‘The Stage’ digital archive (and ‘The Guardian’)

Here is an excellent resource for anyone working on the history of British theatre: the entire archive of that thespian stalwart The Stage is now available and searchable from the comfort of your own home for a very reasonable small fee.

Also, did you know that, while The Guardian‘s digital archive is currently a work-in-progress for the period prior to 1985, if you email them with a very specific pre-1985 query (as I did yesterday) you will get a very helpful response within a matter of hours, and they may even (as in my case) attach the requested article? This is an astonishingly good service – and is it ever possible to thank someone enough if they have saved you a trip to the hell which is Colindale? I shall be buying The Guardian again.

‘Papa’ John – sufficiently ‘Hairy’, but too spaced out

Of all the numerous genealogical links to and from the Rock Operas which I have pursued (and, occasionally, simply stumbled across) during the last few years, Chris Campion provided one of the most intriguing and bizarre in this Sunday’s Observer Music Monthly. Campion’s excellent, in-depth article on the post-Mamas & Papas life and career of chief ‘Papa’ John Phillips is well worth reading in full.

For anyone interested in pop-rock music on the cusp of the 1960s and 1970s, John Phillips is an important figure. He wrote, for The Mamas & the Papas (and Scott McKenzie), some of the anthems of the ‘peace and love’ generation which had the widest transatlantic appeal at the time, and which have proved most enduring as iconic musical statements of the era. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, The Mamas & the Papas were and sometimes still are subjected to that tiresomely frequent accusation of ‘commercializing’ or ‘selling-out’ the ‘Counter-Culture’. A broadly-based audience warmed to their non-threatening version of hippiedom, their beautiful (by anyone’s standards) vocal harmonies, and Phillips’ melodies and lyrics. This wide appeal, combined with the fact that they did not play their own instruments (because they were singers – and we should note that this was never an impediment to ‘counter-cultural’ acclaim for Janis Joplin) has often made them rather too ‘pop’ for many ‘Counter-Cultural’ purists. Campion’s article goes some way towards redressing the perception of The Mamas & the Papas, and Phillips in particular, as ‘squeaky clean’. On the contrary: Phillips’ ‘spiritual’ and environmental concerns, prodigious libidinousness and even more prodigious drug intake place him firmly within the (admittedly contradictory) ‘mainstream’ of the ‘counter-cultural’ rock milieu of the time. This was, after all, a man who apparently ‘”believed in drug-taking as a way of life”‘.

Phillips also, it seems, developed a rock musical-theatre work with Hair producer Michael Butler. As Campion explains, in the early 1970s, between his first solo album and his dissolute 1977 recording sessions with Keith Richards, Phillips was ‘obsessed with the idea of writing an opera set in space’. The Apollo 11 moon landing had provided the inspiration, and the central role was written with Elvis Presley in mind. (Yes – Elvis.) Having ‘pitched the idea to Michael Butler’, Butler ‘brought on board a young director called Michael Bennett [who would take Broadway by storm in 1975 with A Chorus Line]. For several months, Phillips’ mansion became a hive of activity. Brainstorming sessions were held in the library, a pile of cocaine available for anyone to dip into….Unfortunately, it was not to be. Michael Butler pulled out of the project just as the final cast was to be approved. “Drugs made John very difficult to work with,” Butler says. “He also had a lot of paranoia. And that was the last thing we needed.”…The idea of turning the musical into a sci-fi comedy movie faded too (despite some interest from Jack Nicholson and the mooted involvement of George Lucas)…Nonetheless, with the help of Andy Warhol, Phillips had found new financial backing for Space, now to be retitled Man on the Moon….Harvey Goldberg attended one of the 45 preview performances. “It was so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to go backstage,” he remembers. “It was truly one of the worst things I’d ever seen.”…The New York Times wrote: “For connoisseurs of the truly bad, Man on the Moon may be a small milestone.” The show closed after five nights…What was left was a suite of 22 songs (which will be released for the first time ever later this year) in which Phillips reinvented himself as a space-age Cole Porter, questing after love and truth in the outer realms.’ Read the full article here.

R.I.P. Tom O’Horgan

Tom O’Horgan, the man who brought nudity to London’s West End, died on 11 January 2009. Michael Coveney’s excellent obituary of ‘the big daddy of the modern rock musical’ ran in The Guardian on 21 January.

O’Horgan – not least as the director who first staged Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar – figures prominently in my thesis. Coveney makes many highly perceptive observations about O’Horgan’s artistic reputation, which soared and plummeted (in both cases sometimes unjustly) during his lifetime. O’Horgan personified, in many ways, the often artificially-amplified tensions between the ‘Counter-Cultural’ and ‘the mainstream’; ‘experimental’ and ‘conventional’ theatre; ‘artistic integrity’ versus ‘selling-out’.

As Coveney notes, O’Horgan’s ‘style of direction…was organically evolved in the off-off-Broadway theatre of the mid-1960s and rooted in an alternative lifestyle and the hippy culture’. By 1971 Hair and Superstar were two of four O’Horgan productions running on Broadway. ‘This was his time’, however, and, sadly, ‘he never really thrived beyond it’. In large part, this was because ‘O’Horgan attracted scorn from the critical avant garde, who felt he had sold out, and disdain from the purists for his wacky, outrageous style of synthesising many influences’. Such ‘avant garde scorn’, combined with the commercial disaster of O’Horgan’s 1972 production of Dude by MacDermot and Ragni would, ultimately, result in O’Horgan’s rather sad – but not unjustifiable – reflection ‘in 1993 that he had been put on “an enemies list” by critics and other members of the theatrical establishment’.

Nicker-less Parsons on “Hair”

One of the best things about writing a PhD on a subject such as mine is that ‘what archives are you using?’ – the ultimate historian-stuck-at-drinks-reception-and-lacking-in-social-small-talk question – seems almost laughable. I am frequently tempted to reply that ‘the world is my archive’; but that can sound both arch and somewhat ‘unprofessional’ (dear boy).

But it’s true, as proved by this week’s edition of Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs. Kirsty Young’s guest on Sunday 4th November was actor/game-show host/personality/national institution Nicholas Parsons. Charming, articulate, and with a touching interest in and empathy for all social stratas and walks-of-life, he also revealed himself to be a great admirer of Hair (if not quite a closet ‘counter-culturalist’). He was a late-1960s audience member who interpreted the famous nude scene in precisely the way intended by its authors. Here’s a transcript of his comments, which provided the context for his choice of the song Aquarius as one of eight pieces of music he would take to his desert island:

Kirsty Young: ‘In 1967 you won Radio Personality of the Year. Briefly, how did that come about?’

Nicholas Parsons: ‘People, young, and middle-aged like me, were breaking down all kinds of traditional, arcane attitudes and so forth, and the big breakthrough on television came with That Was The Week That Was. And I went to the Head of Light Entertainment for Radio and I said ‘you haven’t got anything similar on radio’. He said ‘no, we haven’t’. And I said ‘well, I’ve got this idea’. And we called the programme Listen To This Space and it took off, and I was lucky to get the award – the Variety Club Award of Radio Personality of the Year.’

Q: ‘Tell me about your next piece of music then.’

A: ‘Well, it’s all part of the Sixties, my next piece of music. New things were happening in the theatre. And there was a musical came over from America called Hair, and I went to see it. And it was memorable for one scene, I remember, because at the end of the first half they all seemed to be under a huge blanket and they struggled to get their kit off. And then the blanket was whipped away and they all stood up absolutely stark naked and they went into another number. And, you know, it wasn’t done to be provocative, it was actually rather innocent. And that was the joy of this period – there was an innocence, there was a great love going on everywhere. And one of the songs from that musical which has always been with me ever since is The Age Of Aquarius.’

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Thanks, Nicholas. I think you’ve just earned a little citation in my thesis.

Images: http://www.nicholasparsons.co.uk and http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/

 

“The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut”

I will be giving a seminar paper entitled “HAIR, London, 1968: The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut” this Thursday, 4th October, at 5pm in room 3.16 of the Arts building at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS.

Although this is part of the QMUL History Department Postgraduate Seminar Series, anyone, working under any disciplinary label – or none – is very welcome to come along. In keeping with the tone of the paper (which covers just a small part of my PhD research), I aim to make the atmosphere slightly less formal than usual. This is an attempt at just a hint of a 1960s ‘happening’. To that end, there will be much wine available. Whether that results in the degeneration of some into a tediously squiffy state – with entirely predictable consequences – is largely beyond my control (although, while the chroniclers of the Counter-Culture rarely mention it, I suppose that must have happened at ‘happenings’ too. Or maybe they truly were more ‘enlightened’ than the dominant twenty-first century London culture?) My hope is, rather, that everyone will enter into a positive, ludic, ‘Aquarian’ spirit.

I scheduled this, however, before I discovered that I have a rather intense teaching schedule on a Thursday, and that last week and next are without doubt the two most stressful and downright unpleasant I’ve had to endure since I returned to Academia. I therefore suspect I’ll need to draw heavily on all my years of Dr Footlights to physically get through it. That may mean resorting to my drugs of choice in such situations: Berocca, four-star caffeine, cigarettes, bananas and intravenous Lucozade. But the show must go on because, as some of my more senior, eh, ‘colleagues’ realise (admirably), to a large extent (when it comes to delivery, at least) ‘it’s all acting, isn’t it?’ (Maybe I should have taken them along to that casting I declined last week – because the gig clashed with my teaching – to show them what that is really all about.)

Image:  http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/

Superstar? Jesus Christ.

Dubunking of pseudo-science and pseudo-history always appeals to me, and Respectful Influence is a blog which does both with wit.

Responding to press reports, it has provoked quite a debate by asking who would be inspired to choose such an inappropriate ‘venue’ in which to stage Jesus Christ Superstar.

"General De Gaulle is a Phallic Monolith"

Thanks once again to the thoroughly nice Debbie and Johanna for allowing me a return raid on the small but fascinating archive held by the People Show. This consists largely of scripts (sometimes mere fragments), production photos and press cuttings. There is little in the way of company correspondence, and of company accounts there are none; which is a marked contrast to the way in which creative bodies (particularly publicly-subsidized ones) are forced to function nowadays.

The glorious line “General De Gaulle is a Phallic Monolith” comes from People Show No.1, ‘People Show’. It struck me forcibly on several levels. Firstly, as an actor – what a fantastic (but incredibly difficult) line to deliver!
Secondly, out of context, it is undeniably hilarious. We can love our subject, have great respect for it and even be a fan while also being an interrogative critic, but we shouldn’t be scared to admit that sometimes ‘the buzz’ (thanks, Tim Rice and/or Howard Schuman) comes from an affectionate laugh at its gaucheness – from a 21st century perspective. It neither ridicules nor demeans to admit that there was an awful lot of very exciting but nonetheless hilarious ‘stuff’ produced in the late 60s/early 70s in the name of both ‘political revolution’ and ‘cultural change’.

And yet, thirdly…it’s also ‘true’; and remains so. General De Gaulle in 1966 was, undeniably, an iconic, indeed monolithic, representation of post-war France and post-war Europe. He was also, of course, implacably opposed to British entry into the then Common Market, and therefore something of an ‘anti-British’ monolith, in reductive terms.
Also, at the risk of fulfilling my supervisor’s witty observation that ‘you culturalists are obsessed: you’d think a penis was phallic’, if one thinks about the physicality of De Gaulle…substantial, erect, etc, etc…(or maybe that’s just me – or, rather, the way my mind works).

More importantly – while I’m no expert on French history – in the pre-abortion, pre-1968 days, long before Simone Veil and the social liberalization of Giscard D’Estaing (who, ironically, to my childish eyes always resembled a 15th century monk, or a walking skull, a la Sir Alec Douglas-Home) the General can be construed as an embodiment of monolithic patriarchy. He was not, like Harold Wilson, a ‘swing with the sixties’, ideologically-light pragmatist. It is hard to imagine, for instance, had the Beatles been French, the General bestowing any state ‘gongs’ upon them.

For all these reasons, therefore, hats off to the memory of the late Jeff Nuttall, author and ‘director’ of the People Show’s early works, for writing such a densely-packed line of dialogue. Whether he would have agreed with a single word of my interpretation is, of course, a moot point. (But then I’ve learned the hard way that the way to really succeed as an actor is to argue more with your directors. It makes them feel they have a function…) More on People Show, and even more on Nuttall, later.

Images: http://212.84.179.117/list.htm & www.charles-de-gaulle.org

People Show

A plug for the good people at People Show, who are letting me access their archive as part of the theatre history section of my thesis. People Show came into being in 1966 to present their first performance – called ‘People Show’ – in the basement of what was then Better Books in Charing Cross Road, WC1. They fused into an ongoing troupe, initially under the ‘leadership’of Jeff Nuttall. Although intensely proud of their status as “the first experimental theatre group in Britain”, People Show have never rested on the laurels of their ‘iconic’ past: 40 years later they are still going strong from a great company base in Bethnall Green. If you follow the link to their excellent website you can find out about their upcoming work. Of particular interest is “The Big 40th Birthday Building Show”. In June of this year, we’re told, “People Show’s ‘trade mark’ happening, the ‘Building Show’, takes on a festive vibe as the company celebrates forty years of making theatre. Prepare to be astonished, entertained, charmed and roused by People Show artists from across the four decades, here in the home of the company, People Show Studios.” If you want to be kept informed about all of the company’s work you can sign up for their emailing list through their site – which also contains a wealth of photos, memorabilia and information on the history of company.

Rock Opera: Calling all ‘Superstar’ Thespians

In due course I will be outlining the full scope of my MPhil/PhD thesis. In brief, however, it covers the overlapping agendas – either mutually supportive, or contradictory and frictional – of revolutionary politics and cultural change in England between 1965 and 1974.

Within the ‘cultural change’ sphere, a key area I will be looking at is theatre practice. Within that, I’m focusing on a much-maligned and oft-parodied genre, which I, nevertheless, consider glorious both in its own right and as a historical artefact: the ‘Rock Opera’. So, in the hope that someone may just land here after googling the terms Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy, Hair or Godspell, I am trying to contact absolutely anyone involved in the original creation and production of these shows in England. (For the pedants amongst you, I should point out my awareness that i. only the first two are through-composed, and therefore bona fide ‘operas’, ii. only the first two are of English origin, and iii. Tommy – although considered the first of the genre – was not actually staged in this period.)

While I’d like to talk to the ‘names’, writers, composers, producers and directors, the perspective from ‘the back row of the chorus’ is even more important to me. I really want to talk to any ‘hoofers’, dressers, ASMs, pit-bands, front-of-house managers or theatrical agents who were involved.

Was your over-riding feeling at the time one of breaking new artistic ground in a revolutionary manner? Or perhaps sheer relief at getting bums on seats or getting yourself – or your clients – off the dole for a few weeks? Or did the appeal lie in any attendant sex and drugs to accompany the rock ‘n’ roll? (I’ve been on the stage, in the pit, in the lighting box, in the wings and on tour – I know the score folks, believe me!) Perhaps you felt elements of all of the above?

Is this you? Your mum? Your mate’s mate? Or your guitar, dance or stage-management teacher? If so, I would love to hear from you.