The auditorium of the Empire is unusual- it doesn’t have conventional boxes either side of the stage, instead, it has tiered seating that resembles staircases sweeping down to the stage, although they don’t actually go anywhere. Bizarrely, there are substantial cupola topped boxes above at upper Circle level which have zero view of the stage and way too high for those who would have gone there in order to be seen.

Back to Mervyn, who worked seasonally at the Empire for much of the 1970s and researched much history of the building. He persuaded the then theatre Manager to let him take several artifacts that were otherwise going to be thrown away and he always wished that the Theatre Museum would accept them after he died.

Alas, the Theatre Museum (in the form of the V & A) were not particularly interested but the Theatre were delighted as they have gradually been recovering some of the treasures lost over the decades. So yesterday, we returned four items from Mervyn’s collection, namely a plant stand, an occasional table, a gallery ticket box and a mirror, along with some memorabilia in the form of Box office Cards and early programmes.

Here is the car loaded for the journey. The plant stand is on the passenger seat in this photo and we rearranged it several times to ensure the mirror was protected.
The mirror is very special- there were two very large and two small mirrors in the auditorium at Circle level and if you look closely at the lower photo on the front cover of this 1913 Programme, you can see the large one on the left below the swags and you can just see one of the small ones on the wall to the left of the curved box-like arcade frontages. (Obviously there is no way of telling which side of the Auditorium Mervyn’s mirror was hung).

When I visited in the ’70s, the theatre was green and cream, it is now red and cream, as can be seen from my camera snapshot. (We stayed for the show!) Much of the fine detail has been painted out and from talking to our host any form of historic restoration sounds unlikely, although there was an extensive stage house expansion in 2004 so that the venue can take the biggest touring shows.

By the way, the term “Makem” is mildly derogatory by Geordies but the Wearsiders obviously take it in good spirit, judging by these sweets spotted in an excellent sweet shop spotted in Fawcett Street.

(For the background to this Photo, see an earlier blogpost here)

For all his faults, he was very sincere in his charity work, as confirmed by my Auntie who was a Nurse; he wasn’t precious about emptying bedpans. He actually had an Office (or at least a room with his name on the door) on the top floor of the Wellcome Wing at the Leeds General Infirmary, Karen had seen it when she was working there for the Ethics Committee.

Whilst in Superstar the musicians were onstage in view (embedded in the set), the musicians were out of sight in Godspell, not even in the orchestra pit. The cast, however, were onstage practically all the way through the show, including the interval (but more of that later!)

I remember sitting near the back of the stalls centre aisle the first time I saw the show, having noticed a rather intrusive vertical scaffold pipe (with a Strand Electric Pattern 263 at the top) at the very back of the centre stalls on the way in and thinking it looked rather out of place amongst the gilt and velvet.

The opening number for Godspell is rather odd- the cast in drab costumes reciting philosophers, then singing about them in counterpoint. The first impressions of both myself and my Mum were along the lines of “Oh no! Pretentious Crap!” …when suddenly, a horn sounded behind us and the John the Baptist character marched down the aisle preparing us for the way of the Lord and joy was unconfined. (Or at least it was until Jesus got crucified near the end of the second half, which put a temporary dampener on things).

The big twist in Godspell was that in the interval, the cast invite the audience up on stage to share in a demijohn of wine. I remember my first time doing this, gazing out at the auditorium with an audience in, noticing all the stagehands loitering downstage either side to prevent punters straying into the Wings and then the cast sloping off five minutes in for a rest and possibly a quick fag. (They could still smoke in their dressing rooms then).

I only recall being invited onstage as an audience member (rather than being singled out!) for one other show- Chaucer’s Pilgrims Progress at reading Hexagon, where the cast were holding a market before the show, actually selling cakes & nick-nacks from stalls .

Godspell is more of a happening than a performance and it has a lot of songs in it, performed in a variety of styles. We did it at school of course and people still talk about my lighting. (Well, my Mum mentioned it recently!) I ended up seeing the 1970s touring version three times, first at the Newcastle Theatre Royal, second at the Nottingham Theatre Royal (which coincided with a backstage visit shortly after re-opening so we had crawled all over the building earlier). The third time was at Coventry Belgrade Theatre, when I saw for myself how low the grid there was. (The Belgrade is the same vintage as my good self, money was a bit tight back then and most of it went on the public spaces).

The movie version completely passed me by for some reason and the next opportunity to see it again was a revival at Leeds Grand in the mid ‘90s. Having talked it up to Karen, the show was a big disappointment. Firstly, it was half full, with the raising of the House Lights for some enforced clapping during song number 2 being nothing short of embarrassing. Secondly, the songs had been souped up for the era, which worked well for the slow ones but the fast ones sounded like Kylie & Jason synth-pop. The sharing of wine at the interval had been dispensed with and whilst the show was still good, it felt like a hollow shell compared with the original. (Sometimes being dated is more preferable than being brought up-to-date).

The irony of the 90s show was that we had gone on a Saturday night; we were back in the Grand on the Monday evening to see Return to Forbidden Planet and the place was full to the rafters & rocking…

Anyway, fast forward many years, during which time the Greys migrated from a Couple to a Family. We had stumbled across a small amateur society from Whitworth performing the Madness musical “Our House” in Rochdale last year and decided that they were one to keep an eye on. This year, they were doing a double header of 42nd Street and Godspell performed over two successive weeks. As it happened, we noticed on their Facebook site that they were giving a platform performance of Godspell in a Church Hall in Whitworth a few weeks before the show so we went along out of curiosity. Anyway, they blew us away. Whilst by no means perfect, they gave spirited performances of all the songs, the only let-down to me being “On the Willows” which was sung in a rather shouty way by the backing guitarist. We were surprised to win a minor prize in the raffle, and even more surprised to find that it was a signed photo of one of the cast members who was famous even though we’d never heard of him…

On to the show itself, and in the third row of a packed but intimate Curtain Theatre sat just behind the Town Mayor (complete with Ponytail). The show seemed to be the best bits of the original, with skilful adaption of all the successful twists that are around on YouTube. The stage was a simple decking set with a somewhat over the top lighting rig (for such a small venue) but it remained tamed and restrained such that it never stole the show. It played with the usual cast of ten (Jesus and nine disciples) in what could be called a hybrid of modern dress and fanciful clothes (the original show had a bit of a hippy clown theme to the costumes but the Superman T shirt logo for Jesus was retained for this production). two songs were particularly memorable- “All for the best”, originally a soft shoe shuffle but played in “Diddy Dick & Dom” style with puppet bodies & oversize heads, the other was “All good gifts” which was performed as a boy band number, with the five earnest singers with microphones on high stools. How they managed not to corpse I have no idea, one in particular was looking so earnest and he swapped his mic for a recorder in one fell swoop to near hysteria from the audience!

As to the Celeb- it was Mr. C.J. De Mooi who is well known from a TV show called Eggheads and he was playing the  role of both John the Baptist & Judas. When he entered to sing “Prepare ye…” I noticed that the Band provided an abundance of musical cues for the start note and I quickly realised why, when he started to sing he was a semitone flat, which of course backfired on him nine bars later when the band started playing along correctly, sharp to his flat. To his credit, he recovered and sang very well the rest of the show. It seems that he would like to diversify his career into musical theatre and he awaits his West End calling.

One noble tradition was retained in the show- the audience were invited onstage in the interval to partake in the wine, although it has to be said that there wasn’t very much of it- one bottle and ten tiny shot glasses, props for the communion scene later in the show (bottle topped up of course). There weren’t too many of the audience joined the cast onstage, they mostly went to the bar or to get an Ice Cream.

I did wonder how much the staging of the show would prove to be better than the already very good platform performance and the answer was it improved it a hundred fold; the cast were happy, sassy, tight and were obviously enjoying themselves immensely.

Digging into the history of the show I realised that the 1973 film was available on DVD so I ordered it on Amazon. Whilst rather twee and dated (the cast look and behave like hippies way after their time) it was still pleasantly watchable, unlike the contemporaneous film version of Superstar which is widely detested by many lovers of the show.

Onwards a few months and a chance browse of some brochures revealed that another small amateur society was performing Godspell, this time, a lot closer to home. We had never heard of the Goodwood AOS but we decided to go and see them as even if the show was terrible it was a night out and the opportunity to visit a new theatre in the area.

The Lawrence Batley Theatre is in Huddersfield and is a conversion of a very large Methodist chapel into an intimate 400-ish seater courtyard theatre. The external walls were retained and it has an excellent forecourt setting in the street scene. I had seen the technical write-ups from when it opened in the mid noughties but the only thing that stuck in my mind about the venue was that there was no access to the grid above the stage. (I think the reasoning behind that was that there was normally no reason to go on the grid outside of routine maintenance. However, if nothing else, occasional cleaning prevents dust cascading down during 1812 Overtures complete with Cannon & Mortar orchestration!)

The only obvious compromise to the theatre (& only obvious from behind the building or if the stage is clear) is that the stage has a curved back wall, something shared with the People’s Theatre in Jesmond, although they did it like that deliberately when they converted it from a Cinema in the 1960s in order to get a permanent curved cyclorama, which was still in vogue at the time. (By the way, happy centenary guys!)

So- to the show. We were in the front row and for some quirky reason the first few rows were fairly empty but the rest of the Stalls was fairly full, along with people on the two three-sided galleries and side tiers. The stage setting was a bit urban looking- a park bench, some road signs, some toys, some graffiti on scenic flats, a few seats, two potted bushes and a lamp post. A staircase disappeared down into the (empty) orchestra pit. To the rear, a scaffold structure created a balcony and five tarp screens (3 up, 2 down), a centre entrance below.

Perusing the programme, we were surprised to see that the cast had a full company, the ten principal actors and a chorus. The show was performed in modern dress (Judas looking a bit like the Terminator with his long leather coat, shades and water pistol) but the way it was performed was very close to the original show as I remember it, including soft shoe shuffle for “All for the best” (along with the Chicka-boom chorus) and mainly Female voices in “On the Willows”.

We weren’t invited onstage in the interval but they got round the lyric encouraging us to “let’s have some wine!” by getting a Wino to shout it on the park bench, a clever bit of direction.

The show was very well performed and the second half became dramatically very dark as it progressed towards the inevitable kerfuffle towards the end. The cast came back with a lively “Megamix” and certainly left us wanting more. There were times when it felt that there were too many people onstage who weren’t really adding value to the show between the numbers though, not uncommon in amateur shows. On a positive note, Goodwood are now on the list of Amateur Societies worth going to see, along with Halifax, Sheffield, Leeds and Whitworth. The trouble is, the more we see, the higher the bar it sets for our local Morley AOS to raise!

The Theatre was close to being lost in the early 1980s but was rescued by a Trust and these days is well supported. Being a Victorian theatre, the building has tiny foyers as they were only intended for use of the wealthy sitting in the Dress Circle or the Front Stalls (the working class had seperate entrances with paybox windows in the stairwells). They hope to extend the building in order to get much better foyer space, improved backstage facilities and a studio theatre, however that development is still a way off yet.

Anyway, tucked away in the Gould Theatre Collection, I was delighted to find a small commemorative souvenir of the opening back in 1894.  I have snapped it and reproduce it below. It is on expensive embossed linen paper and it is slightly damaged. How Mervyn came by it is unclear, as is the meaning of “Box 19″ written in the top right corner. (The theatre does have Boxes, but only two of them). The sheets are about 6″ x 4″ and I’d speculate that they may have been slipped into the programmes.

Today, we dressed our tree and put the tinsel up. A little early this year, but we have a Grandma staying next week for “Not Christmas” so want to make the house festive. I found two “Three Bird Roasts” at Aldi to replace our usual Tommy the Turkey and I snapped them up, because last year once they had been advertised on the telly you couldn’t find them anywhere.

We don’t buy new tree ornaments very often, the ones we bought back in the days B.D. (Before David) are lasting well. My favourite one is Eeyore holding a Bauble. This is probably not quite what the late Eric Boswell had in mind!

Slickly produced with some great music as well.

Check out her blog with more on her musicians and how it is going. You saw it here first!

The ability to profile movement speed makes the Leeds Grand system look soulless and sterile when doing flying cues, especially the house tabs.

Meanwhile, up on the grid, something that looks somewhat like a floor polisher is able to be positioned pretty much anywhere. Large yellow spreader plates are used where the lifting weight is going to be over the spot grid limit. The placement of the units was demonstrated for us and the biggest nuisance is in the tidying up of the excess cable from the DC controllers.

The Olivier is an open stage in an ampitheatre style and the fly tower is more-or-less hexagonal in shape. It was recognised back in the early 1970s that standard flying bars parallel to the proscenium was not appropriate for a venue without a proscenium, so instead, a very flexible point hoist system was installed. There were 170 hooks which can be moved left or right from their home position, connected via a switching matrix to 36 variable frequency controller units known as cyco-converters. It was all controlled via a PDP 11 Mini computer and a custom control desk. The system was clever enough to move any of the hooks at any individual speed in either direction, up to the limit of 35 moving at any one moment (One was a a spare).

The system worked very well for the first three decades but accelerated component failures in recent years now mean that only six controllers work and lots of the winches are unservicable. On that basis, the old system is now relegated to rigging and static flying. Looking at an article written in 1979, it seems that the current control desk is not the original one so there has been an interface refresh at some point.

The theatre has now installed a phase 1 upgrade consisting of 30+ new hauling units, more about the new stuff next time.

Today, I was mostly working out which drawer went back into which filing cabinet. Below are before and after shots of the lock-up. The table and plant pot holder on top of the cabinets are not actually mine- they have been bequeathed to the Theatre Museum (part of the Victoria & Albert) and originate from the 1907 Sunderland Empire, somewhere Mervyn worked in the 1970s and rescued from the skip along with some carver type chairs.

(If you are wondering why there is a wine rack, it was used for storing rolled up plans).

You can find more about this extraordinary park here.

We ate there recently and whilst not cheap it was memorable. The theatrical memorabilia & puppets are fascinating and the food was sensational. They were starting to set it out for Halloween and this witch appeared between the main course and the dessert.

With the aid of lots of money, the scheme has been recreated with LED lighting to striking effect.

(I hope to eventually see the first LED restoration  Apollo Victoria scheme, that will be really stunning).

As we entered the hall, the sheet had a long shot of the O2 Arena, with the gentle babble of audience voices through the side wall effects speakers. The view was very familiar, being not too far removed from the view we enjoyed back in April.

The show went very well, other than some vision mixing that wasn’t quite as tight as it could be & the occasional turned down Mic. It was a platform performance as per the 10th anniversary concert but there were a number of scenic elements to make it more visually theatrical.

All the performers shone, with I felt just one exception. Lea Salonga was particularly wonderful as Fantine and Matt Lucas gave a very lively show-stopping performance of Thenardier, much better than I expected. Conversely, Nick Jonas as Marius felt rather pedestrian to me and “Empty chairs at empty tables” was a little bit of a disappointment.

Having an interval at the Showcase was unusual (something the small independents still do to maximise turnover) and the venue milked it somewhat with the disembodied voice of the ice cream salesman cajoling us into buying his expensive wares for 30 minutes or so.

The show finished with four casts onstage- the 25th show one, the 25th tour one (from the Barbican) the West End Cast from the Queens and the original 1985 performers, including a little Cosette in her mid-thirties!

The highlight for me was the four Jean Valjeans singing “Bring him home”, a superb arrangement that showcased each of them and layered rich Tenor harmony, a real spine tingler.

(Needless to say, we will be getting the Blu-Ray on November 29th…)

How did it work as an event? Well, we never loosened up enough to stamp and shout, although there was increasingly enthusiastic clapping towards the end. I think the trouble was that we were only distant observers via telecommunications rather than (still possibly distant) participants within the massive bulk of the docklands arena. At a live event the audience definitely influences the performance, something that never quite happens at the movies. Audience reaction certainly influences other audience members but the flickering shadows are immune to this.

Having said that, we probably got a much better view than sat in the arena, including some great shots of the audience from the performer perspective.

There was video footage mixed for the local audience on the three rear screens and video footage mixed for the remote audience (which included longer shots and occasional focus on the orchestra). No doubt the best of both will emerge for the sell-through, two have already been pre-ordered for Grandma Xmas presents.

We had third row stalls seats in the centre of the stalls in the striking (but run down) Palace theatre, somewhere I had visited twice previously to see Jesus Christ Superstar. Les Mis is a musical and all the lines are sung through, there are no spoken words as such. However, it is sung conventionally rather than in an operatic style, something I’m not too keen on at the best of times. Anyway, from two minutes into the show, I was hooked.

What is so captivating about the show? Everything. Each element of the performance comes together as a wonderful piece of theatricality and the clever set design allows the action to flow in a cinematic way as Jon Valjean relentlessly marches through the revolving stage of life.

I was to see the show two or three times again at the Palace and more recently in its new home at the Queens theatre further up Shaftesbury Avenue. There were two casualties in the move up the road. The first was the musicians- there are a lot less but it sounds the same (something the Musicians Union were not happy about). The second was a stage truck that was used to quickly set up a cafe scene downstage. The truck lived at the back of the stage and could move guided by slots and powered by batteries under radio control. Occasionally, however, it had a mind of its own and several bits of what looked like debris & bricks at the edge of the stage concealed girders to stop the truck plunging into the orchestra pit. (The truck was dispensed with for the UK tour in the ’90s as it was considered problematic).

We went to see the show on tour at the Manchester Palace theatre. Apart from the missing truck, I also felt that the two barricade pieces that so cleverly interlock together looked much less imposing because the stage is so much wider in Manchester than London. Also, the re-staging to dispense with the truck required the barricades to come together earlier than their big moment later in the show so the impact was lessened.

A couple of months ago, we were given tickets to see the 25th anniversary production at the Lowry. This has been re-staged and relit to what I feel are mixed results. (Some wore better, some don’t) The revolve has gone but there is much more use of scenic elements and projection, some of which is visually stunning. The suicide of Javaert the policeman was entirely unexpected and a bit of a gosh moment. Conversely, however, the inability to be able to revolve the barricade meant that Gavroche’s brave attempts to rescue bullets from dead soldiers happened out of view.

Fifteen years ago, there was a 10th anniversary concert at the Albert Hall where performers from around the world came together to give a stunning platform performance and it is happening again this Sunday at the London Dome O2 Arena. We did look into going but the tickets were very expensive. However, for a tenth of the price, we can participate by live satellite at our local Showcase Cinema, which will be a curious experience, live but out of sight. Will we clap and cheer I wonder?

The trouble is, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I just end up as the Twat in the Hat…

Karen knew Chris from her days as an audience member of the Oxford Road Show and later with her involvement at Radio HBS (Hospital Radio at North Manchester General). She persuaded both the Freshies and Graham Fellows (Jilted John,  now John Shuttleworth) to swap the BBC studios for the hospital ones, if only for an afternoon.

Here are pictures of a youthful Karen with Frank and Chris in the radio studios in 1985.

They charted with this one and later had to replace “Virgin” with “a certain Manchester superstore” to keep Beardy happy.

R.I.P. Chris, you were one of Karen’s heroes a quarter of a Century ago…