Broadway gets a royal audience: Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren will portray the Queen when the show transfers to New York

Helen Mirren is to reign over new subjects in the distant colony known as Broadway.
The award-winning star revealed that she will portray the Queen when Peter Morgan’s smash hit play The Audience transfers to New York in 12 months’ time.
‘There are talks and negotiations going on now, and I will be going to do the play over there around this time next year,’ the actress told me.
Helen won across-the-board raves from British critics and, importantly, Ben Brantley of the New York Times, who hailed her performance as ‘unimpeachably authoritative’.
The play concerns the monarch’s weekly audience at Buckingham Palace with some of the 12 prime ministers who have held office during her 61 years on the throne.
Morgan, who also wrote Stephen Frears’s film The Queen, for which Helen won an Oscar, explores how Her Maj got on with eight PMs: Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson (who, the play suggests, was the Queen’s favourite), James Callaghan (making a cameo appearance), Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
The Audience completes its limited run at the Gielgud on June  15, but it won’t be extending at that theatre. 
‘Cameron Mackintosh, who owns it, has already booked in another show, so we couldn’t stay at the Gielgud,’ Helen explained.
‘In any case, I have other commitments now, but I have urged the producers to continue with another actress, at another theatre. It’s such a good piece, and there are so many people unable to get tickets, that they should re-mount it.’
As I noted recently, touts are having a field day flogging seats at more than £500 a pair, and official premium-priced tickets have been flying out of the box-office at £125 a pop.

 

The production’s producers — Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert Fox and Andy Harries — started official talks with New York theatre owners on Tuesday and they’re exploring budget and schedules with director Stephen Daldry and designer Bob Crowley. 
They’re also, at Helen’s urging, quietly compiling a short list  of actresses able to convey the stature and nobility required to play the Queen if the show is revived, at a future date, in London.
A New York run would make Helen — and the show and creative team — major contenders for the 2014 Tony Awards.
A Queen crowned on Broadway would be quite something.
The Audience was nominated for a number of Olivier MasterCard Awards on Tuesday, including best new play, best actress, best director, best costume and best supporting actor for Richard McCabe’s study of Harold Wilson. 

Holliday's happy to be Posh tottie

Holliday Grainger: Dining out

Holliday GRAINGER  has been offered one of  the few female roles, opposite a pack of top  young Brit actors.
The actress, who plays Lucrezia Borgia in television’s The Borgias, is considering whether she can play a part in the film version of Laura Wade’s successful play Posh. 
It’s a tale of Tory wild boys who are members of a fictional elite Oxbridge dining society known as The Riot Club. 
Events get out of hand at a drunken dinner party  they hold in a pub’s private dining room.
Wade has adapted her own drama for the screen and opened it out substantially to include a female character not featured in the play, which originated at the Royal Court.
The film’s lead will be played by Max Irons and his character now has a girlfriend — and that’s the part Holliday may, or may not, take.
At the moment it depends on her schedule for shooting The Borgias and another project.
Harry Potter star Emma Watson also met the film’s director Lone Scherfig to discuss another part.
But Emma — who, by the way, gives a sublime performance in Sofia Coppola’s new film The Bling Ring — wasn’t available to be in Posh. Holliday has emerged as one of our most gifted young actresses. 
She has done a ton of television work and was great as Estella in the recent, big-screen version of Great Expectations.
Her breakthrough performance in the much under-rated film The Scouting Book For Boys has stayed with me since I saw it four years ago.
Sam Claflin, Douglas Booth and Freddie Fox are among several actors in various stages of negotiations to be in Posh. Robert Pattinson was being courted, too, from a distance, but he’s not doing it.

Watch out for...

Declan Bennett and Zrinka Cvitesic in Once

John Partridge, the former EastEnders actor who has gone back to his song-and-dance roots.
He’s taking a pre-arranged break from playing Zac, the energetic choreographer in A Chorus Line at the London Palladium, to perform a week’s cabaret residency for Live At The Hippodrome (the old Talk Of The Town) from April 22 through April 27.
Partridge describes his gig as a ‘rock ’n’ roll experience with a theatrical twist’.
He’s calling his Hippodrome sessions Dames ’n’ Dudes and he’ll sing songs associated with Kate Bush, David Bowie, Bruno Mars, Jacques Brel, Fleetwood Mac and others. Partridge has hand-picked his  own five piece band for the show.
Declan Bennett and Zrinka Cvitesic, who star in John Tiffany’s production of the musical Once, by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. 
The show is based on the film of the same name, which won a best song Oscar for the haunting love song Falling Slowly. 
It’s about a young man — a Dublin busker (Bennett) — who can’t move forward because he has unfinished business concerning love. He meets a woman (Cvitesic) who encourages him out of his shell. 
I saw the show a couple of times in New York. I’ve always liked it, but I didn’t love it till I saw the production on Tuesday at the Phoenix Theatre. 
The omens weren’t good. Everything put me in the wrong mood: the box office queue was painfully slow; the programme cost £6; an usher told me I was in the wrong seat  (I wasn’t!) and so on.
But slowly the performers on stage, playing their own instruments, started reeling me in. 
I think Bennett’s un-showy performance and his ability to locate the ache in heartache, when he sings the show’s ballads, caught me. I will surely  be seeing the West End Once, twice.
Alex Jennings, Gabrielle Lloyd and Jeff Rawle, who portray Alan Bennett and his parents in Cocktail Sticks, the playwright’s dramatisation of part of his memoir, A Life Like Other People’s.
In the piece, Bennett talks to his late father, and allows his mother to express her desire to step up anotch and socialise with people she perceived as her betters.
It’s one half of a double bill called Untold Stories, which has now transferred from the National to the Duchess Theatre.
The other, a short piece called Hymn, features music composed by George Fenton. Jennings plays Bennett in both and gives one of the best performances to be seen on the London stage.

 

I was BAD last week because I single-handedly closed down the Michael Jackson show Thriller - Live. Contrary to what I said, it’s still running at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue.
We’re Going On A Bear Hunt will be showing at the Lyric during the day; and Thriller Live continues, according to the theatre’s website, till September.

 

Some of the nominations for this year’s Olivier Mastercard awards are a tad out of whack.
Top Hat is very enjoyable at the Aldwych — but is it the best new musical of the year? Probably not.
It’s up against The Bodyguard, and I think that show, which is on at the Adelphi, has the edge – and it also has the fabulous Heather Headley.