Who could ask for anything more at the third Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre? That’s the question 300 local schoolchildren put to their audiences on Sunday during the festival’s opening gala of that name, when they performed excerpts from five different musicals with the introduction of three UK performers, Graham Bickley, Shân Cothi and Ria Jones.
Perhaps the title of the gala reflects the confidence of the festival’s chief executive, Joanne Benjamin, and her team. And there are good reasons to be positive: the opening of the Wales Millennium Centre in 2004 now allows for performances by the biggest touring musical productions, and Welsh singers have been making their mark on the musical stage since the mid-19th century.
The festival also boasts the unique selling point of being almost the only one of its kind in the world, aside from its US counterpart. Established in 2002, two years earlier than the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), the Cardiff festival was first proposed by BBC Wales and is strongly supported by the Cardiff County Council, while the New York event was the initiative of Australian director-producer Kris Stewart and is largely privately funded.
“We’ve had a few shows that have done both festivals and we certainly have a friendship, but there are no official ties,” said Stewart, Executive Director of both the National Music Theatre Network (NMTN) in the US as well as NYMF. “I think both events came into being for different reasons – in Cardiff, it was the city taking leadership to create an event to give the city a real point of difference; with us, I think it was inevitable that an event like ours would eventually exist, due to the critical mass of artists and audiences.”
Does this mean that the Cardiff festival is somehow contrived or manufactured? It’s difficult to say. The popularity of the 2002 and 2005 events (the only ones to be held so far), which each attracted audiences of more than 40,000, seems to make the question irrelevant. There is no denying the vibrancy of a festival that, although located in a city some 25 times smaller than its American counterpart, rakes in a roughly equal number of participants.
Yet the realities of private funding for professional musical theatre companies in the US have caused them to woo audiences much more ardently than may be the case elsewhere, and this seems to be paying off – the New York festival is seeing breathtaking growth in the form of a 65 per cent increase in audience attendance. Will Wales be able to compete with the “home of musical theatre” in the coming years?
“In order to be a successful company (in the US) you need to be popular, to reach as many people as possible, doing things they’re interested in and relate to,” observed Stewart. “In that vein, one of things they’re asking over in the US is what is good art? Their answer being, ‘stuff that I like’, and that’s completely valid. Consequently, musical theatre is the ultimate populist art form.”
The city of Cardiff is taking a different approach to the promotion of musical theatre, as is amply reflected in its festival programme. This year’s programme serves up a generous dollop of old favourites and remakes, including the Bridgend Youth Theatre’s Fiddler On The Roof; the Donmar’s Guys and Dolls, which is making a stop at the Welsh capital en route to Broadway; a revival of the largely forgotten Broadway production Treasure Girl, which starred Gertrude Lawrence; and a performance of Gypsy starring Helena Blackman, the losing finalist on the BBC’s talent-based competition series How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria.
The stars of a bygone era also dazzle in the year’s line-up: Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence and Joyce Grenfell are among the legendary performers to be remembered in Beverley Humphreys’ Seven Women Under One Hat. A Styne Symposium will focus on the career of the man who wrote the score for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Funny Girl and Gypsy, and whose seven-decade career saw him produce hits for both Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. And the centenary of David Heneker, the composer of musicals such as Half A Sixpence and Charlie Girl provides a reason to party at a concert that will feature performances of his songs by West End stars.
On the other hand, the NYMF programme featured a much wider range of relatively unknown musicals. Ending less than three weeks ago, the festival paid tribute to the usual cultural suspects – Shakespeare, Cervantes and Charlie Chaplin, but urban legends, current issues, love stories, coming-of-age tales and quintessential American experiences occupied a much more prominent place on its agenda. There were even a couple of rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop productions, and a remake of an 80s b-horror movie.
Still, there is no doubt that credit needs to be given to the Cardiff festival for its efforts to nurture musical theatre. One of these has been the Global Search for New Musicals, an initiative that aims to discover the best in musical theatre writing from around the globe. This year it is bringing six new shows to the attention of Welsh audiences: About Face, inspired by Much Ado About Nothing; Like You Like It, also a Shakespeare reference; The Fabulist, an Aesop fable based on the novel by John Vornholt; Kind Hearts and Coronets, drawn from the classic film of the same name; Casanova Returns, telling the story of the Venetian womaniser’s return from Venice, and Top Of The Heap, which charts a friendship tested by the darker aspects of show business in the 1950s.
Elsewhere during the festival, the Unknown Theatre Company impersonates the animal characters of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories, and Thalidomide!! A Musical tells the story of how a thalidomide baby of the 1960s finds love in spite of the natal deformities caused by the drug. And the festival courts the approval of the small ones with presentations of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Unga Bunga – the stoneage spectacular, in a which a sabre-toothed tiger wrecks Queen Inga’s coronation in a village of man-eating plants and cordon bleu cannibals.
Viewers who are not content to simply watch can attend the free Sing-A-Long Sundays or test their knowledge of musicals at the Showstoppers quiz, to be hosted by Welsh entertainer Mal Pope. Pope will also lend his voice to the carnival of plays at the festival, singing for a showcase of his new musical-in-development, Contender, about a famous heavyweight boxer who comes out of retirement to battle financial ruin. Look out too for the BBC Radio 2 Voice of Musical Theatre, the world’s only competition for professional musical theatre performers, which launched the career of 2000 winner Laura Michelle Kelly. Meanwhile, for the serious theatre performer, a masterclass, two conferences and a series of actors’ workshops await.
This year’s festival yields an array of performances and activities that should cement its previous successes. Perhaps its only lack, and something the NYMF has pioneered to capitalise on the star quality of their event, is concerts and performance sessions with individual theatre performers. But the two festivals don’t have to be rivals – Like You Like It is setting up camp in Cardiff after touring the NYMF, showing that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. After all, they do share the common purpose of, as NYMF director Kris Stewart put it, getting new musicals out from “under the glass ceiling of developmental hell”.
The Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre runs until November 5th, 2006.
For more, visit www.cardiffmusicals.com