London Spotlight: August 2005

Yes, theaters here shuttered the night of July 7 after bombs exploded in three underground trains and a fourth explosion tore apart a 30 bus in Bloomsbury. Still, Londoners immediately experienced gallant surges within them of the type that overtook the population during the Blitz in World War II. And by the next night, theaters were operating — albeit including security checks. And Londoners are still going out, so tickets for smash hits like Billy Elliot, Guys and Dolls, and Mary Poppins remain hard to nab. So it’s typical summer doldrums — and nothing else — that’s responsible for cutting the month’s openings to just four.

Perhaps the most eagerly awaited production is Tom, Dick and Harry at the Duke of York’s. Let’s revise that to: Perhaps the most eagerly awaited production by Ray Cooney fans is Tom, Dick and Harry. Cooney is the king of the boulevard comedy, if those boulevards are in the strictly middle-class areas. He’s the guy who wrote (or co-wrote) naughty numbers like Run for Your Wife. Many of his commercial clicks have been produced by the Theatre of Comedy Company, which he founded in 1983 and for which the 73-year-old former actor directs whenever he gets the chance. The new laffer — with Ray’s son, Michael, serving as collaborator — is about adoption gone wrong. It stars Joe, Stephen and Mark McGann, brothers known more to English audiences than to Americans.

At the Duchess, the new offering is Behind the Iron Mask, a musical version of the The Man in the Iron Mask. In this new treatment of the Dumas novel, the masked man finally gets to sing, which must mean that iron mask has some flexibility. (Will it resemble in any way the by-now-well-worn Phantom of the Opera mask?) A lost Plautus play known as The Storm has been re-imagined by Peter Oswald for presentation at the Globe. Yet a third re-version of a classic shows up at the Soho as part of its fifth anniversary season: Nick Darke’s Antigone at Hell’s Mouth, which is described as a “radical and explosive retelling” of Sophocles’s tragedy.

Here’s big news for musical theater aficionados: Frances Ruffelle is returning to Chicago as Roxie Hart this month only. For those with faulty memories, she’s the little sparrow who was the first to sing “On My Own” in Les Miserables. Musical comedy fans and/or William Shakespeare lovers may also want to check into The Big Life, an adaptation by Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph of the Bard’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. It’s been ballyhooed as the West End’s first “all-black” original tuner — making its Apollo booking something of an inside joke for New Yorkers familiar with Harlem’s Apollo.

True adventurers may want to travel to Bath for a day or two. The great director Sir Peter Hall, now in his later seventies and still evincing undiminished energy, has been setting up his Peter Hall Company shop at the popular watering-hole’s Theatre Royal for the last few summer seasons. This year he’s guiding — for the first time in his astonishing career — a production of Much Ado About Nothing, one that apparently recognizes quite ardently the near-tragic nature of the Bard’s supposed comedy. While Janie Dee and Aiden Gillett are the squabbling Beatrice and Benedick, reports have it they’re taking more of a back seat than usual to the ugly practical joke that nearly leads to the death of virtuous bride-to-be Hero.

The other Peter Hall Company offering is young and talented upstart Thea Sharrock’s revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives with Michael Siberry and Greta Scacchi as the squabbling Elyot and Amanda. Both plays are, of course, much ado about something, and well worth any journey to Bath, where Jane Austen put pen to paper for her own squabbling duo, Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy.