Latest news with #musicals
The Independent
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Why West End's biggest stars are drawn to the East
London's Chinatown is in the middle of the British capital city, but it is also at the heart of another very distinctive city within a city: Theatreland. According to trade association the Society of London Theatre, for every one pound spent on a ticket, an additional 1.27 pounds are spent at local businesses such as hotels and restaurants, and with 17.1 million people attending West End shows in 2024, the West End's economic contribution to city life, as well as its cultural one, is huge. As well as being popular with locals, 24 per cent of all overseas visitors to London go to see a show, and with travellers from China making up a significant number of the capital's visitors, and being among its biggest spenders, a lot of those seats will be occupied by Chinese tourists. So it is no surprise that, increasingly frequently, West End producers and performers are looking to build on that interest by performing in China. Matilda, based on the Roald Dahl story about a book-loving young girl with magic powers, and the hugely popular The Phantom of the Opera are two shows that have recently toured China, to great acclaim. Two more award-winning hits that recently came to Shanghai Culture Square are Six and Life of Pi. Six is an all-female pop musical, telling the story of the six wives of England's 16th century king Henry VIII, and Life of Pi is a visually stunning staging of Yann Martel's best-selling book, also an Oscar-winning movie, about a boy who survives a shipwreck. Tom de Keyser is chief executive of Royo, a production company with offices in London and Shanghai, that has taken Life of Pi, and also the thriller Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, around China. He said top class facilities, a rich local heritage and enthusiastic audiences made China one of the most exciting places in the world to operate. 'A few years ago, you'd only have played Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but now a lot of second-tier cities have developed fantastic state-of-the-art modern theatres and have built up a real appetite for high-quality theatre, so we will now tour for 10-14 weeks, across many different cities, whereas previously we'd only have done two or three weeks.' Shanghai is a particular magnet for touring shows, and De Keyser called its principal venues, Shanghai Culture Square and the Shanghai Grand Theatre, 'two of the most magnificent state-of-the-art theatres I've ever seen anywhere in the world'. Someone who has had a chance to see Chinese audiences up close and can compare them to those in the West End and on New York's Broadway is performer and recording artist Kerry Ellis, known as the Queen of the West End. 'What I love about our industry is you can connect with people whether you speak the language or not, so I love to travel and perform all over the world and China is up there with my favourite places,' she said. Serin Kasif is business development director at Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, which has been taking his shows and productions to China for more than 20 years. She said the company's relations with local producers such as SMG Live were vital to its touring success in China. 'For a show like Phantom, the decision on where we go and for how long is made very closely with our partners — we don't pretend to know what Chinese audiences want, which is why we work with producers and venues on what they want, we're in constant conversation to find what is the best fit,' she explained. Like the Really Useful Group, Royo also foresees a busy future in China. But in a nod to its roots in two countries approach, there is the prospect of some of China's top performers making the reverse journey. 'What shows we can bring here is something we do discuss a lot,' said De Keyser. 'For many years, London has been a hub of some of the world's best theatre so I think there would be real interest in bringing Chinese theatre here, partly for the Chinese population, but also because of so many British people's interest in a culture as rich as China's.'
Daily Mail
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Rosie O'Donnell sends pointed message amid her war of words with Trump
Rosie O'Donnell sent a pointed message after President Donald Trump threatened to revoke her American citizenship. The U.S.-born actress, 63, rocked a 'New York' themed outfit at the London premiere of the Burlesque musical. O'Donnell, who was born in the U.S. but now resides in Ireland, has been embroiled in a recent war of words with Trump, but has long been at odds with him. After Trump said he was seriously considering revoking Rosie's citizenship last week, she set out to fully embrace her American roots in unforgettable fashion on Tuesday. Rosie's paint-splattered grey jacket featured a repetitive 'New York' pattern along with a Big Apple design front and center. Even her trousers were inspired by her birth state. Rosie, who was born in Commack, New York, sported black trousers with 'New York' painted in neon across both legs. On the red carpet, Rosie continued her criticism of Trump as she recommended a list of musicals for him to watch. 'Hamilton, so he can actually learn about our founding fathers, and understand exactly what it means to have the role that he has,' she told Attitude. 'I believe he feels we're in a reality show and he's acting like it's some sort of ridiculous television program. 'Les Misérables. Must my name before I die, be more than just an alibi? Must I lie? How will I ever face my fellow man? How will I ever face myself again? My soul belongs to God, I know I made that bargain long ago. He gave my hope when hope was gone. He gave me strength to carry on. 'And probably the third one would be something like La Cage aux Folles. Just so he could know how wonderful gay people are and stop his ridiculous marginalization of us. And I stand in unison with every gay person all over the world, and especially trans people who are being marginalized by this very abusive government we have now in the United States.' Her appearance comes weeks after the president threatened to revoke Rosie's American citizenship, calling the comedian and longtime critic a 'threat to humanity' in a fiery post on Truth Social. 'Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship,' Trump, 79, wrote to his Truth Social. 'She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!' Under US law, a president cannot revoke the citizenship of an American born in the United States. O'Donnell was born in New York state. She subsequently went scorched earth on Trump with a series of posts claiming Trump was on Jeffrey Epstein's client list and was a guest at the billionaire's infamous island. Over the course of almost a dozen posts the comedian and former chat show host laid into Trump and any association he may have had with Epstein, but some focused squarely on the president himself. 'Thirty-plus years of sexual abuse - The known victims,' O'Donnell posted earlier this month along with a profile shot of Trump and a list of women who have accused him of sexual abuse dating back to the 1980s. Earlier this month Trump said he was considering "taking away" the U.S. citizenship of his longtime rival Another posting showcased a photo montage showcasing Trump meeting Epstein and his convicted sex trafficker girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. In the center was a Truth Social from Trump pleading for people to 'STOP TALKING ABOUT EPSTEIN!!!!!'. Other posts designed to irk the president further saw a photoshopped picture of Trump wearing one of his signature red MAGA caps only with the words changed to read: 'I'm on the list' referring to the supposed client list Epstein kept. Earlier this month the White House has said that there is in fact no 'client list,' a narrative that some question. 'Let's not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,' Trump later wrote on Truth Social, casting the controversy as a ploy to derail his political momentum. One of O'Donnell's messages earlier this month was aimed squarely in response to Trump's suggestion to revoke her citizenship. 'Hey Donald - you're rattled again? 18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours. you call me a threat to humanity - but I'm everything you fear: a loud woman a queer woman. a mother who tells the truth an American who got out of the country b4 u set it ablaze,' O'Donnell began. 'You crave loyalty - I teach my children to question power you sell fear on golf courses - I make art about surviving trauma you lie, you steal, you degrade - I nurture, I create, I persist,' she went on. 'You are everything that is wrong with America - and I'm everything you hate about what's still right with it. You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, king Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan 'i'm not yours to silence i never was - Rosie.' Responding directly to Trump's threat she wrote how the president opposes her because she 'stands in direct opposition with all he represents.' 'The president of the USA has always hated the fact that i see him for who he is - a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself - this is why i moved to Ireland,' O'Donnell wrote in another posting that day. 'He is a dangerous old soulless man with dementia who lacks empathy compassion and basic humanity- i stand in direct opposition all he represents ... ur a bad joke who cant form a coherent sentence.' In other blatant attacks on Trump, O'Donnell posted artwork of the president stating 'He rapes', while in another she posted a tweet stating: 'Damn, I wish Trump would go after the Epstein list pedophiles the way he's going at Rosie O'Donnell rn.' Rosie has continued to share similar content ever since, including posts generally critical of Trump. O'Donnell, a longtime target of Trump's insults and jabs, moved to Ireland earlier this year with her 12-year-old son after the start of the president's second term. She has said she's in the process of obtaining Irish citizenship based on family lineage. O'Donnell, said in a March TikTok video that she would return to the US 'when it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America.' Trump's outburst followed O'Donnell's July 7 HuffPost interview, in which she discussed her decades-long feud with him and her 2024 move to Ireland, made ahead of Trump's reelection. Trump's disdain for O'Donnell dates back to 2006 when O'Donnell, a comedian and host on The View at the time, mocked Trump over his handling of a controversy concerning a winner of the Miss USA pageant, which Trump had owned. 'I look at America and I feel overwhelmingly depressed,' O'Donnell, 63, said, citing her need to protect her mental health and care for her 12-year-old son, who has autism. 'I knew what [the Trump administration] was planning to do, because I read Project 2025. I know what he's capable of. And I didn't want to put myself through another four years of him being in charge.' Watching Trump's second term from abroad, O'Donnell added: 'I think it's as bad as everyone worried it would be. I believe fascism has taken a foothold in the United States.' She also criticized a new bill she claims grants Trump his own 'secret police,' with a budget 'greater than the money we give to Israel, which is already unbelievably high.' 'I look at America, and it feels tragic,' she said. 'I feel sad. I feel overwhelmingly depressed. I don't understand how we got here.' During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly brought up O'Donnell, including during the first Republican primary debate in August 2015. When moderator Megyn Kelly questioned his use of terms like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' and 'slobs' to describe women, he replied, 'Only Rosie O'Donnell.' Her name eventually resurfaced during a debate with Hillary Clinton, when Trump said, 'Rosie O'Donnell has been very vicious to me. I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree she deserves it.' O'Donnell responded in a now-deleted post on X, calling him an 'orange anus.' After Trump's first election, O'Donnell told W Magazine in October 2017 that she struggled to cope with his presidency, saying it took her a year to regain emotional balance. 'I seriously worry whether I personally will be able to live through [his presidency] and whether the nation will be able to survive,' she said. 'It's a terrifying concept, on the brink of nuclear war with a madman in charge.' Trump's latest jab at O'Donnell seemed to be in response to a TikTok video she posted this month mourning the 119 deaths in the July 4 floods in Texas and blaming Trump's widespread cuts to environmental and science agencies involved in forecasting major natural disasters. 'What a horror story in Texas,' O'Donnell said in the video. 'And you know, when the president guts all the early warning systems and the weathering forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we're gonna start to see on a daily basis.' The Trump administration, as well as local and state officials, have faced mounting questions over whether more could have been done to protect and warn residents ahead of the Texas flooding, which struck with astonishing speed in the pre-dawn hours of July 4 and killed at least 137, according to Reuters.
New York Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘A Chorus Line' and ‘Chicago' at 50: Who Won?
Just two musicals open on Broadway during the summer of 1975. 'Chicago,' in June, is received warily, like a stranger at the door. It's 'a very sleek show,' writes Walter Kerr in The New York Times. 'It just seems to be the wrong one.' But 'A Chorus Line,' in July, elicits unthrottled raves. 'The conservative word' for it, writes Kerr's colleague Clive Barnes, 'might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific.' Yet the musicals have more in common than their initial reception reveals. Both shows are about performers: 'Chicago' featuring 1920s vaudevillians with a sideline in murder; 'A Chorus Line,' contemporary Broadway dancers. Both are masterminded by director-choreographers of acknowledged (and self-acknowledged) brilliance: 'Chicago' by Bob Fosse; 'A Chorus Line' by Michael Bennett. Both are seen, regardless of reviews, as exemplars of style-meets-content storytelling in a period of confusing change in musical theater. And both shows remain touchstones today, albeit of very different things. Indeed, their differences now seem more salient than their similarities, and fate has been funny with their reputations. For 50 years, 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago' have tussled for primacy like Jacob and Esau, at least in the eyes and ears of Broadway fans. Which show is 'the wrong one' now? To answer that, you might look uncharitably at their faults. 'A Chorus Line' is shaggy and gooped up with psychobabble. 'Chicago' is mechanical, a big hammer pounding one nail. But both are so well crafted for performance that those faults fade in any good production. For me, having seen each many times, the highlights are more telling. In 'A Chorus Line' my favorite moment comes near the end of the song 'At the Ballet,' in which three women auditioning for an ensemble role in a Broadway musical sing their hearts out about sad childhoods redeemed by dance. Up the 'steep and very narrow stairway' that led to ballet class, Sheila learned to be happy despite her unloving father. Bebe came to see herself as pretty despite her disdainful mother. And though Maggie lacks the words for how dancing allowed her to feel, she doesn't lack the music. At the climax of a number that has been troubling its way through various cloudy keys for five minutes, her salvation comes in the form of a high E cast over a horizon of sudden D Major sunlight. It's gorgeous harmonically (the songs are by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban) but also emotionally (the book is by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante). Having learned to love the only home that loved them back, the women alchemize their personal despair into public joy and share it with us through bravura singing and dancing. As for my favorite moment from 'Chicago' — actually, I can't even quote it. It's too vulgar. Vulgarity is what you'd expect from 'Chicago,' in which the central figure, Roxie Hart, makes a bigger name for herself on Death Row than she could ever make on the stage. To her and the show's other 'merry murderesses,' the upshot of shooting a lover isn't justice but fame; indeed, justice is fame. 'She made a scandal and a start,' runs a typically biting lyric by Fred Ebb, to the catchiest possible melody by John Kander. We are in two very different worlds. 'A Chorus Line' is psychological, wholesome, sincere; 'Chicago' is sociological, jagged, jaded. 'A Chorus Line' keens: When one of the dancers injures his knee rehearsing a tap routine, the others sing the wonderfully weepy 'What I Did for Love' as a kind of professional obituary. But in cold 'Chicago,' with songs like 'Razzle Dazzle' and 'We Both Reached for the Gun,' the tears are only for show. No one can sing her heart out because no one has a heart. If we can't judge the shows by whose world is better — how to compare sweet apples and bitter oranges? — we can ask a bigger question about the birthright of the American musical theater. Which delivered our local art form into the future? At first it seemed certain to be 'A Chorus Line,' and not just because it won nine Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, famously skunking 'Chicago.' Nor because the original Broadway production ran for more than 6,000 performances, its first national tour for six years. ('Chicago' did not quite crack 1,000 Broadway performances; its first national tour eked out a year.) Nor even because, within a year or two, 'What I Did for Love' had been recorded by pop stars as stylistically diverse as Aretha Franklin, Bing Crosby, Grace Jones, Petula Clark and Peggy Lee. The biggest number from 'Chicago,' 'All That Jazz,' was heard mostly on its cast album. Something else favored 'A Chorus Line.' Its story of 24 performers auditioning for eight spots in the ensemble of a flashy new musical flattered the hopes as well as the gumption of theater people in a time of commercial collapse. During the early 1970s, Broadway attendance dropped precipitously, falling to half of what it had been in the late 1960s. By January 1974, 15 of the 38 Broadway theaters then extant were empty, with no bookings in the offing; six were for sale. But thanks in part to the enormous success of 'A Chorus Line,' Broadway began to rebound, allowing the scope of adventurous taste to rebound with it. The Sondheim revolution that had begun in 1970 with 'Company' reached a climax with the flop 'Pacific Overtures' in 1976 and, three years later, the quasi-hit 'Sweeney Todd.' Now considered classics, both looked backward in time to look outward at the world, 'Pacific Overtures' considering America's 'opening' of Japan in the 19th century; 'Sweeney Todd,' the violence unleashed during the same period by the Industrial Revolution. In that company, 'A Chorus Line' began to seem provincial and era bound, looking not outward but inward, at the theater of the 1970s itself. The invasion of the British mega-musicals, starting with 'Cats' in 1982, pummeled 'A Chorus Line' from another direction, knocking the wind out of its touching soliloquies. Richard Attenborough's overblown 1985 movie, earning just $14 million on a budget of twice that, seemed to slam another door on the original stage show, which closed in 1990. An 'archivally and anatomically correct reproduction' in 2006 did little to suggest it had more to offer. By then, the underdog fortunes of 'Chicago' had begun to grow. A minimalist staging for the Encores! series in 1996 led to a Broadway transfer, which won six Tony Awards and turned the previously provisional critical acclaim into wholehearted hosannas. Now the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, the revival long ago surpassed both versions of 'A Chorus Line' put together, with more than 11,000 performances earning $800 million to date. Rubbing salt in the wound, Rob Marshall's sleekly kinetic movie was a triumph, grossing $300 million and winning six Academy Awards (including best picture) in 2003. To understand why 'Chicago' swamped 'A Chorus Line' in the public imagination, you must also look at how the two musicals work. 'A Chorus Line,' based on the taped reminiscences of Broadway dancers, is a lot like a yearbook: You get the class picture (buff, bluff, proud) and then the dig-deeper individual portraits (I'm tone-deaf, I'm flat-chested, I'm gay). But after each revelation, the dancers return to the anonymity of the line, because their destiny, at best, is to support and never upstage a real star. In that way, the show, however perfect, is self-sealing. You close the yearbook and put it away. But if the theater is the whole world in 'A Chorus Line' — the stage is literally all you see on the stage — in 'Chicago' the opposite is true: The whole world is theater. The book, by Ebb and Fosse, based on a 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, seeks to literalize the showbizification of American justice by performing it as a series of variety acts. Each song repurposes a familiar genre and personality from the period as commentary on the courts. Roxie essentially auditions for acquittal. Another showgirl, Velma Kelly, tries to ride her legal coattails, suggesting a sister act. Their lawyer, Billy Flynn, does a ventriloquist bit, with the defendant as his dummy. We are not supposed to care about any of them, only about the world that would turn 'two scintillating sinners' into stars. And because we still live in that world — celebrity remaining the best get-out-of-jail-free card — it seems inevitable that the show has proved eternal. Clever, merciless stunt casting by the producers has underlined and monetized that theme, dredging up C-list names to play roles they are qualified for only by virtue of being unqualified. What's eternal in 'A Chorus Line' is something else entirely. Its dancers, despite their disappointments, universally accept their fate as a fair trade. 'Love is never gone,' they sing in the 11 o'clock number. Because both directors, Fosse and Bennett, understood how to tell a story congruently, the visual and choreographic styles of the two shows are as different as their perspectives. Bennett's staging — Bob Avian was the co-choreographer — is poetic and minimal: When the dancers cover their faces with their résumé photos, we see how individuality is obscured even in the act of self-presentation. And when, in the finale, the black wall at the back of the stage revolves to create a palace of glittering mirrors, we see how the multiplication of the self does the same thing. The mirrors anonymize perfection. In 'Chicago' we are forced into complicity with imperfection. The dancing, however brilliantly performed, is sweaty and scuzzy; the characters are not meant to be talented. Nor is Fosse's visual poetry pretty. Bangles, fans and fedoras are just props and strategies, the way a gun is. In the original production, when Gwen Verdon, who played Roxie, inhaled a piece of confetti, it got caught in her vocal cords, necessitating surgery. You know your show is cold and cutting when it makes sense that a shred of celebratory paper would become a weapon. Cold and cutting turned out to be the ticket to the future. If 'A Chorus Line' is a culminating expression of one strain of musical theater — the Rodgers and Hammerstein strain, in which individuals must come to grips with society — 'Chicago' is a foundational expression of a new one, in which, society be damned, individuals are out for themselves. 'Now, every son of a bitch is a snake in the grass,' goes a lyric from the ironically titled 'Class.' And: 'Ain't there no decency left?' Fifty years have taught us to leave decency to 'A Chorus Line.' In an indecent age, 'Chicago' is inevitable, the treacherous confetti in our throats. Animations by Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library. 'Chicago' images by Friedman-Abeles/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; 'A Chorus Line' images by Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
New York Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Moves That Made ‘Chicago' and ‘A Chorus Line' Singular Sensations
Fifty years ago, when director-choreographer giants still walked the earth, two of the biggest — Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett — created highly influential shows that have attained legendary status and lasted: 'Chicago' and 'A Chorus Line.' These were musicals with dancing at the center. The showbiz-cynical attitude of 'Chicago,' a tale of 1920s murderers who go into vaudeville, was inseparable from its choreographic style. 'A Chorus Line' was about Broadway dancers, built from their real-life stories and framed as an audition. To celebrate the golden anniversaries of these shows, The New York Times invited Robyn Hurder, who has performed in productions of both over the past two decades (and recently received a Tony nomination for her performance in 'Smash'), to demonstrate and discuss what makes the choreography so special. To coach her, direct-lineage experts were on hand. transcript [MUSIC] For 'A Chorus Line,' Hurder could turn to Baayork Lee, an original cast member who has been staging and directing the show ever since. (She's directing an anniversary benefit performance on July 27.) For 'Chicago,' Verdon Fosse Legacy — an organization dedicated to preserving and reconstructing the choreography of Fosse and his chief collaborator, Gwen Verdon — sent Dana Moore, who worked with Fosse in his 1978 'Dancin'' and his 1986 revival of 'Sweet Charity.' She also danced in the 1996 'Chicago' revival and in revivals of 'A Chorus Line,' too. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Peter James obituary
Peter James, who has died aged 84, was once described as the best artistic director the National Theatre never had. His career covered such innovative and long-lasting projects as the Liverpool Everyman (1964-70), the Young Vic (1971-73) and two consolidating, long stints as the second artistic director at both the controversial open-stage Sheffield Crucible (1974-81) and the recreated, refurbished Lyric, Hammersmith (1981-94). As a director James was equally at home with new plays and musicals – directing the UK premieres of Chicago and The Wiz (the all-black rock version of The Wizard of Oz) in Sheffield. In 1994 he made a drastic career swerve to become principal of Lamda – the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – and led a complete overhaul of the school's new home, which he identified and purchased, in the former Royal Ballet School buildings on Talgarth Road; there, he re-established its top dog status alongside Rada. A killer commercial theatre success evaded him, but his style was that of a quietly effective enabler: of students, actors, organisations and fellow artists. Right at the start of his Lyric phase, he put on David Hare's important revival of Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse (with Hilton McRae as Rimbaud and Simon Callow as Verlaine) to an acclaim long overdue since its 1968 premiere. And in Sheffield he channelled his sporting enthusiasms – which included boxing and soccer (he was a lifelong Arsenal fan) – into pitching for, and landing, in 1977, the long-term residency of the money-spinning World Snooker Championship, which put the Crucible on the global map and reinforced its local and national profile. Modest, quietly spoken and loved by colleagues and peers alike, James sported a piratical/rock star 'look' with long hair and ponytail, wide-brimmed hats, and a rare ability to roll a liquorice-papered ciggie in one hand while writing notes with the other. When invited to direct the Israeli premiere of Hair in Tel Aviv in the early 1970s, he suggested breaking the ice on the first day of rehearsals by starting with the all-nude scene at the end of the first act. He then stripped off, the actors and stage management followed (birthday) suit and the ice was not only broken but completely dissolved. Born in Enfield, north London, Peter was the son of Gladys (nee King) and Arthur James, who worked in the Enfield gun factory. He was educated at Albany secondary modern (now comprehensive), then joined the sixth form at Enfield grammar school, progressing to Birmingham University to study English and philosophy before spending 39 weeks in rep as actor and dogsbody at the Intimate, Palmer's Green, his near-local theatre. He entered the 'national' world of theatre by taking a certificate in drama at Bristol University and, in 1964, launched the Liverpool Everyman in a former Methodist chapel on Hope Street, with Terry Hands, future RSC director, and Martin Jenkins, future BBC radio drama producer. He directed more than 30 productions there as sole artistic director (1967-70). He invited Liverpool into the theatre, commissioning the poet Roger McGough and his band the Scaffold, and directing a documentary about the building of the new Roman Catholic cathedral at the end of the road. This set the tone for the following eras of the director Alan Dossor and the playwright Willy Russell, and indeed all managements since. At the Young Vic, working with the artistic director Frank Dunlop, he directed Beckett (Denise Coffey in Happy Days), Pinter, Shakespeare, O'Casey and a season of Ted Hughes. The happiest time of his life, he said, was in Sheffield – he gave Alan Rickman his first leading roles, notably as a distraught pop concert sponsor in Stephen Poliakoff's The Summer Party (1980), with Brian Cox and Hayley Mills; and as Jaques in As You Like It with Ruby Wax (1977). James also brought on the comedian and cabaret performer Victoria Wood as writer and the film director David Leland. He himself directed a controversial play by Keith Dewhurst about Northern Ireland, The Bomb in Brewery Street (1975). The Guardian critic and New Statesman writer Paul Allen, who was from Sheffield, claims that James made him a better critic and, later, a better playwright (he wrote the stage version of the movie Brassed Off in 1998 and several plays with Rony Robinson), and he ended up chairing the board. James's Sheffield 'posse', who remained close, included Allen, the designer Roger Glossop, Glossop's wife, the stage manager Charlotte Scott, his secretary Lou Cooper and the press officer Jen Coldwell. At the Lyric, he confessed that he 'never quite knew who I was talking to'. All the same, he directed fine new plays by Poliakoff and Neil Simon, the venerable farce Charley's Aunt starring a brilliant Griff Rhys-Jones, and two musicals by Charles Strouse – an operatic Nightingale (1982) starring Sarah Brightman, and the weirdly eccentric Lyle the Crocodile (1987) – for which Strouse wrote music, book and lyrics – based on Bernard Waber's 1962 book The House on East 88th Street. He called in his impressive international contacts to bring two great directors to the Lyric: Yuri Lyubimov with his version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1983) led by Michael Pennington, and the actor Núria Espert with a beautiful production of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba (1986) starring Joan Plowright and Glenda Jackson, which transferred to the West End. At Lamda, James initiated courses based on the work of Mike Alfreds' Shared Experience and Simon McBurney's Complicité, and commissioned workshops with the playwright Mark Ravenhill and actor/director Di Trevis that led to new plays taken up by Nicholas Hytner at the National – Ravenhill's gloriously rude Mother Clap's Molly House and Pinter's beautiful, unproduced screenplay of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (both in 2000). He left Lamda in 2010 but was coaxed out of retirement to be head of the theatre-directing graduate course at Mountview Academy in Peckham, south London, in 2012, a post he relinquished only two or three years ago. His latest theatre productions included several shows for Glossop at the 260-seater Old Laundry in Bowness-on-Windermere. In all, he was a dynamic, one-man motor and instigator for the last half century of British theatre and fully deserved being made CBE in 2011. James was married to Anthea Olive, a costume designer at the Liverpool Everyman, from 1964 to 1972, when they divorced. He was then in a relationship for 10 years from 1975 with the Irish actor Bernadette McKenna before marrying Alexandra Paisley in 1998; they divorced in 2012. He lived in Tottenham, north London, retiring finally to Truro, Cornwall, to be near his daughter, Emily, from his first marriage. Even there, in failing health, he contacted the Hall for Cornwall to enquire as to how he might advise and encourage young people entering the theatre. He is survived by Emily, by Leo, his son with McKenna, by four grandchildren, Felix, Jessica, Olivia and Lila, and by a younger sister, Margaret. Peter John James, theatre director, born 27 July 1940; died 28 June 2025
