Mormon-mania and the Once and only

Unless, as they say, you’ve been in Outer Mongolia, you can’t have failed to have heard of The Book of Mormon, which opens officially tomorrow but has been in the collective consciousness of London for months now: it has been everywhere on tubes, buses, in newspapers, on Twitter.

I’ve heard figures for the pre-opening marketing spend that would be enough to fund the entire budget of several West End shows in London (and keep the Union Theatre, for instance, in business from now to the end of the next half century at least).

Though ‘official’ reviews won’t run until Friday, it has already had the kind of news and feature coverage that is virtually indistinguishable from reviews themselves. In the Evening Standard, Henry Hitchings took over the most of the leader comment page last Friday to add to what he dubbed in the piece “the deluge of hype” it has arrived in London with. He called it “viciously funny”, before going on to write:

The songs are sunny, and there are moments of tenderness… There have been goofy musicals before, as well as outrageous ones, but none so foul of mouth and at the same time so big of heart.

In the Daily Telegraph, Paul Clements focused on the foul of mouth in a news feature:

I believe it could be the most expletive-driven, jaw-droppingly shocking and gasp-inducingly offensive show the West End has ever witnessed…

Over the two and a half hours, I lost count of the number of F and C words used. No one will leave without having caught their breath in disbelief.

I can’t wait to see what the Daily Mail makes of it in turn (but perhaps a bad review in the Mail will play into the producers’ hands – they can wear that kind of disapproval as a badge of honour rather than dishonour).

But if The Book of Mormon is a show that has already got all of London talking, you may not, on the other hand, have noticed Once at all. It is, presumably, adopting the reverse strategy entirely – if it can’t beat them, it won’t join them.

I doubt the reasons are to do with the budget. The lead lead producer, after all, is Barbara Broccoli, who has presided over the Bond movie franchise for the last twenty years with her half-brother Michael G Wilson (also on the musical’s producer billing), so they’re not short of a dollar or two. In an interview in The Times last week, she spoke of the reasons for doing the show, after seeing the film in a cinema with her daughter four years ago:

I’m motivated entirely by passion. You want to do good things. You want to do great stuff. You want to work with amazing people. And I wanted to see it! The idea was to bring a lot of interesting people together who could make it special.

They duly put together a phenomenal mostly Anglo-Irish team, including John Tiffany (then an associate director with the National Theatre of Scotland) as director, Frantic Assembly’s Steven Hoggett to do the movement, Martin Lowe as orchestrator and Bob Crowley as designer, to bring it to the stage.

Now they’ve brought the show back ‘home’ first to Dublin last month, and now to the West End, where it is currently previewing at the Phoenix before opening next month on April 9. And perhaps it is good to creep into town more unobtrusively and wait for people to find you instead of forcing yourself upon them. Once, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical last year, following in the footsteps of The Book of Mormon which took the top honour the year before, is a different kind of musical altogether.

Yes, it is based on a film – a 2006 Irish indie feature, shot on a micro-budget ($160,000) in the style of a home movie, which went on to become a sleeper hit, receiving audience awards at the 2007 Sundance and Dublin Film Festivals, and one of its songs, ‘Falling Slowly’, won the 2007 Oscar for Best Original Song. But where The Book of Mormon is brash, in-yer-face and indeed riotously funny, Once is a show of much quieter, more radiant and subtle charms.

It is a show I have loved since I first saw it during its New York Theatre Workshop try-out at the end of 2011, and have seen thrice more since it transferred to Broadway. But the other night I finally watched the movie for the first time at home, and was utterly overwhelmed. It packs a completely different punch to the stage show, feeling like a private, intense and intimate act of eavesdropping on a relationship that is both wounding and exhilarating, thanks to the utterly naturalistic, unforced acting of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who wrote both the music and star in it.

Last weekend Hansard was interviewed on the CBS Sunday morning show in the US, revisiting his life as a street busker since he was 13 (and showing off his wrecked guitar, damaged by the strumming). He also spoke of his initial reluctance to take it Broadway: “For me, Broadway meant hamming it up.” People told him, he said, “you’ll be seriously rich” if it did well; but he added, “that was never the reason we did this.”

He also hauntingly revealed the personal dimension behind the film: that he fell in love with Markéta Irglová himself during the making of it:

Part of what made Once work was that there was always this energy between us, a beautiful, powerful, romantic creative energy that was there…. If you said to me, you could have all the success, or you could have just have a great relationship with Markéta, I’d have took the relationship: it was the most profound and beautiful thing I’ve been through. It’s all there – it’s all on the records.

It’s also all there now in the stage musical, too, but in a very different way. Firstly, of course, they are no longer played by themselves, but by musical actors; but more importantly, what was quietly observed – often with cameras positioned far away so as not to intrude – and intimate, is now very much a public event, with big, amazingly choreographed displays of group effort that is thrillingly alive.

The last time I saw it in New York I went with my composer pal Dana P Rowe and we were in a puddle of tears by the end; but watching the film, I was in tears throughout. I can’t now wait to see it again in London now having seen the source material for myself.

Video Link: http://www.thestage.co.uk/columns/shenton/2013/03/mormon-mania-and-the-once-and-only/

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