Daniel Evans has been appointed artistic director at Chichester Festival theatre, but he will have to celebrate his new job temperately, as he is in the busiest stage of rehearsals for next week’s opening at Sheffield of the Broadway musical Show Boat.
His knack with a song-and-dance classic – previous Christmas shows in South Yorkshire have been My Fair Lady, Anything Goes and Oliver! – must be one aspect of his CV that caught the eye of the West Sussex selectors. Chichester’s recent profile and profitability have been greatly helped by West End transfers of Guys and Dolls, Gypsy and Sweeney Todd, those last two shows written by Stephen Sondheim, of whose work Evans was an Olivier award-winning interpreter during his actor-singer career.
Technically, Evans is an actor-manager, although he has put on the greasepaint only twice during six years in Sheffield. It will be intriguing to see to what extent he treads the Chichester stage on which Sir Laurence Olivier formed the first National Theatre.
During the recruitment process, the word was that Chichester was seeking someone who could continue the tradition of lucrative musicals, while encouraging new work and more community involvement.
Evans would have been able to point to a record of venue-suitable original writing – the annual world snooker championships at the Crucible next spring will be followed by a new Richard Bean play about snooker – and productions that engaged even more directly with the locality. This summer’s thrilling Camelot: The Shining City was a collaboration with the Slung Low company and Sheffield People’s Theatre, in which a cast including 150 South Yorkshire extras spilled from the stage into two sites in the city.
The building Evans now inherits is in formidable artistic form under the incumbent, Jonathan Church: two of this year’s theatrical highlights were the London run of Imelda Staunton in Gypsy and, at the home-base, Young Chekhov, a trilogy of early plays by the Russian dramatist, which is expected to transfer to the National Theatre next year. And while Chichester faces some serious challenges – principally a core audience that tends towards the elderly and conservative – Evans should have fewer sleepless nights than at Sheffield over national and regional funding cuts.
Good-natured and kind, but steely when needed, he is thought to have been seriously considered for the artistic directorship of the National Theatre in London three years ago, and if he lives up to his ability at Chichester, would be disadvantaged the next time the NT comes up only by the fact that he would extend an unbroken succession of men.
Others rumoured to have expressed interest in Chichester included star directors on the London circuit and a couple of dazzlingly famous actors. The board, though, has sensibly picked a director who has shown in a directing career of only 10 years the skills to extend the theatre’s existing strengths while stealthily innovating – pushing out the boat as well as the Show Boat.
