneurial producer of shows like Les Mis, Phantom, Miss Saigon and more.

In this interview there's no talk of Brecht, or Beckett, or Joan Littlewood - people who dominate the questions in many of the other interviews. Here the name of Andrew Lloyd Webber isn't temporarily forgotten by the interviewee (as it is in the preceding interview with John McGrath); in this interview, of course, it's celebrated.

There's one brief question and answer I'd like to quote - it comes from page 278 of the book.

Eyre: Do you accept some sort of hierarchy of art by whichpeople talk about operetta as sort of second-rate are and, as it were, Verdi and Mozart as first-rate art?

Mackintosh: I always thought the best defence of that was a wonderful critic in the Sunday Times called Harold Hobson, who wrote about a Ray Cooney farce saying: 'This is on an equal part with Hamlet.' Because, you know, whatever the art is, as long as it is absolutley of the best and true to what it is trying to do, then it is a marvellous piece of work. To me, there is absolutely no difference.

Through the rest of the book we've had the 'intellectual' theatre people saying some wonderful things, but also seemingly focused on political, physical, metaphysical, out on the edge theatre. Mackintosh is quite refreshing. Pity there's no more of him in the book!

Working to the script

It's not easy to drag in a comment about a stainless steel drum when you're intending to write about actors and playwrights and the theatre. Though if I go to a different kind of theatre - that is, the one in a hospital where operations are done - I can find a connection: there you'll find dressing drums and stainless steel kidney trays, and yikes! catheter trays. Please don't remind me.

A short while ago I came across an unusual interview with actress Laura Linney. Each question had been posed by an email correspondent to the New York Times.

Someone asked: How does being the daughter of a playwright impact how you approach a stage role, if at all? and Linney responded:

Oh yes, it certainly has influenced the way I read a play, or any script for that matter. I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have an intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.

I tend to approach everything with story first. Every choice I make I hope will feed the story and flesh out the narrative.

It's an interesting response; there are some actors who don't seem to find the original script that important, and substitute words of their own - or worse, there are directors who encourage them to do so.

In their book, Notes on Directing, Hauser and Reich note in their 25th point: Director Lloyd Richards said that if you [the director] continually find yourself itching to make changes in a script, consider whether you should give up directing and take up playwriting.

I've just been reading another book on the theatre - Talking Theatre, by Richard Eyre. It's a series of interviews with about fifty famous playwrights, directors, designers, actors, and others. More than once the comment is made in relation to Samuel Beckett's plays that even the punctuation mattered - if there were three commas at a certain spot in the dialogue, it meant a longer pause needed to be taken. Beckett's writing was so precise the actors could rely on it to work if they followed the instructions to the letter.