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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, November 2, 2015 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Megan Ching, Julia Lewis PAGES: 18, including this page. C3 October 31, 2015 ‘Funny Girl’ Secures Transfer to West End, Before It Even Opens By David Belcher LONDON — Just a few weeks into rehearsals, the Menier Chocolate Factory has announced that its revival of “Funny Girl,” which broke the theater’s box-office records by selling out in 90 minutes, will transfer to the Savoy Theater in London’s West End on April 9 for 12 weeks. The production, starring the Olivier Award winner Sheridan Smith, is the first major London revival of the musical, which had its premiere on Broadway in 1964 but has not been produced there since. (A Broadway revival planned for 2011, which was to have starred Lauren Ambrose and be directed by Bartlett Sher, was scrapped after several producers pulled out.) Whereas other classic Broadway musicals with major original stars — such as Ethel Merman in “Gypsy” or Gertrude Lawrence in “The King and I” — have enjoyed successful revivals in both London and on Broadway, “Funny Girl” has remained indelibly linked to Barbra Streisand, who originated the role of Fanny Brice on Broadway at age 21 and repeated it on the London stage in 1966 and in the 1968 film version, winning an Oscar for best actress. The musical recounts the rise of an actress from working-class New York to film and Broadway stardom, and features such songs as “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” For the London production, the book by Isobel Lennart is being revised by the writer and actor Harvey Fierstein, though the producers are not releasing any details, or information on whether the original score (by Jule Styne, with lyrics by Bob Merrill) remains intact. Ms. Smith won an Olivier Award for her role in “Flare Path” in London in 2011 and has also starred in the West End in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hedda Gabler” and “Legally Blonde.” The new “Funny Girl” is directed by Michael Mayer, whose Broadway credits include “American Idiot’’ and “Spring Awakening”; and co-stars Darius Campbell as Brice’s ne’er-do-well husband, a role made famous by Omar Sharif in the film version. The Menier has had several productions move to the West End, and its revivals of “Sunday in the Park With George,” “A Little Night Music” and “La Cage aux Folles” transferred to Broadway. The sold-out production at the Menier Chocolate Factory will run Nov. 20 to March 5. The West End production will run April 9 to July 2, and tickets go on sale Nov. 16. C1 November 2, 2015 Review: In ‘King Charles III,’ Glimpsing the Near Future of Monarchy By Ben Brantley To sign, or not to sign. That is the question that hangs so urgently over the wavering title character of “King Charles III,” Mike Bartlett’s flat-out brilliant portrait of a monarchy in crisis, which blazed open on Sunday night at the Music Box Theater. Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Yet as portrayed by Tim Pigott-Smith, in a fully fleshed performance that finds heroic dimensions in one man’s misguided bid for greatness, this unsteady monarch acquires a pathos that might indeed be called Shakespearean. Yes, it’s only a pen he holds, not a sword, as he stares at the unsigned documents before him. But in that pen lies the power to divide a nation and to erase a king’s identity. Directed with fiery wit and rushing momentum by Rupert Goold, this London import, which won last year’s Olivier Award for best play, is a work that takes all manner of audacious license, poetic and otherwise. It’s one thing to portray the current members of the House of Windsor, on whom it is always open season for writers of every stripe, in a mainstream drama. (A fictional version of Queen Elizabeth II showed up on Broadway earlier this year — and picked up a Tony for the actress playing her, Helen Mirren — in the form of Peter Morgan’s “The Audience.” But that play was highly respectful to Her Majesty and, while necessarily speculative, rooted in known fact.) But Mr. Bartlett has the hubris to venture not only into the future but also into the minds of public figures who are notorious for never revealing their thoughts. What’s more, he opens up these shuttered psyches by means of language, structure and theatrical devices that brazenly imitate those of one (gulp!) William Shakespeare. Much of the script is in blank verse, with a heady surfeit of expanding metaphors, lyrical soliloquies and discreetly rhymed couplets. In other words, any sane theatergoer hearing of this latest effort from Mr. Bartlett, whose earlier work includes the excellent but small-scale “Cockfight Play,” might have predicted a Shakespearean fall from grace. Yet with “King Charles III,” Mr. Bartlett sails with bravado over every high hurdle he sets up. What could have been only a cleverly executed stunt is instead an intellectually and emotionally gripping study of the strangely enduring anachronism that is the British monarchy and of the contemporary, star-struck world that can still find room for its royals. And for Bardophiles, “King Charles III” provides the bonus of confirming the immortal topicality of Shakespeare. Prototypes of plot, imagery and character from not only “Hamlet” but also “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV” and “Macbeth” are invoked with droll yet illuminating precision as we follow the fortunes of Charles and his family. And, yes, aside from his mum, the gang’s all here: Charles’s wife, Camilla (Margot Leicester); his sons, William (Oliver Chris) and Harry (Richard Goulding); and his daughter-in-law, Kate (Lydia Wilson); as well as a long-dead family ghost (Sally Scott) who still shows up on the covers of celebrity magazines. The plot is propelled by the quandaries, both constitutional and existential, of its title character, whose previous life has been, as he puts it, “a ling’ring for the throne.” Now that his mother has died, he is determined to fill dynamically what for centuries has been a passive, ornamental role. This proactive attitude takes the specific form of his refusal to sign a bill, already passed by Parliament, that would limit the rights of the press in invading personal privacy. You would think that Charles — whose first wife, Diana, was killed while fleeing paparazzi — would be sympathetic to such measures. But a principle is at stake, he insists, as is his very essence. As he says, in a lovely example of Mr. Bartlett’s neo-Shakespearean style, For if my name is given through routine And not because it represents my view Then soon I’ll have no name, and nameless I Have not myself. His stubbornness grows into monomania. Such obduracy is met with horror by the reigning prime minister (Adam James), and strategically mixed emotions by the leader of the more conservative opposition party (Anthony Calf). When the conflict between Charles and his government is made public, chaos ensues that forces a nation as well as a king to wonder just who and what they are. Paralleling Charles’s quest for selfhood is that of a bewildered Prince Harry, whose hedonistic lifestyle is not unlike that of Prince Hal in the “Henry IV” plays. But instead of being in thrall to a Falstaff, he falls in love with a socialist art student, Jess (Tafline Steen), and the wide-open world of commoners. In the meantime, Prince William and his sharp-witted, strong-willed wife, Kate, try their best to ensure the future of the throne that will eventually be theirs. The attendant plots and counterplots are laid and hatched in a world in which a moss-covered past always coexists with a shiny present. This sensibility is richly yet efficiently conveyed by Tom Scutt’s ancient-looking, cathedral-like set and contemporary costumes; Jon Clark’s lighting, which shifts between phantasmal shadows and flashbulb brightness; and Jocelyn Pook’s ceremonial music. The cast members — and they’re marvelous, to a one — deliver the script’s stately speech with such easy fluency that you forget they’re speaking in iambic pentameter. Playing people whose job is to maintain facades, these performers endow their characters with a canny self-awareness and a tellingly varied gift for balancing shell and substance. Charles’s tragedy is that he’s a prisoner of an ivory-tower notion of royalty as much as Shakespeare’s medieval figurine of a king, Richard II, was. And like Richard, he finds himself pitted against a usurping Bolingbroke, who understands that for the monarchy to survive, it has to accommodate changing times and the juggernaut of realpolitik. This role is assumed here by several characters, including one within the royal family. That’s the former Kate Middleton, born a commoner, astutely played by Ms. Wilson as a sane and even salutary Lady Macbeth type, who knows full well that it’s those who master the photo op who really rule the public in “a world of surfaces.” Charles, alas, refuses to accept such reductionism.

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