Grand Hotel at The Donmar Warehouse, 2004

I watched 'The Story of the Musical' this evening and out of the ashes of it's predictability flew the marvellous 'Grand Hotel'. It wasn't featured in the programme but all the glitz and special effects on display reminded that I saw a very simple musical, 'Grand Hotel' twice at The Donmar, in 2004 and the memory has stayed with me. It's the musical that taught me it was ok to shed a few tears and I did.

'Grand Hotel' is based on the 1932 film with Greta Garbo and the original book of a cast of disparate characters meeting in a Berlin hotel over a a weekend. Businessmen, a dying middle aged man, a typist with ambitions for Hollywood, a fading ballerina and her dresser and a young baron down on his luck. The Donmar production featured Daniel Evans as the dying Mr Kringelein, Mary Elizabeth Mastranatonio as the ballerina and Julian Ovenden as the Baron. The ballerina and the Baron fall in love when the Baron tries to steal her jewels. No, they don't fall in love, they find the love in each other they've waited their whole lives for. It's a quick and clean love, and all encompassing over one night and, at last, they're together. And then the Baron is killed while trying to rob the room of a businessman and all is lost.

Of course, that's not the end, it can't be. The Baron had promised to meet his beloved at the train station the next morning to see her off on her farewell tour and there he is. His love is so strong that his spirit is there, waiting at the station with roses for his beloved and she, of course, doesn't know he has been shot and thinks his was a false love like so many she's endured before. He can't speak and she can't see and they miss each other...

The Baron has two show-stopper songs, 'Love Can't Happen' which he sings when he realises he's in love with his ballerina heroine, and 'Roses At The Station' when he is dead. He sings,

I'm here Elizaveta at the station//Here with the roses at the station//I'm here Elizaveta at the station//Here with the roses at the station

All my life I have wanted to be here//All my life I have waited to appear//At the station//With these roses...

He tells us that he survived the First World War with bullets flying past him, he's had everything he's wanted in life only to finally find love and to lose it so quickly and so suddenly. So beautiful and so sad and a great platform for Julian Ovenden's great voice. He has a powerful voice and should do more singing. I saw him in the one-off concert version of 'Merrily We Roll Along' in 2010 and his voice is, if anything, getting better.

I was delighted to find the Broadway cast recording in a shop in Toronto in 2005 and it features Brent Barrett as the Baron and Jane Krakowski (from 'Ally McBeal') as the typist with ambitions. It's a great recording but I'd love to have my cast on the record.


I'd love to see this show again.