THEATRE AND DANCE Parallel universe
The Wizard of Oz LONDON PALLADIUM
Alice in Wonderland THE ROYAL BALLET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
up by the reviewing schedules: critics, for example, might suddenly see, either side of lunch, two movies with identical themes or even scenes. The effect is even more bizarre when it happens across genres: within a few hours, on the same day, I saw a musical and a ballet in which adolescent girls in gingham frocks fall down vortices and have sub- Freudian encounters with distorted versions of people from their daily lives. The overlap is maximised because both
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Jeremy Sams and Andrew Lloyd Webber, in their stage adaptation of the 1939 song-and- dance movie The Wizard of Oz, and Christopher Wheeldon, choreographing Lewis Carroll’s famous stories about the fallen school- girl, have chosen identical framing devices, in which Dorothy and Alice respectively are thrown by a sudden unnatural event into an alternative world that is both unfamiliar yet recognisable. These contemporary dramaturgical deci- sions mean that the shows have more in common than the source stories do. But, even so, it seems likely that L. Frank Baum, writing the first Oz novel in 1900, must have been influenced at some level by Carroll’s already- famous tale from 1865, and it’s fascinating that two stories involving a young woman’s enjoyable but also dangerous escape from boredom into a fantasy kingdom should rank among the most enduring children’s books. Another doubling between the productions is that they were substantially sold out before opening, although The Wizard of Oz has the vast advantage of having been cast through a peak-time TV show with up to 10 million viewers: Danielle Hope, whose name was in the envelope read out by Graham Norton at the finale of Over the Rainbow, now joins Michael Crawford and Hannah Waddingham at the top of the bill for a production for which chief TV judge Lloyd Webber has renovated his Palladium theatre in London, including the upgrading of its stage to allow spectacular revolving scenery. The television interest means that a steady audience is almost guaranteed but, in a crucial way, this project is a bigger gamble than Lloyd Webber’s earlier TV-cast shows: The Sound of Music and Joseph were established stage musicals, whereas this Oz has been knocked together from a score by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg that was written for cinema. Accepting that straightforward translation would be inadequate, Lloyd Webber has called in his former lyricist Tim Rice, in their most
ne of the oddities of covering culture pro- fessionally is the coincidences thrown
Not enough plot lines or songs to go round: The Wizard of Oz
substantial collaboration since Evita in 1978, to add several new songs. Even so, it still feels as if there aren’t enough plot lines or songs to go round. The BBC1 viewers’ choice, Danielle Hope, is efficient rather than electrifying as Dorothy and gets her best song, “Over the Rainbow”, ruinously early in the evening. And Crawford, although allowed four roles by the policy of cross-casting between Kansas and Oz, only gets one half- decent number: Rice and Lloyd Webber’s new “Wonders of the World”. Dorothy’s sidekick Toto – played by a rotat- ing foursome of Westies called Bobby, Razzamatazz, Dazzle and Topper – is inter- mittently charming but you become too conscious that he is having to be taken off the stage or replaced by a stuffed stand-in for the bigger production numbers on Robert Jones’ lavish sets. Without the benefit of its weeks of free BBC1 publicity, this strangely dull evening would risk being a rapid flop. Alice in Wonderland deserves a very long run but, given the repertory system in place at the Royal Opera House to protect dancers’ feet and cede the stage to the Royal Ballet’s operatic colleagues, will only accumulate it over several years. Like the National Theatre’s current
Frankenstein (reviewed here last week) and the Mark-Anthony Turnage opera Anna Nicole (reviewed on page 29), this Alice is visually eye-popping (sets by Bob Crowley). There’s a strong feeling at the moment that subsidised performance companies are using their huge resources to prove that live theatre can match the spectacle of 3D and CGI cinema. Wheeldon and Crowley contrive successive
startling scenarios, involving dancing playing cards, a multi-footed caterpillar, a lavish cro- quet game and a notably clever flash-forward epilogue in modern Britain. My apprehension in advance had been that
ballet seems to me to struggle with comedy because funniness often involves clumsiness, and classic dance struggles to accommodate this. Wheeldon, though, has negotiated this difficulty through the breadth of his choreo- graphic language: including tap for the Mad Hatter and a classical actor, Simon Russell Beale, making his ballet debut as the Duchess. More conventionally, Lauren Cuthbertson,
in the title role, has a striking love duet with Sergei Polunin’s Knave of Hearts. The weakness, it seems to me as a non- specialist critic, is sex, or rather its absence. Because of its physical intertwining of women and men, dance is almost inevitably sensual and many major ballets draw on this, as the movie Black Swanmelodramatically explores. But Alice is a young girl, whose story was
written by an author suspected of unhealthy imaginings, and so this aspect of the art form must be neutered. Even so, while the stories of Alice and Dorothy make a fascinating doubling, the ballet is the one that demands to be seen. Mark Lawson
Brentwood Religious Education Service Spring Lecture 2011
“The Word of God for the Church and for the World” An exploration of the Synod document on the Bible (Verbum Domini)
24 March 2011 7.30pm - 9pm
Speaker: Rev Dr Adrian Graffy, Author, and Director of CEF Cost: £5 waged, £3 unwaged.
Ingrave Road, Brentwood, Essex CM15 8AT Telephone: 01277 265285
Cathedral House Conference Centre,
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