YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: PERFORMING-ARTS: PERFORMING ...

Performing Arts: MUSIC: Popular: United States Hootie and the Blowfish, a racially mixed rock band from Columbia, S.C., sold more than 10 million copies of its debut album, Cracked Rear View, and spent eight weeks at the top of the U.S. album sales charts during 1995. Led by vocalist-guitarist Darius Rucker, the four-piece group undertook a successful tour of major concert venues, playing to larger, more diverse audiences than the college fraternity fans who had first embraced the band's music. Hootie embodies the liberal dream of a successful civil rights movement, wrote one reviewer. Alanis Morissette, a native of Canada, rose to prominence with Jagged Little Pill, an album of highly personal, sometimes angry songs describing emotional upheaval. A dance-pop recording artist at age 14, Morissette collaborated with songwriter and pop producer Glen Ballard to create her more mature rock-oriented sound. Released by Madonna's record label, Maverick, Morissette's album sold more than three million copies with help from the brassy, confrontational pop hit You Oughta Know. The Georgia-based rock group R.E.M., which first rose to prominence in the early 1980s, reaffirmed its status as a pioneer of alternative college rock with a successful world tour in support of its late-1994 release, Monster. A slightly younger generation of alternative rock bands, including Hole (led by Courtney Love, widow of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain), Sonic Youth, Beck, and the British group Elastica, joined the 1995 lineup of Lollapalooza as the traveling alternative rock festival moved into its fifth year. The $92 million Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened its doors in Cleveland, Ohio, in early September with gala festivities and a concert featuring rock and pop stars past and present, including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Melissa Etheridge, and Al Green. Earlier in the year, Green joined the Hall of Fame along with new members the Allman Brothers Band, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Martha and the Vandellas, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, the Orioles, and journalist Paul Ackerman. Jerry Garcia (see OBITUARIES), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member and singer and guitarist for the Grateful Dead, died on August 9 at age 53 in Forest Knolls, Calif. Garcia's band had placed great emphasis on musical improvisation in performance. Many of the band's fans, known as Deadheads, followed the group from concert to concert during its frequent tours. In December the Grateful Dead announced that they would disband. Equally devastating to fans was the March 31 murder, by a disgruntled employee, of Tejano superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez, known professionally as Selena. (See OBITUARIES.) Just over a month before her death, the 23-year-old native of Lake Jackson, Texas, had captured 6 of 15 honours at the 15th annual Tejano Music Awards in San Antonio, Texas. Selena's posthumously released album, Dreaming of You, a mix of mainstream pop and Spanish-language Tejano selections, debuted at number one on Billboard magazine's Top 200 chart, the first album by a Latino artist to achieve the distinction. Alison Krauss, a 24-year-old fiddler and singer, stunned the country music world by winning four awards at the 29th annual Country Music Association awards. An Illinois native, Krauss initially built her reputation by playing and singing a traditional bluegrass repertoire for Rounder Records, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., and not affiliated with the larger Nashville, Tenn.-based country record labels. Reba McEntire mounted the most elaborate stage show and drew the largest audiences in the country field in 1995. Garth Brooks, the best-selling country artist in history, released Fresh Horses, his first studio album in two years, with $4.5 million in marketing support from his record company. Singer-songwriter Roger Miller and the former executive director of the Country Music Association, Jo Walker-Meador, were elected as members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Country and pop artist Charlie Rich died in Hammond, La., while on a trip to hear his son perform, and the popular crooner, actor, and comedian Dean Martin died on Christmas Day. (See OBITUARIES.) Oscar Brand's radio broadcast Folk Song Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. Michael Jackson paired a disc of his past hits with a second disc of new songs on HIStory: Past, Present and Future Book 1, and his sister Janet Jackson also assembled a best-selling retrospective, Design of a Decade 1986/1996. African-American vocal harmony groups Boyz II Men (see BIOGRAPHIES) from Philadelphia and TLC from Atlanta, Ga., continued to score hits in both the pop and the rhythm-and-blues fields. The fortunes of rap acts declined somewhat and rap records included more singing, but rap fans continued to greet warmly new releases by artists such as Naughty by Nature, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Tupac Shakur. Rapper Eric (Eazy-E) Wright, a founding member of the seminal Los Angeles-based gangsta rap group N.W.A, died from complications related to AIDS. (JAY ORR) THEATRE There were strange, troubled times in 1995. The brilliant actor Mark Rylance, who questioned the authenticity of the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays, was appointed artistic director of the new Globe Theatre, the Shakespearean shrine under construction at bankside on the River Thames. In a year of Macbeths all over the country--the play was on the British school system's examination syllabus--Rylance himself played the murderous Scottish thane as a rotten apple among the orange people--a deviant in a cult faction. It was a brilliant notion that addressed, in a serious contemporary fashion, the pervasive atmosphere of magic and superstition in the play. Rylance's Lady Macbeth, played by Jane Horrocks, was a vicious innocent whose idea of fancy dress at the feast--the entire play was set around Halloween--was to go as a nun. In the sleepwalking scene, stripped to her childish underwear, Horrocks actually urinated on stage. As the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) confirmed that it would vacate the Barbican Centre in London for at least six months of each year from 1997 and concentrate on touring (while retaining the Stratford-upon-Avon stronghold), the Shakespearean initiatives were clearly happening elsewhere. The RSC's main stage Stratford productions of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Julius Caesar were intellectually arid, under-cast, and physically dull. Easily the best Stratford Shakespeare was Richard III with new RSC star David Troughton, directed with imagination and verve by Steven Pimlott. At the Swan at Stratford, Adrian Noble directed Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard to general acclaim, while Matthew Warchus was responsible for one of the most gleeful and vigorous Ben Jonson revivals in living memory, The Devil Is an Ass. Rylance's vivid Macbeth was almost matched by a brave, bold version at the Birmingham Rep directed by former RSC associate Bill Alexander. The same play was imaginatively treated by the English Touring Theatre--one of the medium-scale touring companies that were maintaining the transformation of the classic repertoire begun by Cheek by Jowl and Shared Experience in the 1980s--and also at the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London, in a fast, furious production by Nicolas Kent with a black Macbeth (Lenny James) and an outstanding Lady Macbeth (Helen McCrory), lit continuously by flaming torches, fires, and candles. The team of actress Fiona Shaw and director Deborah Warner, having made headlines in 1994 with their controversial production of Samuel Beckett's Footfalls, which was banned by the author's estate, presented a Richard II in the Royal National Theatre's (RNT's) small Cottesloe auditorium that was equally divisive. Shaw played the monarch as a gender-free hysteric wrapped like a mummy in white bandages, but it was impossible to ignore the conceit. Warner's exciting production was played through the middle of the audience, and the idea was to consider notions of monarchy aside from personality, as indeed Richard himself does on many occasions in the play. This task, in the end, proved self-defeating, and Shaw consoled herself with a fascinating, but deliberately unfrivolous, performance as Millamant in the RNT's modern-dress revival of William Congreve's masterpiece The Way of the World, in which Geraldine McEwan as Lady Wishfort had a field day in a rose pink tutu, clinging desperately to her carnal instincts. McEwan's achievement was deservedly recognized with the Evening Standard (ES) best actress award. The RNT once again cleaned up in the ES awards, notching four of the seven prizes: in addition to McEwan, best actor for Michael Gambon in the leading role in Volpone, whose director, the shooting star Warchus again, was named best director; and best comedy for Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice, an astoundingly confident debut by a well-known young television comedy writer set around a poker school in a London restaurant. A special award was made to Richard Eyre, artistic director of the RNT, who was planning to move on in 1997. The race for Eyre's succession was already heating up. Obvious nominees, such as the actor Sir Ian McKellen and Stephen Daldry, the director of the Royal Court and of the worldwide blockbuster hit revival of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls, denied any interest in the job. This left the field clear for the very young Sam Mendes, Eyre's favoured contender, who had made a spectacular job of running the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, or possibly Jonathan Kent of the Almeida Theatre. Kent's RNT revival of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage in a new text by David Hare, with an acclaimed performance by Dame Diana Rigg in the title role, would not have damaged his chances. Kent also directed the very fine, romantically old-fashioned Hamlet of Ralph Fiennes at the Hackney Empire and on Broadway. Kent's work was given a gloss and sheen uncomplicated by the sort of innovative daredevilry Rylance brought to Shakespeare. The RNT mounted excellent revivals of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw, Rodney Ackland's Absolute Hell, Eduardo de Filippo's La Grande Magia, and (an RSC discovery of the 1970s) John O'Keeffe's Wild Oats. Best of all, perhaps, was Sean Mathias' revival of Stephen Sondheim's 1973 A Little Night Music with the entire action whirling in waltz time around a brilliant gray/gauze design by Stephen Brimson Lewis. The RNT's major new play of the year was Hare's Skylight, directed by Eyre and starring Gambon and Lia Williams, in which a long-exhausted affair between a shambling, thuggish restaurateur and his former employee, now an overworked schoolteacher in the deprived East End of London, is revisited, and re-created, in a present crisis. Technically, the writing was superb, and Hare's debate about a collision between the insensitive entrepreneurial spirit and the incensed reality of a society falling apart--refracted through the romance--was brilliantly joined. The other outstanding new play of the year was The Steward of Christendom by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry, directed by Max Stafford-Clark in a coproduction between his own touring company, Out of Joint, and the Royal Court. This was a memory play concerned with a crucial period of Irish history reenacted in a mental home by a retired Catholic policeman, Thomas Dunne, in 1932. Dunne, a real-life ancestor of Barry, switched allegiance from the British Crown to the revolutionary republican Michael Collins, who signed the treaty with London for Irish independence and was later assassinated. Deranged and confused like King Lear, Dunne was surrounded by his daughters and accumulative regrets, retreating finally to jibbering, childlike helplessness. The play was powerful enough, but it became a veritable sensation through the performance of Donal McCann. Other new plays of note were Jonathan Harvey's The Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club, a superior situation comedy of modern sexuality and quirkiness presented by the English Touring Theatre and the Contact Theatre, Manchester, at the Donmar Warehouse and finally at the Criterion in the West End; and Harry Gibson's Trainspotting, a hilarious, devastating adaptation of Irvine Welsh's cult novel about junkies and no-hopers in Edinburgh that seized the popular imagination all year in cities from Glasgow and Liverpool to Manchester and London. Trainspotting, like Rupert Street, came to rest in the West End at the end of the year, a sure indication that in order to survive, the theatre must exist enthusiastically in its own times. In its first year the National Lottery elicited differing views on the propriety--or otherwise--of a government actively encouraging gambling as a form of taxation; it also produced millions of pounds for the arts. The Royal Court was a chief beneficiary, securing 16 million toward a comprehensive redesign and refurbishment of the famous old theatre in Sloane Square to begin in 1996. Under Daldry the artistic policy had been at its liveliest since the first flush of John Osborne and the Angry Young Men in the 1950s. The first "first play" to be mounted on the main stage since Osborne's Look Back in Anger was a riotous gangland comedy set in the Soho of the 1950s, Mojo by Jez Butterworth (ES most promising playwright). Also memorable were Sam Shepard's haunting Simpatico and Phyllis Nagy's The Strip, a seriously underrated, beautifully written adventure story ranging from Las Vegas, Nev., to Earl's Court, London, with one of the best opening lines in modern drama: "Female impersonation is a rather curious career choice for a woman, Miss Coo." Nagy's other play was Disappeared, a fascinating thriller of escape and mystery that toured the country and contained one of the year's best performances, by Kerry Shale. In the Royal Court's little Theatre Upstairs, a first play by young Sarah Kane, Blasted, created one of the year's big controversies. Scenes of molestation, buggery, baby-munching, and Bosnia-in-your-front-room violence had critics frothing at the mouth with rage. Not since Edward Bond's Saved in 1964 with its baby-stoning scene had there been such a furor. But there was also a disturbing sense of a dysfunctional relationship between a cynical journalist and his underage girlfriend, and Bond himself joined Harold Pinter and others in defending the play and hailing a talented new theatrical voice. Pinter directed Taking Sides, a fine new play by Ronald Harwood, at Chichester and in the West End. This posed a confrontation between a coarse American officer played by Michael Pennington and the mystical conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler (Daniel Massey) during the denazification of Berlin at the end of World War II. Taking Sides arrived in town from the Chichester Festival, where producer Duncan Weldon first capitalized the show for 25,000. Had he presented it first in the West End, the costs would have been at least 200,000, an amount, he said, that would be virtually impossible to recoup on a serious play. Thus, like Broadway, London's commercial theatre was becoming barren of creativity, except in musical theatre. The difference was that in the U.K. so many plays came from the subsidized sector, and from venues like Chichester, the problem was virtually disguised. Julie Christie shimmered mysteriously in Pinter's Old Times, an import from the Theatre Clyd at Mold, near Chester, and Pinter appeared, hilariously, as a demented administrator of a mental home in a revival of one of his own early plays, The Hothouse, which also began life in Chichester. The same address provided a superb revival of Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice for Shaftesbury Avenue, with the cast led by Leo McKern. Alan Ayckbourn's Communicating Doors, like his other plays, was first seen at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. Its three interlocking time scales were ingeniously managed in the one hotel bedroom, and the leading role was taken by the musical comedy star Julia McKenzie. The West End was fortified by the dazzling solo comedy of Eddie Izzard and by a season of Royal Court "classics" at the Duke of York's--Ron Hutchinson's Rat in the Skull, starring Rufus Sewell, followed by Terry Johnson's farce Hysteria. Alan Bates gave a leisurely reading of Solness in Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, directed by Peter Hall, but his Hilde Wangel, newcomer Victoria Hamilton, made an indelible first impression. Tom Stoppard adapted a radio play for his less-than-brilliant Indian Ink at the Aldwych; the year closed with a revival of his first hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, at the RNT. One of the most curious events of the year was the defection of the actor Stephen Fry--who made his name in university and television revue with Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson and his fortune by rewriting the "Lambeth Walk" musical Me and My Girl--from Simon Gray's play Cell Mates. The defection was doubly ironic, given that Fry was playing the British spy George Blake. The notices were admittedly mixed and the play undoubtedly poor, but Fry seemed poised on the brink of a personal crisis, and he simply disappeared three days after the opening. He resurfaced in Brugge, Belgium, and faxed his friends that he was all right, but he was unable to allay the wrath of the playwright or the producing management, who entered legal proceedings against him. The musical cupboard was virtually bare with a continuing proliferation of undistinguished cabaret-style entertainments. An attempt to jazz up Gilbert and Sullivan, The Hot Mikado, gave pleasure to some but was, in truth, an enterprise of hollow worth. Jerry Herman and the late Michael Stewart's eagerly anticipated Mack and Mabel (ES best musical) arrived 20 years after its Broadway premiere in a sadly underfinanced production first mounted at the Leicester Haymarket. The second-act narrative problems had not been solved, the songs were reasonably effective and well-upholstered (especially when they were reminiscent of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, Herman's big hits), while the acting and choreography were undistinguished. Much livelier was Jolson, which mixed elements of the bio-musical and compilation show to powerful effect. The politically tricky issue of Jolson's blackface stage persona was neither ducked nor celebrated; otherwise, Brian Conley's magnificent performance, possibly the most extraordinary performance of the year on any British stage, gave a warts-and-all portrait of the superstar monster, and his lungs and personality gave full justice to the wonderful repertoire of songs. This reminder of the great actor's supremacy over all other theatrical components only underlined the sadness of so many departures during the year. John Osborne's death on Christmas Eve 1994 seemed to trigger a spate of casualties (see OBITUARIES): the grand old character actor Sir Michael Hordern, the finical classicist Eric Porter, the immensely popular light comic actor and Ayckbourn specialist Paul Eddington, the fascinating elder juvenile Jeremy Brett, the blazing RSC star Susan Fleetwood, and Sir Robert Stephens, a founding member of both the modern Royal Court and the RNT. Stephens had made a remarkable comeback in recent years as Falstaff and King Lear with the RSC and, though debilitated by illness following a liver and kidney transplant operation, had managed to complete his autobiography, a recording of Shakespearean speeches at the command of Prince Charles, and a television appearance as the poet John Dryden in Tony Palmer's TV film about the composer Henry Purcell. The glorious but politically and economically threatened tradition of weekly repertory theatre continued in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Glasgow, and Nottingham. All those cities' theatres had productive years. The Edinburgh Festival triumphed with Philip Prowse's Glasgow Citizens' production of Friedrich von Schiller's Don Carlos, the long-awaited return of the Pina Bausch dance company, and a double bill of delightful, bitter Sacha Guitry sex plays from the Schaubhne, Berlin, directed by Luc Bondy, which forged a missing link in European light comedy between Ferenc Molnr and Nol Coward. In Ireland the most significant production was Marie Jones's A Night in November, which toured incessantly under the banner of Dubbeljoint (a joining of Dublin and Belfast) and charted the personal history of an association football (soccer) fanatic and Protestant bigot who is transformed and converted by his enthusiasm for the Republic of Ireland's success on the international soccer stage. The solo role was memorably taken by Dan Gordon, whose passionate performance diverted the audience from the slight worries of implausibility surrounding the narrative premise. The Dublin Festival premiered a new Barry play, The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, at the Abbey, but this failed to fulfil the expectations engendered by the massive impact of The Steward of Christendom. (MICHAEL COVENEY) This updates the article theatre, history of.