Robert Tanitch reviews Grand Hotel at Southwark Playhouse, London SE1
Vicki Baum worked as a parlour maid for six months in a Berlin hotel so she could research her best-selling novel, Menschen I’m Hotel, which was published in 1929. A dramatisation of the novel ran for a year on Broadway in 1930.
In 1932 Grand Hotel became the first all-star Hollywood film with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore and his brother, John Barrymore. The film was melodramatic and sentimental, full of clichés and banalities; in short it was perfect entertainment for all those looking for escapism from the Depression. It was in this film that Garbo famously said she wanted to be alone.
In 1958 Robert Wright and George Forrest turned Grand Hotel into a musical, but it failed to reach Broadway. In 1989 it was rewritten and there was additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.
The score is great. The musical was a brilliant artistic success on Broadway, winning many awards. The success was due largely to the spectacular staging by director-choreographer Tommy Tune.
Luther Davis’s book, a social panorama, follows the fates of the Grand Hotel’s guests and staff in 1928. Wall Street has crashed and time is running out for them all. The Nazis will all too soon be in power. The overlapping stories occasionally interlock.
The guests include a famous ballerina (Christine Grimandi), past her prime, who is accompanied by a devoted companion (Valerie Cutko) and dancing to empty houses. A baron (Scott Garnham), deep in debt, and with gangsters breathing down his neck, decides to steal her jewellery only to find he prefers to have a fling with her. Garnham singing “ Love Can’t Happen” is one of the high spots. So is Grimandi singing “Bonjour Amour.”
A pregnant typist (Victoria Serra) dreams of becoming a movie star in Hollywood. She is prepared to sleep with any man if he will take her to America. Stewart has a rewarding dance number, “Girl in the Mirror.”
Christine Grimandi and Scott Garnham
A company director (Jacob Chapman) attempts to cheat his stockholders and fails to save himself from financial ruin. A dying Jewish accountant (George Rae) decides that it is time he started living it up.
Each time I have seen Grand Hotel, the production, the performance and the choreography have always been amazing.
First there was Tommy Tune, then there was Michael Grandage in 2004 at the Donmar and now there is Thom Southerland’s thoroughly engaging production.
Played out on a narrow traverse stage, it will, no doubt, have an instant cult following. Southerland directed Maury Yeston’sTitanic musical at the same address brilliantly last year.
Grand Hotel is essentially a parade of characters. They are constantly kept on the move on the catwalk. The inventive and exhilarating choreography is by Lee Proud. The lighting is by Derek Anderson. The songs are really tuneful. The one criticism would be that you can’t always hear the lyrics.
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Images by Aviv Ron
