This month I had intended to review the new blockbuster - 'Beauty and the Beast". But with all the hype and publicity it is bound to run for ages. So that review can wait so that I can instead draw your attention to the new show at The Donmar Warehouse. The good news is that "The Fix" is playing for a limited season so you will have to be quick if you want to see it (as you should if at all possible.)
Director Sam Mendes has said that he would like to bring musical theatre up to date. His handling of this new piece (which follows his excellent revival of "Company") shows how well he is succeeding.
"Fix" is a powerful story of American politics. The show opens with the funeral of Senator Reed Chandler who has died suddenly just before becoming President. The grief of his widow (Violet) and older brother (Graham) soon gives way to a determination that all the effort they have both put into building Reed's political career should not be wasted. They decide that Violet's son (Cal) should be groomed for power instead. Undeterred by Cal's lack of interest or experience, they take the view that anything can be 'fixed' and they set about orchestrating his climb up the ladder.
The show not only takes a cynical look at the world of political conspiracy and graft but also explores how the modern publicity machine can manipulate the truth through soundbites and carefully stage managed tv presentations. But the brilliant book and lyrics by John Dempsey do more than take a swipe at the political system. They explore the personalities and motives of the main characters (and in the process reveal the skeletons they have in their own cupboards.)
The music by Dana P. Rowe moves the whole piece along at a fine pace. It is dramatic when it needs to be - but some of the best moments are when the scheming and dishonesty is satirized in musical numbers which adopt a less sinister style (be it soft shoe, country and western, or vaudeville).
As is usual at the Donmar (a small open stage with the audience on three sides) there is no scenery as such. But the use of props is brilliant and the lighting superb.
But it is the performances which underline what a good show this is. John Barrowman sings well as Cal and is very convincing as he allows his character to change over the course of the story. Starting as an aimless dropout, reluctant to enter politics, he eventually shows he can wield power and enjoy swaying an audience without worrying too much about the honesty of his message. But he remains vulnerable throughout and in the end his fall is as meteoric as his rise.
Katherine Evans is excellent as Cal's mother - efficient, scheming, glamorous, in control - until the glamour is stripped away and her true self is revealed in the song "Spin" towards the end of the show.
Krysten Cummings who plays Tina, a night club entertainer who captivates, and then betrays, Cal gets some of the best songs. As a cabaret performer herself you would expect her to sing well - and she does. But this part also requires some sensitive acting and she proves she is a good all around performer.
But for me it was Philip Quast who the outstanding performance as Graham, older and more clever than his brother Reed Chandler, but always in his shadow. He plays the whole show either on crutches or in a wheelchair and is convincing throughout as he seeks compensation for his own disabilities through planning the success first of his brother and later his nephew. His acting and singing are of the highest order. I am not sure whether this counts as a as a "supporting" role or not. But he deserves to get an Olivier nomination of some kind.
Inevitably you are left guessing how far this fictitious story has has drawn its inspiration from real political families - Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair, the careful pursuit of power by the Kennedy family. Just as you dismiss the idea from your mind there is one of those brilliant touches of direction that you will remember forever. Tina dons a blond wig and replica of Marilyn Monroe's famous white dress and sings "happy birthday Mr. Senator" to Cal with skirts billowing above an air vent. Shortly afterwards both he and she are dead!
This is great musical theatre. I hope it goes on to greater success and that people don't forget that its world premiere was at the Donmar under Sam Mendes direction.
Think Clinton. Think Kennedy. Think Lyndon Johnson. Think Caligula. Caligula? The Fix, you see is about power. How to get it, how to keep it, how to destroy it, how to use it. Two young Americans, John Dempsey and Dana Rowe, have written a startlingly original musical the first two thirds of which are stunning.
With only one previous unsuccessful off-Broadway musical under their belts they've hit the dark side of American politics and scored a bullseye. The score has tremendous confidence and ranges from ballads, gospel and point numbers to up tempo pastiche. But it's the lyrics that count. Not since the young Stephen Sondheim has there been such seemingly artless craft. This ain't Oklahoma, folks, the darkness of politics, drugs, and the unreality that is public life in the late twentieth century is all here and it rings entirely true.
The evening begins and ends with a flag covered funeral. A hugely popular politician lies dead, having succumbed to a heart attack in the arms of a receptionist only hours before he is to become his party's candidate for President. What is his ambitious wife and Iago - like brother to do? Why, tidy up the dropout rocker son, Cal (Caligula geddit?) and run him up instead. Up he goes, this new star in the firmament, up into the startosphere of the political aristocracy of the political aristocracy where any sin from an Acid Queen mistress to a heroin problem can be fixed.
There are some subversive moments which work splendidly, such as a soft-shoe shuffle in a minefield and a cripple tap-dancing on crutches. Others, such as the famous Marilyn Munroe having her skirt blown up by a New York air-vent do not. What does suprise me is that The Fix is undercast. John Barrowman looks good as Cal and sings well but he is curiously unsexy. Whatever else may be said about the Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, charisma oozed from every pore. Without it it's hard to understand how Cal could overcome the disadvantages of a ghastly mother and an even worse uncle to get elected in the first place. Philip Quast as Uncle Graham gives the strongest performance: Richard III in a longue suit, twisted and fabulous. As the mother, Kathryn Evans doesn't get much but evil to play with, and her role is underwritten.
The show looks and sounds marvellous, a tribute not only to the director, Sam Mendes, but also to Cameron Mackintosh who has taken on two unknown composers as he did with Boublil and Schonberg before Les Miz became a hit: and the production designed by Rob Howell with its double turntable in the tiny Donmar playing area, is first class all the way.
On opening night, I had the impression that The Fix wasn't quite ready. Another two weeks rehearsals might have sorted out the shambles of the last twenty minutes in which the authors and the director, in a brave attempt to distract our attention from the fact that they don't have an ending, throw in everything they can think of and still don't have an ending. Never mind, Dempsey and Rowe are good enough to invent one before the end of the run.
There is a saying in American musical theatre that the best stuff gets written out of town. For The Fix, a daring new musical previewing at the Donmar Warehouse, there is no out of town. The closest the show gets to a provincial tour is a rehearsal room in south London, followed by a fortnight of previews.
"I would like to hit the audience that thinks the West End is middle aged" says producer Cameron Mackintosh. "They'll come to see something like this and find that it isn't."
With The Fix the Donmar is introducing an element of risk that most musicals work hard to eliminate. It is the first time that Sam Mendes, the theatre's artistic director, has given a musical its world premiere, or used such unabashedly electrified orchestrations, or collaborated with Mackintosh, or chosen two writers with such a short track record.
John Dempsey (book & Lyrics, aged 32) and Dana Rowe ( music, 40) have just one musical on their joint CV. Zombie Prom, a sort of Little Shop Of Rocky Horror, opened off Broadway last April. And closed last May. But they were strongly recommended to Mackintosh and rushed a demo of The Fix to him. Within weeks the show had a slot in the Donmar's schedule.
Decisions just aren't made this quickly in the musical theatre. But Mendes had a hole in his schedule and Mackintosh was "immediately struck that The Fix was something different: an extraordinary mixture of rock and vaudeville and black comedy that happens very rarely."
The Fix started out in Dempsey's febrile imagination as "a serious opera about Claudius and Cailgula". Slowly it was updated mongering in late 20th century America. Written flat out over a two month period last year, it takes a good hard look at the exaltation of image over ideas in the political arena of the media age.
A presidential candidate dies between the thighs of a receptionist. His widow, Violet, has designs on the White House and converts her son Cal (John Barrowman) into a conduit of her ambition. She enlists her dead husband's brother Grahame, a Svengali figure, to mastermind Cal's ascent.
The show's first proper run through was on a gloomy Friday afternoon in Clapham. Without the American system of endless workshopping, or the comfort blanket of an out of town tour, the climax of the seven week rehearsal takes on huge importance. The props are minimal, the band just piano and drums, the costumes negligible. There are still no microphones, which means that Lonely Is A Two Way Street, a bluesy nightclub number, is somewhat underwhelming. But the choreography by Charles Augins of Five Guys Named Mo fame needs a little tinkering.
Afterwards Mackintosh confides that Clandestine Affairs which closes Act 1, is for the chop. "Its not working" Dempsey and Rowe will spend the weekend writing its successor Dangerous Games, to be shoehorned in during the previews. A scrap-rate of just one song, they agree is pleasingly low.
The first preview was postponed for two days - the Donmar's modest equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber shutting down for two weeks to revamp. Mendes paces the entrance to the stalls. "I hate previews" he says. Despite the odd glitch, the transformation from rehearsal to real thing is impressive, though Dempsey and Rowe look down in the mouth.
Mendes announces a few days later that the first preview "was awful - it had lost its lightness of touch and its wit". He has since shaved 10 minutes off the first act and dropped the cod-operatic opening number. In has come Let The Games Begin, which Mendes decides is a "good deal more efficient at setting the tone". "I'm getting happy with it now" he says. "The story telling is much clearer. It just takes a long long time." Would a traditional out of town run run have been useful? "No" he says. "I'm of the school that says your previews are where you get it right. And if you can't they'll give it bad reviews and you'll close. That's the deal."
Sam Mendes began his reign at the Donmar Warehouse directing the British premiere of Assassins, Sondheim's musical take on the motivation of that rag-bag of people who have pointed guns at U.S. presidents. He returns to American politics now with The Fix - a new musical by unknowns John Dempsey and Dana P Rowe - that traces the rise and fall of a young would be senator, Cal Chandler, the scion of a dynasty not entirely distinct from the Kennedys.
The contrast between the two shows is instructive. The Sondheim takes material that is potentially offensive to put into this genre and then disarms criticism with a biting demonstartion that, far from being incongruous figures in a Broadway show, these twisted, loned and thwarted idealists represent the parodic embodiment of the American musical's self-assertive values.
There's no equivalent irony in The Fix, which aims at very broad and battered targets (the amorality of the political machine; the links between politicians and the mafia; the remorseless dynastic mill) and which justifies itself as a msuical on the undeniable, but scarcely thought-provoking, grounds that politicians are naturally showfolk.
Hence a score which, while basically rock driven, is free to nod in any direction - macabre Vaudeville number; rousing clap-happy gospel; country and western ballad, and so on. Where the musical eclecticism of Assassins makes the dramatic point that all the characters are trapped in one or other form of national costume, in The Fix it mainly serves to advertise Mr Rowe's ability to write blandly in several styles.
The proceedings begin with a suited chorus clustered around the flag draped coffin of a senator who has died in flagrante with a receptionist. At the end there is the same stage picture, only this time the stiff is the first senator's son, Cal (played by the talented Hugh Grant lookalike John Barrowman), who has died because, as state governor, he's taken on the mafia in a drugs-busting programme.
In between, we see how Cal's cartoonily ambitious Rose-Kennedy meets Lady Macbeth monster mother, Violet (Kathryn Evans) and his not just literally twisted and crippled gay uncle (a splendid Philip Quast) package the reluctant boy for a political career. Soon, he has a wife he doesn't love, a mechanical ability to stir audiences with a formulaic I-see-the-future autocue oration ("You delivered the speech as well as anyone I ever heard," declares the uncle, while unconscious of anything back handed in that compliment) and is busy burying his fatigue and dazed disorientation in heroin addiction and a junkie girlfriend (Krysten Cummings).
Sam Mendes' production has a prodigious slickness, with its tightly drilled, stylised chorus ( who play everything from ominously strutting mob men to microphone waggling lobbyists) its dazzling lighting effects, its droll TV news inserts, and the hard fluency it achieves through the mini revolve and the conveyor belt stage at the back. At times though, this technical tour de force comes to illustrating one of the ills pinpointed in the piece: the primacy of packaging over content. Dealing with a young man who determines to be individual rather than a type , the show itself has unresolved problems shifting between the satirically representative and the personally heartfelt. Loose ends and undeveloped strands abound.
The whole project is the outcome of a collaboration between the Donmar and Cameron Mackintosh. I wish this partnership well: the commercial and subsidised theatres should co-operate to create the best conditions for nuturing new talent. It might have been a bit kinder however, to tarry a bit longer with this show in the workshop.
John Barrowman, who impressed in Sunset Boulevard, plays Cal. He is a handsome hunk with a strong voice, and its hardly his fault that the show fails to provide him with a personality. Philip Quast plays the wicked (and homosexual) uncle, dragging his withered legs around on crutches, and injects the show with a welcome shot of bilious vitality. Kathryn Evans, lumbered with lines like "We all have our guilty secrets, you mishapen old fag" could make far more of the mother, though newcomer Krysten Cummings as the slinky torch singer may have a bright future.