How last-gasp changes saved All About Eve
DIRECTOR Ivo van Hove gathered his cast, including Gillian Anderson and Lily James, hours before the stalls were due to fill with famous folk on opening night — to make last-minute changes to his adaptation of All About Eve.
The film’s best-known line, ‘ Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night’, must have been close to the company’s lips.
Some of the previews that had gone before were bumpy indeed. I saw one of them and put my unsettled feelings down to jet lag and the onset of a fever that all but knocked me out. Yet just a week later I was on my feet, cheering. Van Hove had triumphed. It wasn’t a replica of the film that famously starred Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a true star of the theatre; Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, who wants to usurp her; and George Sanders as the venal theatre columnist Addison DeWitt.
And, thankfully, the three stage leads (Anderson, James and Stanley Townsend) weren’t impersonating them, either.
Someone close to the production told me the opening scenes on Tuesday hadn’t been there on Monday. ‘ They were put in this afternoon. Ivo insists his cast arrive at rehearsals fully off book, meaning they know their lines. He can throw the whole play up in the air, and the actors will go with it because they know their lines inside out. So when he changed everything on Tuesday they weren’t fazed.
‘Normally, a show like this is frozen several days beforehand. This was done in four hours, on the day of opening.’
The show worked for me. Townsend was a superb anchor as DeWitt, but the women — Anderson, James and Monica Dolan ( as Karen Richards, Margo’s best friend) — ruled.
Reviews from critics were mixed. I suspect some caught the show before Tuesday’s big changes went in.
In any event, the piece, produced by Sonia Friedman and Robert B. Cohen for Fox Stage Productions, is attracting young audiences who aren’t devoted to every gesture in the film. They’re interested in the famous stage actors, and Van Hove.
It already has over £6 million in advance ticket sales — a record for a straight play that’s not Harry Potter And The Cursed Child.