Michael Coveney: Scottsboro Boys hold forth and Des Barrit gets down
It was disappointing, of course, that The Scottsboro Boys composer John Kander needed to rest up last Friday night rather than attend the Q and A I chaired after the preview performance at the Garrick Theatre – I'd spent several hours preparing my killer questions on Liza Minelli, Chita Rivera and when were we likely to see his penultimate collaboration with the late Fred Ebb, their musical version of Friedrich Durrenmatt's killer thriller, The Visit – but we got lucky.
David Thompson, the Scottsboro Boys librettist, proved a more than eloquent spokesman for the show, and he was joined on the panel by three of the cast, all of them veterans of the Broadway production: Brandon Victor Dixon who plays Haywood Patterson, the lead (if there is one in so brilliant an ensemble piece), and the ferociously funny double act, Mr Bones and Mr Tambo, aka Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon.
So we steamed on with a discussion of the show's genesis, the way it had all been crafted and sculpted into shape by director Susan Stroman, the exclamatory style of vaudeville and those traditions of American ragtime, blues and cakewalk that are pressed so brilliantly into the service of what comes across as a sort of lunatic kangaroo court, following the arrest and conviction on trumped-up rape charges of nine black youths on a Southern freight train in Alabama in 1931.
Thompson has worked with Kander and Ebb on various others of their shows, including the dance marathon musical Steel Pier and the latest script adaptation of Chicago for Lincoln Center, and he was both informative and revelatory about their working methods. The actors were sharp and funny – very sharp indeed in the case of Victor Dixon – and they all rose to the relatively simple task of batting off the query from the audience as to why three white men were writing a minstrel show for a mostly black cast (Julian Glover is the sole "whitey" as the emcee-like all-purpose Interlocutor figure, and he's really settled splendidly into that role now).
The question was a good one, and it needed answering, but behind it lay the suspicion – the questioner was a black woman – that a little touch of Exhibit B at the Barbican protest was bubbling under. Was this grim subject of the racist prosecution of the boys, and the extended fight to clear their names in a repressive justice system, fit matter for a musical? Or was it exploitation for commercial theatre purposes? The actors dealt with this perfectly. But of course the acidly ironic show had already done so anyway.
A bash for Barrit, Bellingham's critical honeymoon
Party of the week was Desmond Barrit's 70th birthday bash in a converted water factory on the Hackney/Stoke Newington borders. There was a home video montage of all his friends – including Nick Hytner in long robes and a turban, for some reason – singing "Comedy Tonight" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (in which Des appeared at the National, playing Frankie Howerd).
There was cake and champagne, a rock and roll band and dancing, good food and a cast list that would cause serious trouble with the billing: Hytner himself, Alex Jennings (both taking a break from filming on location in Camden Town with Maggie Smith in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van), Alison Steadman and Michael Elwyn, Toni Palmer and Peter Straker, Haydn Gwynne and Julie Legrand, Adrian Scarborough and peerless company manager Charles Evans, Sharon D Clarke and Linda Marlowe.
Many moons ago, at the height of the RSC season in Stratford-upon-Avon, Des, along with Robert Stephens, Guy Henry, Pam Harris of the Dirty Duck, Jack Tinker of the Mail and myself formed an impromptu after-hours drinking club, the Lady Caroline Lamb. Wherefore? We'd been invited with champagne back to Jack's Lady Caroline Lamb suite in the Welcombe Hotel – it was the bridal suite, in fact – after an opening night. Robert and Jack have long since passed on, alas, but the rest of us maintain our subscriptions.
Jack, and his bridal suite, came to mind this week after the death of that fine actress, Lynda Bellingham, inevitably dubbed "the mum in the Oxo adverts" on television. I remember her more in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig, with Janet Suzman and Maureen Lipman, directed by Michael Blakemore, which played at the Greenwich Theatre and the Old Vic 20 years ago. I also remember her as great fun at a party. So did Jack Tinker, so much so, that he went with her on her honeymoon after she married the Italian waiter Nunzio whom she had met serving at table in the La Famiglia restaurant in Chelsea.
I am sure they all three had a great time but I often wondered why in fact Lynda had taken little Jack along with her as well as her drop-dead-gorgeous new beau. As a lucky charm or mascot? As an after-dinner entertainment? As a present for Nunzio? One thing's for sure, Jack won't have been reading from his collected reviews all night, but he might well have been inducting the happy couple as honorary members of the Lady Caroline Lamb club.
