Elton shrugs off the jibes from highbrow critics
IT has taken a couple of months to catch Ben Elton to talk about his Rod Stewart jukebox show, Tonight’s The Night, but it’s certainly not because he feels he’s flogging the theatre equivalent of worn-out old vinyl. The light comedy, Faustian-pact tale of a young garage mechanic who sells his soul to become a satin-shirted pop rooster has been playing to packed houses for more than a decade.
The reluctance, you suspect, is most likely to do with the fact that Elton knows, in media terms, he’s the man who can do no right.
Despite creating Blackadder, which will rerun until hell freezes over, the writer suffers opprobrium the way the rest of us suffer weather gloom.
It doesn’t matter if he’s written 13 best-selling novels or his Queen musical We Will Rock You has stormed the world. His theatre work, say critics, is often banal. But today he’s talking, and thankfully is in fine voice.
“Everything I do comes with a shower of brickbats,” he says on the subject of (unfair) criticism. “Yet, if I avoided a piece of work just because I thought there would be a council-truck s***load of criticism delivered at my door the next morning, I’d never have written anything.”
He adds, in soft voice: “Apart from my play Popcorn, very little I’ve done has been anything but horrendously received.”
Elton finds it astonishing, however, that high-brow critics aren’t in tune with jukebox musicals.
“For gawd’s sake, who doesn’t love a jukebox? Who doesn’t look at such a machine either with anticipation or think ‘What memories can I now force on the rest of this pub?’ Look, the idea that theatre should be a place to be challenged and have one’s intellect provoked – well I have no argument with that.
“But why should people who pay the taxes for the intriguing new drama at the National be sneered at for going to the theatre to celebrate a communal experience such as a pop musical? Indeed, why not synthesise 25 pop standards with a comedic story?
“Theatre has always been about pop music,” he continues in animated voice. “Noel Coward, Cole Porter and Gilbert and Sullivan wrote popular music and used theatre to have their work heard. Now, pop music is coming back to the theatre via the jukebox musicals.”
His voice tone lifts in delight. “Can you imagine what it’s like for a bloke like me, who spends most of his time alone at a typewriter writing novels then gets to share in this wonderful songbook and hang out with great actors and musicians at rehearsals? It’s amazing.”
What you don’t appreciate until you see Tonight’s The Night is not how many good songs Rod Stewart produced, but how some of his more naff efforts such as disco duff Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and Hot Legs actually work when reimagined tongue-in-cheek.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” he says, with genuine appreciation in his voice. “I would never dare to say it myself, but I do think that putting songs in a narrative context gives Rod’s songs a different emotional position. As the author, it’s a gleeful task.”
Elton wasn’t always in a state of glee during the production. When he finished the show’s script, Stewart refused to read it.
“He said he wouldn’t absorb it. So we set up a workshop he could visit. But I had a feeling he’d like it, and on the day he turned up it was wonderful, in fact it became a party.” The show has some lovely twists. The Devil, for example, is played by a rather sexy female.
“Hopefully Rod’s not been corrupted too much by devils all his life,” Elton throws in laughing. “But I wanted not just to imbue the spirit of Rod’s music, which is so deeply romantic, but also to capture his impishness.” And deliver a moral. “The message is you won’t get too far in life trying to be someone else. It’s the story of our modern celebrity-obsessed life. Just watch the X Factor and hear people say, ‘I want to be Beyonce.’ You need to find your own life force.”
The cynics argue Ben Elton leapt onto the musical theatre bandwagon. But it’s not valid. When 12 year-old Ben first saw Grease in its original London production it was an epiphany. Back in 1973, early in his teens, Elton actually played the Artful Dodger in a “rather good” amateur production of Oliver!
“I loved musical theatre before it was cool,” he laughs. “There was a time when it was sneered at. John Lennon didn’t like it, but McCartney did. And I think Paul was right. He saw it as a great art form. And now the penny has dropped. Cyndi Lauper has written a show, Bono and the Edge . . . Tim Minchin.
He adds, grinning; “Look, I’m not saying I think the change in perception is down to me, but 12 years ago when I began working with Queen there was a thought that musicals were for grannies. Not now. It’s a powerful art form. And a joyful one.”
The public think so. And since Elton’s the man responsible for putting millions of bums on theatre seats, perhaps it’s time he got the applause. Tonight’s The Night, King’s Theatre, Glasgow June 2 - 14.