Get your teeth into this
Toothsome celebrity casting and what else to see in London
It’s essentially impossible to escape the perennial rumblings in theatreland about celebrity casting in the West End. There are always mutterings that by casting big film and TV names for stage productions, it cuts out ‘theatre’ actors from work they would otherwise get (notwithstanding that many famous screen names started out and often slogged for years in theatre – Bryan Cranston being a current example).
I think this argument is especially flawed in the current financial climate. The longstanding success of jukebox musicals is a very good indicator that when people are spending a lot of money on tickets, they feel braver to do so if they can grasp something familiar. The same principle applies to celebrity casting. And it’s actually moderately rare that an actor who genuinely cannot do theatre is thrown in at the deep end in a big show.
Theatre is a business, and an eye-wateringly expensive business at that. Even in the case of subsidised theatre, it needs to balance opportunity for actors with selling enough tickets to pay for the show, and costs have rocketed since Covid.
It’s also not as if it hasn’t been going on for generations – there was probably never a more successful production of Private Lives than the one that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1983, though that had as much to do with the vivid reflection in their own lives of the relationship depicted on stage as it did with their celebrity.
Anyway, it’s an old trick, but it’s usually one that works, if you can get the name and the show to work together.
What I’ve seen
The latest iteration of this is the much-anticipated Cynthia Erivo Dracula at the Noël Coward theatre until May 30.
Written and directed by Kip Williams, who was the backroom force behind that rather marvellous (I thought) The Picture of Dorian Gray which Sarah Snook did in the West End in 2024, it’s another one-woman show, with Erivo playing all 23 (apparently) of the roles in an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel, from the Count to the coachman.
