Ken Ludwig In Conversation

Ken Ludwig

Crazy For You opens this month at Chichester Festival Theatre. The musical delivers a fine evening of song and dance and drawn from the composing genius of George and Ira Gershwin, one could be forgiven for thinking that the show is a classic hailing from Broadway’s Golden Age. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. While the songs are in part drawn from the Gershwin’s 1930 show Girl Crazy, it fell to Ken Ludwig (who co-conceived the musical with director Mike Ockrent) to create the book for Crazy for You some 60 years later. The show's Broadway opening in 1992 garnered 3 Tony Awards including Best Musical, with similar honours in the Oliviers a year later on its West End transfer.

Ludwig has been very busy at Chichester recently. His adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express has only recently closed at the Festival Theatre after achieving a slew of rave reviews from across the national press. He is back in Sussex again for Crazy For You and I caught up with him in a break from rehearsals to talk about these remarkable productions.

Charlie Stemp and Carly Anderson rehearsing Crazy For You at Chichester

Ludwig told me how Crazy For You was created. “Back in the early 1990s, a businessman called Roger Horchow called me out of the blue. He had invested in a couple of Broadway shows, but had always wanted to do Gershwin. He called me because I had a show on Broadway at the time called Lend Me A Tenor that was the only real comedy on Broadway at the time and he had really loved it. He told me that he had acquired the rights from the Gershwin Estate and would I write an adaptation of Girl Crazy? 

I told him that I couldn't! Girl Crazy has a terrible book. In fact it’s hardly a book at all, more a bunch of blackout sketches with some glorious songs in it: Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm, But Not For Me. So it had an amazing score, but it was hardly a story at all.

Girl Crazy was loosely about an East Coast guy heading West. Well, I ended up keeping that bit of the story so that I could use a couple of the songs as book songs, like Biding My Time and Could You Use Me, but otherwise I threw it all out and started from scratch. I came up with a story, not entirely unlike Lend Me A Tenor, if you think about it, which is someone who in their heart wants to be in show business, but can't quite make the leap. In the case of Lend Me A Tenor, it’s somebody who is an assistant to a producer. In the case of Crazy For You, he comes from a banking family. His parents force him to be a banker, but he just wants to tap dance and that's Bobby in Crazy For You. So, I wrote the idea, came up with the story, and then Mike Ockrent joined in, we found Susan Stroman to choregraph and we built the musical.”

The company rehearsing Crazy For You at Chichester

I asked Ken to tell me more about Susan Stroman. “Well, Stroman is remarkable. She started out as a choreographer, and was rightly acclaimed for Crazy For You and went onto do other Broadway shows. And then, late in the day, she started directing. She and Mike Ockrent who directed Crazy For You got married and they were doing some shows together, and in fact were hired to do The Producers together, when Mike contracted leukaemia and tragically died so young. And then she took over The Producers and directed that on her own.”

And of course it is Stroman who will be making her much anticipated debut at Chichester this year, as she directs and choreographs this revival of Crazy For You!

Chichester hosted the UK premiere of Murder On The Orient Express earlier this year before a planned transfer to Bath. I asked Ken about his ingenious adaptation of the Agatha Christie classic.

“The Christie Estate came to me and said, "We'd like you to take any one of her novels and put it on stage.  I was very flattered and I said, "Of course I'd be honoured to do it." I chose Murder On The Orient Express without rereading it. I hadn't read it in years. I'd seen the great (1974) Albert Finney movie, but I knew the title was such an iconic title. And I thought, well, in itself it's so romantic, the title's romantic and it's exotic and ought to translate to the stage well.

Then I read the novel soup to nuts and realized this is going to be tricky. It's all virtually, all on the train. So to dramatise it, to make it fun to watch on stage and exciting, and a cliff hanger, I changed two things from the novel.

Firstly, I made the murder happen a great deal later in the piece than it is in the book. If you think in a way that's counterintuitive, as it's the murder that gets the story started, but it's really not. As a dramatist I wanted us to meet the characters and get invested in all those characters on the train, so that we cared about who did it, because until the very end w don't know who did it. Jonathan Church, who directed it so superbly, turned to me at one point and said, "Ken, the murder isn't happening till 45 minutes into the play, are we going to be okay?" And I said, "Well, just hold tight. I think we'll be all right." And it ends up being just that and it works.

The other major change I made is that in the book there are 12 suspects and someone even makes a remark about that and says, "Oh 12, like a British jury." I cut that down to eight suspects because there were just too many people to get to know in the compressed stage time.”

One of the standout features of the play was the set design, and I asked Ken for his thoughts on seeing a play that is, for the most part, set on a train stranded in the Alps, physically brought to the stage.

“When the play first ran in the States there was a beautiful set by Beowulf Boritt who in fact I've worked with several times since, and he's doing Crazy For You here at Chichester now. For the play here, a whole different concept emerged between the two geniuses that I had to work with, who were Jonathan Church and his designer Rob Jones. 

Rob had conceived a whole imaginative way to view the train with the locomotive at the back of the stage and pallets that came on and danced around the stage. And, as you saw, they formed the dining car and then formed the car with all the bedrooms. And so we had to imagine ourselves into the setting in a different way. 

It was all in our mind seeing the pieces of it come together and it was, I have to say, the most beautiful, dramatic set I think I'll ever have in my life. And it helped spur me on to write the new pieces, parts of it that I did, because it was so glorious. Rob’s design, from the early design-box stage, made me think about how that would affect Poirot and the big entrances for Mrs. Hubbard, who is very flamboyant American, and all the characters, little Greta Olson, who's afraid of her own shadow. And it inspired me to rethink the dramatic way to tell the story.

Henry Goodman as Hercule Poirot

And of course Henry Goodman (as Hercule Poirot) was a delight. I have known of Henry’s work for a long while and I find his attention to detail is remarkable. He thinks through the character in depth from the beginning of the play to the end of the play. So when we start working, even when we started on the first day and he was practising the first scene, he knows where he wants to end up emotionally, because he's thought about it so much. He's a real intellect. And his skillset is incredible. So he brings both this remarkable intelligence to every role he does and then is able to embody it, because he has such a great set of acting skills and such a good voice too.”

Crazy For You commences previews in the Chichester Festival Theatre on 11th July, where it runs until 4th September. For tickets click here.  

Henry Goodman talks about bringing Hercule Poirot to the stage

 

Henry Goodman has received near universal acclaim for his portrayal of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express that opened in Chichester last week. Describing the Belgian sleuth as “a cop with a conscience, a detective with dignity”, earlier this month Goodman took a break from his hectic rehearsal schedule to speak with me about the production.

You can read my 5* review of Chichester's Murder on the Orient Express here

Henry Goodman returns to the Chichester stage this month, leading the cast on a newly-written version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. One of the crime-writer’s classic yarns, the story has been committed to screen numerous times. Now, for the first time, in Ken Ludwig’s adaptation, the murder mystery is to be performed live on stage, with Goodman waxing up his moustache to step into the role of famed detective Hercule Poirot. 

“What is so exciting about the challenge of this story is Poirot. We all know I’m standing on the shoulders of giants – Kenneth Branagh, David Suchet, Peter Ustinov, John Malkovich, Albert Finney and Alfred Molina have all played him on screen – but lockdown gave me the time to read quite a lot of the novels and look at all the films. I didn’t do this to nick ideas, although there might be the odd thing that inspired me, but to soak myself up in Poirot and try to understand why he is so important to people. Why did Christie fall in love with him? I see Poirot as a figure of hope and this adaptation enhances that. I’m in my 70s, so it’s an older man who is saying: ‘This was the case that really was unique in my life. Come back and have a look at it with me.’

“Why is Poirot so refreshing, and why is he able to say things about the British that the British can’t say about themselves? It’s not just that he’s got an odd walk, or that he’s slightly eccentric in his speech, or that he is a foreigner out of place amongst all these people because in this story there are a lot of foreigners all trapped on a train who are from Russia, Sweden and Hungary. No, the interesting, exotic thing is it that this blend of cultures makes him act differently to how he does when he is with the English. Ludwig has been very clever about keeping alive the whodunnit and the questioning, but also in allowing me to observe different nationalities and different presumed attitudes. He’s not just a cop with a conscience, he is a man with a moral strength, and that’s why this case is so important to him as he invites the audience to go back and explore it with him.”

Previous Poirots have all been on film or TV where the camera can be close-up on every hair on his moustache. Here, we are in a 1300-seat auditorium, which Goodman last appeared at in 2010 when he played the role of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Prime Minister. “Live performance doesn’t necessarily mean melodrama, because it’s a wonderfully powerful and intimate space, but it’s theatre not film,” says Henry. “That means not ‘bigness’, but a different type of laser-focus on certain things that a camera can cheat on. The camera can suggest a little shot through a window or a lingering dolly shot or all sorts of things, but we have to make it happen in a different way.”

Speaking about the historical context of the story, Goodman continued: “I am very conscious that it’s set in the 1930s just after the Nazi rise of 1933. Although it’s a murder mystery, and Ken’s been very strong on the thriller element of working out what happens when and where, there are certain social attitudes built into Christie in her time. Some of these tend towards the colonial and imperialist. However, these people are trapped on a train in the ‘30s. I don’t want to give anything away, but towards the end of the play they are revealed to be acting in a particular light of current events. There are the attitudes of the thirties: of nobility, royalty, a Russian princess, an American actress. These are the characters in the novel, so they’re nothing new, but we have intensified the contrast between them, creating a strong insight into the attitudes of the time, which speak to us now because here we are with Russia invading Ukraine. In the ‘30s that’s exactly what was going on – an invasion of Europe.”

In 1997 Goodman brought Broadway’s Billy Flynn to London in Kander and Ebb’s Chicago. I ask if there are any parallels between playing a ruthless criminal defence lawyer and an investigating detective?

“I’ve played a lot of manipulative nasty people, but the reason these roles are so interesting to play, and why people enjoy reading criminal novels and dealing with dark stuff, is that there’s something charismatic about them. Flynn is manipulative, while Poirot discovers other people’s manipulation, and that is a joy to play. Poirot is passionate about his moral certitude in a world that is in danger.”

Goodman grew up in the East End and worked a pitch selling watches on Petticoat Lane. He landed his first role in 1960 in a film called Conspiracy of Hearts. He was 10. “The film was about little kids being rescued from a concentration camp by nuns. My picture was in Woman’s Weekly – the first image of myself on film was standing behind barbed wire as a little boy in a concentration camp. These things go very deep.

You can read my 5* review of Chichester's Murder on the Orient Express here

Runs until 4th June at Chichester, then tours to Theatre Royal, Bath

This interview was first published in the Jewish News

Photos of Henry Goodman by Johan Persson

Murder on the Orient Express - Review

Festival Theatre, Chichester

*****

Written by Agatha Christie

Adapted for the stage by Ken Ludwig

Directed by Jonathan Church

Henry Goodman

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH HENRY GOODMAN HERE

Murder on the Orient Express is one of the most beloved murder mysteries of recent decades. Committed to the screen 4 times and with its grand scenes of Istanbul, steam trains, and treacherous mountain blizzards all framing a cast of glamorous characters from across Europe and the USA,  the romance, intrigue and above all deception have long combined to give Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s celebrated sleuth, the challenge of his detective career.

Equalling that challenge is the task that Chichester’s cast and creative team have faced in taking their audience on a two-hour journey across the Alps to watch as Henry Goodman’s Poirot cracks the case. And much as Poirot stylishly delivers his unravelling of the train’s gruesome murder, so too has Jonathan Church’s ensemble delivered an outstanding interpretation of this ripping yarn.

Ken Ludwig’s adaptation has skillfully filleted Christie’s novel into a two act play that threads the essential elements of the plot into a well crafted tale. There are melodrama and shocks a’plenty with just a hint of wit and humour too, all thrown in with some serious moral anguish in the endgame. Pure theatrical class.

The audience’s disbelief is first suspended by Robert Jones’ stunning set. Like Steven Spielberg’s shark in Jaws, the eponymous steam train is kept out of sight for quite a while as with an ingenious use of sliding arches and simple scenery, Jones transports us to Istanbul for the story’s opening. Then, as the journey commences and those brilliant arches start to slide the locomotive is revealed, a glorious fusion of steel, smoke and light that frames the murderous tale. It is not often that a scene change receives its own round of applause - Jones’ work is sensational and enhanced by Mark Henderson's lighting, the coup de theatres are magnificent.

Many actors have waxed that famed moustache and by his own admission Goodman acknowledges that he “is standing on the shoulders of giants” as he tackles literature’s most famous Belgian, but he unquestionably makes the role his own. On stage for virtually the entire show and with an accent deliciously cod, Goodman probes his suspects with a combination of sensitivity and vigour that is never less than convincing. When the play’s finale sees him wrestling with his conscience, he commands our sympathy. With two Olivier Awards already under his belt alongside countless other nominations, Goodman should garner another gong for his Poirot.

His fellow passengers are all delightful caricatures. With numerous suspects to flesh out in 2 hours, there is not a lot of time to allow each character much depth. The skill therefore in bringing them into relief, as with all drama, lies in the brilliant economies of Ludwig’s script blended with the company’s fine acting and some absolutely gorgeous costume work and millinery (with a shout out here for Sean Barrett’s stunning hats, created for Joanna McCallum’s equally stunning Princess Dragomiroff). Sara Stewart as Helen Hubbard and Laura Rogers as Countess Andrenyi were perhaps the most memorable of the bunch, but there is fine work all round.

Murder on the Orient Express is unpretentious, brilliantly crafted theatre of the finest standard. The horror is not too bloody, nor the scares too scary nor its arguments too complex, with Adrian Sutton’s music (albeit not as majestic as Richard Rodney Bennett’s 1974 movie score) providing an enchanting backdrop to the intrigue.

Chichester have a hit on their hands that deserves a London transfer. Unmissable!

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH HENRY GOODMAN HERE

Runs until 4th June, then tours to Theatre Royal, Bath

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Honour - Review

Park Theatre, London


***


Written by Joanna Murray-Smith
Directed by Paul Robinson

Imogen Stubbs and Henry Goodman

'There’s no fool like an old fool’ an adage that sums up much of Honour now playing at the Park Theatre. The play introduces Henry Goodman and Imogen Stubbs as married couple George and Honour. She is a writer who gave up her career to support their thirty-two year old union, while he is a famed intellectual their lives being such that it is almost as if a slice of Hampstead’s intelligentsia has come rolling down Highgate Hill. When the much younger Claudia, an aspiring author who’s profiling George for a book that she’s writing, breezes into their lives, his middle aged mid-life testosterone kicks in and with barely a second thought he succumbs to her attraction, walking out on his wife. 

If the narrative wasn't so ineffably predictable, this might have made for a far more stimulating evening. As it is, as the drama hops from cliché to cliché with the production’s only redeeming feature being Stubbs’ interpretation of a woman in scorned and scorching agony. Hers is a wronged, devoted, heart that bleeds throughout a stunning performance, leaving the audience moved at her pain and cheering her on as faltering, she starts to find a path out of her misery.

Katie Brayben’s triangle-completing Claudia delivers all that the flawed script asks of her - but her encounters with both Honour and Sophie, the couple’s daughter barely a few years her junior, fail to convince. Likewise with Goodman who is forced to wade through interminable melodrama. There is a glimpse of his genius late in act two, after he has been inevitably spurned and rejected by Claudia for a more exciting lover where, Lear-like, he recognises the folly of his deeds. But by then it is too little, too late to redeem an otherwise disappointing turn.

Runs until 24th November
Photo credit: Alex Brenner

After Anatevka - Review

****

Written by Alexandra Silber

Alexandra Silber’s first novel After Anatevka is a carefully crafted study into love and life in Russia in the early twentieth century. Much like Marc Chagall was to paint enchanted images of that era, so too do Silber's words offer a painstaking picture of a world long since disappeared. 

Not just a writer, Silber is amongst the finest musical theatre performers of her generation and on both sides of the Atlantic too. The novel however marks her own remarkable and professional journey which in this instance, and unconventionally, has gone from “stage" to "page”. Read on... 

Every now and then an actress can come along who leaves an indelible impression upon a role. Think here perhaps of Imelda Staunton's Momma Rose or Glenn Close’s sensational take on Norma Desmond. Far more intriguing however, is when the role turns out to have left its own indelible handprint on the heart of its performer. 

So it was in 2006, when Lindsay Posner chose Silber to play Hodel in what was to be his acclaimed production of Fiddler On The Roof at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre. With Henry Goodman as Tevye the show was a sensation, becoming  swiftly earmarked for a West End transfer, playing at London’s Savoy for nearly two years.

Hodel of course is the second eldest of Tevye and Golde's daughters. When Perchik, the Jewish revolutionary firebrand blazes his way into the shtetl of Anatevka to steal her heart, what emerges is an onstage love story that is as sweet and inspirational as it is heartbreaking. It was 1894 when Sholom Aleichem breathed life into his fictional characters in his series of short shtetl-based yarns, collectively called Tevye The Dairyman. Some 70 years Joseph Stein was to draw on that creation in writing the book for Fiddler (a work that was only to be enhanced by Sheldon Harnick's Tony-winning lyrics). It has taken a further half-century for Silber to add a further thread into Aleichem, Stein and Harnick's golden literary tapestry.

One of the most poignant scenes in musical theatre's canon takes place on the platform of Anatevka's railway station. Some time earlier Perchik, branded as a political criminal by the tsarist regime, had been banished thousands of miles away to Siberia. His brief stay in the shtetl however had been long enough to win Hodel's committed and passionate love.  

Hodel realises that she must follow her heart to Siberia, and as the train approaches in the distance, she promises her father that she and Perchik will, one day, be married under a traditional Jewish canopy. Amidst the combined whirlwinds of political revolution, the impending destruction of Anatevka and the dispersal of its inhabitants across the globe, both father and daughter know that they are unlikely to meet again. When Hodel says to Tevye "God alone knows when we shall see each other again", the audience's hearts are broken. 

This scene is a manifestation of love at its most raw and pure. The exchange is carefully crafted prose which in the hands of skilled actors (and this scene has rarely come finer than with Silber and Goodman) can be a performance masterclass. Silber and Goodman did indeed break our hearts - but few (if any) in the audiences will have been aware of Silber's own tragedy that she brought to the role. Barely 23 years old at the time, she had borne the pain of losing her own and much loved father to cancer not long before taking on the role. The impassioned, blazing soul that fuelled Silber's performance was unforgettable.

And so, from the novel's background, to the tale of After Anatevka itself. It is a meticulously detailed story that paints a strangely recognisable picture of Russia’s imposing and corrupt hierarchy and the hardships wreaked upon those who offended the State. There are nosings of both Dostoevsky and Pasternak in Silber's work and she paints a picture of violence and violation as the backdrop to Hodel's remarkable quest to reach her betrothed and the life that they were to build amongst the salt mines of the East.

Silber's research has been thorough. Aside from studying archives of the vanished Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement she visited Siberia to understand for herself the detail and character of the region.

And yet, as well as the projecting the characters into their imagined futures, Silber also offers some charmingly imagined back-stories from the world of Anatevka that can only have come from a woman who has well and truly got under the skin of Tevye's daughters. For not only did Silber play Hodel in the UK, but two years ago in New York, when producers were searching for a Tzeitel for Bartlett Sher's (also acclaimed) revival of Fiddler, it was Sheldon Harnick himself who was to call Silber and ask her to re-visit his show, this time playing Tevye’s oldest daughter. Silber of course was again magnificent on stage and as an aside, the bond between Harnick and Silber is clear for the gifted lyricist has penned a sage and heartfelt foreword to the book.

Silber explores how the sisters grew up together. She offers Hodel's wistful perceptions on her older sister's strengths and capabilities, describing their shared childhood and how much their mother imbued in them the strengths and spiritual importance of 'tradition". The paragraphs in which Hodel recalls Golde instructing the girls in how to bake challah (the Jewish plaited loaf eaten on Sabbath) are but one example of the delightful detail with which Silber fleshes out her world.

There's also a fascinating back story to Perchik. Who would have guessed that this inspirationally handsome communist had started life as an accountant? Though while Perchik is surely no Leo Bloom, Silber breathes a fascinating life into his own troubled past  

After Anatevka is an impressive published debut. Alexandra Silber offers a profoundly perceptive yet quintessentially female take on a world in which tradition was both revered and challenged. Silber also gives us a stunning study into the power of love.

After Anatevka is published on 4th July 2017 and will be available from all good online book distributors

Volpone - Review

Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon


****


Written by Ben Jonson
Directed by Trevor Nunn

Annette McLaughlin and Henry Goodman

Trevor Nunn’s production of Volpone at the RSC's Swan sagely contends that the sins of greed and avarice are timeless. With Ben Jonson’s 17th century comedy set squarely in a modern Venice, if some of Ranjit Bolt’s occasional script revisions are schoolboy clumsy (silly references to Greece and the Euro pop up), they can be forgiven in a plot in which incredible complexities may not have weathered the test of time as much as the brilliant observation of the flawed human condition that makes this play so entertaining.

At the play’s core is Henry Goodman’s titular oleaginous oligarch. Prosperously tanned and every inch a convincingly very rich man, Goodman channels his Auric Goldfinger, Albert Steptoe (there's even a hint of a betrayed Max Bialystock at the end of act one) into a masterful performance. Goodman's first appearance in Stratford since his 2003 Richard III, he works well under Nunn’s direction – and his devious deception of the circling townsfolk who crave his as yet un-bequeathed wealth is a fine performance of classical comedy. Aside from his commanding presence, Goodman’s rapid costume changes, grotesque make-up and sublime voice work – his/Volpone’s Scoto the Mountebank alone justifies the ticket price – make for a display of stunning stagecraft.

Matthew Kelly’s Corvino, married to the beautiful Celia who Volpone desires, offers up a delicious caricature of monstrous misogyny as he views his trophy wife as little more than a consumable artefact in his pursuit of Volpone’s wealth. Rhiannon Handy’s Celia is a pleasing turn, but it is Annette McLaughlin’s Lady Politic Would-Be who steals scenes. McLaughlin’s character is also on the trail of Volpone’s wealth and her WAG-inspired performance, all glamour and selfies, is as gloriously clichéd in its conception as her applause-winning delivery is outstanding.

Orion Lee’s Mosca, Volpone’s assistant (reminding me initially of a slimmed down Goldfinger’s Oddjob) puts in a hard-working shift, but with a performance that jars slightly. No doubt this will settle down into the run.

There are some neat touches. Stephen Brimson Lewis’ minimalist set includes a stock exchange crawler that allows Volpone to track his own corporation’s share price, (code “VLP” natch), whilst Jon Key, Ankur Bahl and Julian Hoult as Volpone’s dwarf, hermaphrodite and eunuch respectively, make high camp fun of their scene-setting parts, amidst some witty rap routines.

Women may be marginalised in this celebration of bumbling buffoonery, but Volpone’s cynical observation that “conscience is a beggar’s virtue” can ring as true today as in Jonson’s era. With high camp farce and a classy lampooning both of the rich and those who fawn upon them, Volpone is well worth a summer’s visit to Stratford.

Runs until 12th September 2015