The West End of the 1980s was nobody’s idea of a belle époque but it nevertheless had its own insane panache. The hits, from Cats to Miss Saigon, were routinely dismissed as crowd-pleasing pap, though there seemed nothing obviously crowd-pleasing about T. S. Eliot’s poems or Madame Butterfly moved to the Vietnam war or any of the other source material for the big blockbusters. By contrast, the Broadway flops of the period were all based on can’t-fail crowd-pleasers which turned out to please nobody.
It feels different now. Walking around Shaftesbury Avenue for the first time in over a year, I thought the old girl was faking it. There’s a natural progression, from book to play to movie. When you do it the other way round, when quite so many of your hits are based on films, it offends the natural order, and gives the project a whiff of desperation. I take the producers’ word for it that Mary Poppins and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang are smash hits, and what used to be called the secondary creative talent—directors, designers, choreographers—have done a grand job with the material. But there’s something faintly unworthy about it. Les Misérables and Starlight Express were nobody’s idea of surefire hits; Mary and Chitty seem like British versions of the frantic Broadway recycling of proven franchises.
Adding to the general air of high-priced karaoke are the compilation shows—take the back catalogue of the rock group Queen and string a plot around it—or the tacky biotuners,
