The success and failure of London musicals, 2014

The popularity of London musicals is clear, some of them are the best 2014 shows in London but what's the key to their success?

Should anyone doubt that the musical is alive and well, they need only look at the record-breaking success of Miss Saigon , which took £4.4 million on the first day booking opened last Wednesday (21 May). Alain Schönberg and Claude-Michel Boublil's Vietnam musical first hit the West End stage in 1989 under the direction of Nicholas Hytner and went on to become the 10th longest running production on Broadway. This rebooted version from Cameron Mackintosh has audiences oohing, aahing and spontaneously applauding, apparently as much for its famous machinery (remember the helicopter?) as the songs from the team who also bought you Les Mis.

Meanwhile The Pajama Game , in a joyous revival by blue-chip director Richard Eyre, is getting five stars from critics raving about its politics and passion (as well of course as original songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and new choreography by Stephen Mear).

Mackintosh's takeover

In fact, Cameron Mackintosh is on a roll, announcing last week that he has taken over two more West End theatres. The Victoria Palace, currently showing Billy Elliot , will undergo improvements to create a larger stage and front of house, equipping it for more blockbuster shows in the mould of Miss Saigon. The Ambassadors will be renamed The Sondheim, in honour of the American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and will welcome subsidised theatre from London and the provinces that would normally perform in spaces without a proscenium arch. It will be, promises Mackintosh, ‘a glamourous 450-seat studio environment’.

Mackintosh’s plans speak volumes about the current state of play in musicals. They are an art form I love; it may not be a trendy thing to admit, but few things give me more pleasure in life than a good old toe-tapping show tune. 

This is why I look at the West End right now with a little trepidation. Old favourites are still going strong, but new openings are more often than not turning rapidly into closings; I Can’t Sing, the X Factor musical, closed after only two months and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest venture lasted just four.  

At the top of the tree are the blockbusters (Saigon), the evergreen classics (Les Mis, Phantom), the jukebox musicals ( We Will Rock You, Mama Mia ) and the Broadway transfers with enormous budgets for spectacle and advertising ( The Book of Mormon ). Around the fringes you get some fabulous work which finds its way into the mainstream by means of word of mouth, great reviews and, increasingly, social media, but there is a middle ground which is being squeezed out. 

A formula for success

So what makes for a successful musical in 2014? Positive reviews and standing ovations aren’t enough on their own; I Can’t Sing enjoyed both, but struggled to fill the Palladium (which was already selling heavily discounted tickets).

A brand new British musical is always going to be a challenge, as Andrew Lloyd-Webber, formerly of the Midas touch, discovered to his cost when Stephen Ward , a musical inspired by the Profumo affair, closed (the Guardian’s Michael Billington opined that ‘this story of the breaking of a social butterfly on a wheel needs a melodic astringency that is not exactly Lloyd Webber's forte’).

Perhaps the problem is that for many, musicals evoke emotions of comfortable nostalgia. Hence the success of revivals like The Pajama Game, or musicals based on favourite children’s books like Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (granted the former also enjoys the stellar musical and lyric-writing talents of Tim Minchin). Even Billy Elliot, the Commitments and The Bodyguard and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels are stage plays based on films.

Broadway transfers are, as always, finding their place. The Book of Mormon is still booking out months in advance, and The Scotsborro Boys hits the West End later this year after a sell out run at the Young Vic. Despite both being deeply political and darkly satirical, these shows have many traditional elements, with classic leading man ballads and rousing tap numbers galore.

 Perhaps the hard truth is that the West End is no longer a place to try something new – your mettle must be proven elsewhere if you have any hope of success. With the benefit of the doubt fading fast and audiences reluctant to fork out increasing sums of money on an unknown quantity, shows hoping to fill a West End space with limited budgets, a new script and no proven place in the classical musical theatre canon, seem doomed to failure. For anyone who loves musicals as much as I do, Mackintosh’s Sondheim theatre can’t open soon enough. 

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