Mānawatia a Matariki.
Last weekend, I snagged tickets to take my nieces in London to see the new revival of Evita starring Rachel Zegler when I’m there in a few weeks. I’m a fiend for Andrew Lloyd Webber bangers, and I absolutely loved Zegler’s singing in A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Plus, I have a huge soft spot for Madonna’s version of Evita, made at a time when she was chasing establishment validation, and co-starring a remarkably good Antonio Banderas.
But I’m twice as excited now that director Jamie Lloyd’s new West End version has premiered, because I’m obsessed with the staging decision to have Zegler leave the theatre and deliver the show’s big hit, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina”, from the balcony at the Palladium to the crowd gathered outside on the London street.
Sure, it’s not the first time Lloyd has deployed this technique. His version of Sunset Boulevard on Broadway has a six-minute live sequence where the lead leaves the theatre while singing, and a continuous tracking shot on a large screen follows him backstage and out on to W 44th Street. And yes, it’s a heavy-handed analogy for Eva Peron’s own populist politics. But it’s more than that, too.
Both Broadway and the West End are deeply inaccessible. Even with same day tickets, lotteries and so on, the prices to see most of these big budget musicals run to hundreds of dollars, putting them out of reach. It means that most people’s experience of musical theatre tends to be mediocre high-school performances and nothing more.
The accessibility question is one that plagues the theatre sector, with many fans relying on low-quality bootlegs to see shows that would otherwise be financially or geographically out of their reach.
A huge leap forward came in 2020 with the stage recording release of Hamilton on Disney.
It’s rare for a Broadway show that’s still running, especially one as popular and lucrative as Hamilton, to be released on video. Stage recordings certainly exist (see: Newsies, Shrek The Musical, Company, Into the Woods, and the streaming service BroadwayHD), but they’re much less common than adapting a show into a movie, and they often come with considerably less fanfare. The best-known filmed stage show is probably the 1998 home video release of Cats…[that] helped popularize the show to those who couldn’t get to London or New York to see the staging.
Importantly, the streaming version of Hamilton hasn’t stopped the stage version from selling out (all over the world), but it does mean that everyone (with a Disney subscription) can see the original cast version if they want to.
Whatever else you have to say about Miranda, he was pretty determined from the outset to ensure people other than the traditional Broadway audience were taken into account. One of the things that made Hamilton special was that when crowds gathered outside the theatre for a daily lottery for front row seats, members of the cast would come out and perform a number specifically for this group of fans. Recorded and released online under the hashtag #Ham4ham:
It turned the lottery into a celebration rather than an afterthought, and allowed those who couldn’t get tickets (lottery or full-priced) to still engage with the show.
My favourite Ham4ham was the “Schuyler Georges”, where the three King Georges performed the Schuyler sisters’ hit:
An aside. My favourite story about Jonathan Groff is from the night Beyoncé came to see the show:
NBC had several years of producing live musicals for television, a sort of weird hybrid between a stage and a movie version. Mostly they received a mixed reception, but Vanessa Hudgens and Keke Palmer in Grease Live is a fun watch, and John Legend’s Jesus Christ Superstar is a great version. And again, they’re ways for audiences to see a show as it was (mostly) intended, rather than a movie adaptation (shudder “CATS” shudder).
And that’s what I love about Rachel Zegler taking to the balcony outside. It’s not (as some people have tried to gin up backlash) a slap in the face to the theatre-goers who have paid over the odds to be inside.
And it’s not for me, a giant musical theatre nerd who is flying to Brisbane next month to see Reuben Kaye’s star turn as Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar.
No, it’s for the hundreds of fans that are waiting on the street in London each night now who get to be part of the show too. Just for one song, the high walls of the West End come down, and everyone is invited.
today in Aotearoa we celebrate Matariki, our first indigenous public holiday. Enjoy this gorgeous song (and beautiful video) from TAWAZ feat. Stan Walker, Hone, HERA, Hops, Neps, Rani.
this week’s moment of joy on tiktok: wiggling firefighters. Firefighters wear something called a PASS device, which sets off a piercing alarm when a firefighter is injured, enabling others to find them. If they’re inactive too long, even if they’re fine and just waiting outside the fire, the alarm can go off and so they … wiggle … to deactivate it. Please enjoy.
insanely good long read on the history of sushi in Pakistan: Who makes the rules?(via webcurios)
Forward this email to someone who likes a singalong.