How do you text a production like Maria?

Published on Thursday 17 April 2008 17:17

CASTING couch? Forget it. Casting text message? That's more like it.

Connie Fisher started it. When the annoyingly squeaky singer won the BBC reality talent show How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?, it fast-tracked her to a West End career in The Sound Of Music.

Lee Mead was next, donning Joseph's amazing Technicolor dreamcoat in Any Dream Will Do and promptly landing himself the lead at London's Adelphi Theatre.

ITV got in on the act, too, with Grease Is the Word, which lead to Susan McFadden and Danny Byrne playing Sandy and Danny at the Piccadilly Theatre.

But it's the BBC and their favourite collaborator Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber who have the whole casting-by- telly sewn up tighter than Frank N Furter's basque in a late night Rocky Horror Show.

Their latest offering, I'd Do Anything, will launch a wannabe Nancy and three would-be Olivers into the spotlight this December when Sir Cameron Macintosh brings Lionel Bart's feel good musical to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, complete with a 100-strong cast and Blackadder's Rowan Atkinson as Fagin – tickets are already on sale.

However, does giving viewers the casting vote really offer the public value for money?

That's one of a number of debates raging at the moment, thanks to Lloyd Webber's penchant for letting couch potatoes cast his shows by text message vote.

Another is the price hike in tickets that having a TV 'celebrity' in the cast allows. Mackintosh has suggested that a top-price ticket for Oliver! might come in at 95. Would you pay that to see a show starring a previously unknown performer – even if most of the contes-tants who sign up for these TV shows are no ordinary Joes, as the producers would like us to believe.

Most have some training, if not professional experience behind them, although the fact that they need to rely on a popularity contest to get work probably tells you all you need to know about their talent or lack of it.

Take Mead, for example. Unsuspecting viewers might have been surprised to discover that, prior to doing the TV show, the curly haired performer had already appeared in Joseph on the West End – as Pharaoh at the New London Theatre.

The pay-off from casting a production in this way is that it keeps theatre alive, not just on the West End but around the country, as familiar faces such Craig Chalmers head up regional tours.

It also keeps an army of actors and stage hands in work. The drawback is that, inevitably, the product suffers.

Inexperienced performers frequently lack the stamina and vocal training required to cope with a 14-show week. Cue sore throats, chest infections, exhaustion – and the understudy.

But then this is commercial theatre, the engine of the arts in this country, without which theatre itself would die.

Defending Mackintosh's talk of 95 tickets, veteran producer Thelma Holt wrote of her belief that theatre is an event and not a luxury. She's right and she's wrong.

Theatre is an event, but for many it is also a luxury, one they enjoy so much more when they feel a connection to the name at the top of the bill.

That's why Lloyd Webber has it right. It's all about viewers getting a return for their investment, of being able to say 'We put them up there' when the curtain rises.

Although 95 is a bit steep, especially if you get the understudy.