Singing in the rain: Regent's Park musicals hit the high notes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/may/30/musicals-regents-park-theatre

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Although it's large, the rehearsal space at Toynbee Studios, east London, is so crowded that walking through the door induces instant claustrophobia. There must be 60 people in here, hemmed in by chairs, props and an oppressively low ceiling. But when a squall of rain starts hammering at the windows, at least everyone stays dry.

This is important, because the show being rehearsed, Ragtime, is just a few days from moving across London to Regent's Park. Specifically, to the Open Air theatre, which over the past five years has been transformed into one of the capital's most exciting spaces. Before 2008, it was best known for its almost yearly productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream: the bucolic setting felt magical, but the work was inert and genteel. Since then, however, it has redefined itself as a home of radical theatre design and surprising programming – and one of London's hottest venues for classic musicals.

For the past three years, the theatre has won the Olivier award for best musical revival: for its 2009 production of Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's high-spirited Hello, Dolly!, its 2010 version of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, and last year's staging of the George and Ira Gershwins' Crazy for You, which went on to become a West End hit when it transferred to the Novello theatre. And these shows didn't earn just awards. Into the Woods was the highest-grossing production in the open air theatre's 80-year history – although that was topped the following year by Crazy for You, which took more than £1.5m at the box office in its six-and-a-half-week run. In other words, this 1,200-seat, unsubsidised, charity-run theatre locked in the middle of a park is playing Shaftesbury Avenue at its own game – and winning.

All of these musicals were directed by Timothy Sheader, the Open Air's artistic director, and the man chiefly responsible for the theatre's metamorphosis. He first worked here as a freelancer in 2005, directing Twelfth Night. "When I was making the work, I hated it. I didn't understand the weather, I didn't understand that the audience could see each other. It was abnormal to me. And then when I watched the result, it felt more spirited and more complicit between all of us. It felt more elemental."

What Sheader has done since becoming artistic director in 2007 is use the ample resources at his disposal – financial and natural – to emphasise the elemental. The space, an amphitheatre surrounded by overarching trees, he says, "allows me to work in a more installational, unconventional way than in a regular theatre". Against all advice that Arthur Miller's play was too intense to work outside, he staged The Crucible in 2010, employing 20 girls to sit on tree stumps around the stage, marking the edge of precarious civilisation. For Lord of the Flies (2011), a plane was crashed between the trees: not a scaled-down model of a plane but a real plane, hacked apart and spread around the stage. It's Sheader's visual imagination, Observer critic Susannah Clapp has argued, that's turned the Open Air from "a decorative space into a vital one".

Ragtime is another high-risk show: unlike Crazy for You, it isn't a champagne fizz of a musical. Adapted from the novel by EL Doctorow and set at the turn of the 20th century, it is a state-of-America tale, dealing with immigration from Europe, racial inequality and the relentless advance of technology. And when it premiered in London, at the Piccadilly theatre in 2003, it ran for just three months. Sheader saw that production, and has wanted to return to the work ever since. He describes his staging as "post-apocalyptic": the set is a mess of concrete rubble and twisted wires, presided over by a torched billboard depicting US President Barack Obama; the trees towering overhead act as reminders of nature's endurance.

Not that Sheader or his designer Jon Bausor – with whom he frequently collaborates – can ever forget nature in this space. It's all in the name: the Open Air is open to the elements, be it scorching sun, sudden rain, birds serenading the dusk or squirrels setting up home on stage. The downside to this can be found in the umpteen practical considerations that demand respect. Matt Noddings, the Open Air's production manager, takes me on a tour of the backstage area, pointing out the storage space for electrical equipment that habitually floods, the pile of towels required for drying the stage mid-performance, and the band area, concealed beneath tarpaulin, which never sees the sun and consequently is so cold the musicians need to wear winter clothes. These are not problems that people working indoors ever face.

But adversity inspires boldness, says Bausor. "You're fighting nature and you can't compete – so you have to turn all the knobs up." He cites the spectacular sets of the Bregenz opera festival, on the shore of Lake Constance in Austria, as a key influence, arguing that the Open Air requires design work on a similarly epic scale. Each year, he solves another problem: for instance, without a roof from which to suspend cables, it would seem impossible to fly things in and out of the space – yet, in Ragtime, Bausor scorns this by making a mini-crane integral to the set.

It's this respect for the setting, combined with a violent desire to defy it, that makes Sheader's Open Air theatre so invigorating. Once Ragtime moves to the stage, the same group of people that was so overwhelming in the rehearsal room suddenly seems puny, dwarfed by the immensity of the trees and the leaden expanse of the sky. Watching them, you realise that Sheader's ability to harness his theatre's natural monumentality, and use it to his own purposes, really is the secret of his success.