But It Has A Flying Helicopter ONSTAGE!!
The Olivier Awards Judges Make Sure That The Drama Is Not Only On Stage
I love the Olivier Awards. Ever since they were called the SWETs they have been a great window into theatre. The awards ceremony is often described as ‘London Theatre’s Big Night’ and the glittering event is wrapped in the twin terrors of hype and hope. The received wisdom is that winning an Olivier will transform the commercial success of shows and the professional standing of cast members and creatives. But I wanted to find out if that is really true.
As a huge musical theatre fan I follow two categories in particular: Best New Musical and Best Revival of a Musical. The advantage of the musical theatre category is all the categories associated with it two like Best Choreographer, Performance In A Musical, Best Score or Arrangement Best Jazz Hands etc. Also the nominated shows will usually all perform a number at the ceremony whereas drama, opera and dance tend not to be featured.
Musicals are expensive beasts so the pressure to win Best New or Best Revived Musical is intense. And if the Olivier Awards are so important then surely those shows winning Best New Musical must all gone on to Phantom levels of success, running in every major city for ever…
Well, actually the truth is that didn’t happen.
The Best New Musical award has gone to some incredible and incredibly successful shows. A Chorus Line, Hamilton, Phantom of the Opera and Blood Brothers all won Best Musical and went on to run for a collective two and a half centuries.
But not every winning show goes on to run for years ( Sweeney Todd only ran for six months) and not every show that loses out ends up closing early. And sometimes there are some decisions which I would politely describe as ‘interesting’.
In 1985 there were only two shows nominated for Best Musical. They were very different types of shows: Me and My Girl which was a good old Cockney knees up book musical based on a 1937 show. It had proper dialogue, songs and dance numbers including the endless reprises of The Lambeth Walk - cor blimey guvnor!
Up against this South London Sunshine was the French entry direct from Paris via the Royal Shakespeare Company; Les Miserables. The show features no dialogue because every word is sung. There are about 8 bars of what might be called stepping during One Day More but not really dance choreography and there is definitely no reprised cheeky chappy knees up!
Would it be the traditionalists or the nouvelle vague? It woz the Cockneys wot won it! But guest which show is still running in the West End nearly 40 years later? This decision caused a little bit of lip pursing at the time but the real pearl clutching and choking on Laurent Perrier Rosé came a few years later….
By 1989/90 Les Mis had become a worldwide sensation. On My Own was banned from female singer auditions and at lunchtime every day at theatre schools up and down the country, students gathered round a piano to knacker their voices singing One Day More.
French team Boublil and Schoenberg who had written Les Mis were back with another epic tale: Miss Saigon. It featured a big pop rock score full of great songs. Jonathan Pryce starred with Lea Salonga and Simon Bowman, Bob Avian choreographed and John Napier’s set design featured a freaking flying helicopter. The show was THE hot ticket - it had a £4million advance in London and $39million in New York. It was big, it was visual and it was very, very good!
Up against Miss Saigon at The Olivier Awards were Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife, a beautiful show which had only played 56 performances. Buddy, The Buddy Holly story which was an early juke box musical about the life of the eponymous singer, and another rock and roll jukebox musical called Return To The Forbidden Planet which was a campy, sci-fi romp very loosely based on The Tempest.
After missing out with Les Miserables, everybody thought that the award was heading over La Manche but wait….what? The award went to….Return To The Forbidden Planet? A campy, sci-fi romp relying on ‘50s rock n roll songs shoe horned into a plot rather than the sophisticated, original and dramatic Miss Saigon -did I mention that it had a helicopter?
The original Miss Saigon eventually run for 10 years in London, 10 years in New York and has had several major revivals, tours and international productions. It has to be said that Return to the Forbidden Planet has not enjoyed the same success.
Sometimes the judging panel’s taste is so different from the audience’s that it seems that they must be smoking something not yet available to the general public or watching different shows.
After the Miss Saigon debacle you might think the panel would be more careful but only nine years later they got it wrong again. Another musical that inspired many and changed musical theatre history was again overlooked for the Best Musical Award. There were four shows nominated for Best Musical in 1999 and the winner was the little know South African show Kat and the Kings which was set in Cape Town during apartheid and features doo-wop inspired music. This little show beat out both the Bee Gees juke box show Saturday Night Fever and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Whistle Down The Wind. But despite running for only four months in London it also beat out Jonathan Larson’s Rent which inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda, went on to be performed in 25 languages and became a feature film. The following year the panel chose Honk over The Lion King and Mamma Mia!
In recent years the decisions have started to make more sense although I’m not sure Kinky Boots is better than In The Heights but they got it right with Hamilton and Come From Away despite really strong competition from Jamie and Six respectively. But the shows all did well commercially and critically with Jamie becoming a feature film and Six appearing to open a production in every city in the world as well as on cruise ships.
Some shows that have missed out on Olivier Awards have gone on to run forever while some winning writers have more bling on their mantelpiece than in their bank account. Andrew Lloyd Webber has not won a Best New Musical Olivier for 37 years, whereas the late Stephen Sondheim has won 4 in that time.
And this year there are four very strong and very contrasting shows nominated for the Best New Musical Award. Elton John’s very well received Tammy Faye is against Richard Hawley’s groundbreaking Standing at the Sky’s Edge while the massively exciting Sylvia from the Old Vic is making waves too. And then there is The Band’s Visit a beautiful piece performed in English, Hebrew and Arabic which ran at the Donmar Warehouse and has previously won 10 Tony Awards on Broadway.
The unique situation this year is that three of the nominated shows have already closed and the fourth will close shortly. We will see if an Olivier Award is enough to bring the winner back to the West End and maybe run for another 20 years.
Check out all the 2023 Olivier Awards Nominees here:
Good luck to all the nominees in the 2023 Olivier Awards
