Checking in to limbo

The film that made Greta Garbo famous for wanting to be alone is now a gritty musical on the London stage. Rhoda Koenig takes a look at the successive refurbishments of Grand Hotel

"People come, people go," says the house doctor and raisonneur of the musical Grand Hotel, watching the revolving door with a blasé air. He doesn't, as in the 1932 movie, add, "Nothing ever happens", which is just as well, as that dyspeptic comment is contradicted not only by what's on stage but by the history of the piece. First presented in 1958, in a version that never got to Broadway, then revived 40 years later for a New York run of 1,000 performances and a shorter one in London, the musical is coming to the Donmar Warehouse, a theatre one would have thought a more appropriate size for a show about a bed-and-breakfast.

"People come, people go," says the house doctor and raisonneur of the musical Grand Hotel, watching the revolving door with a blasé air. He doesn't, as in the 1932 movie, add, "Nothing ever happens", which is just as well, as that dyspeptic comment is contradicted not only by what's on stage but by the history of the piece. First presented in 1958, in a version that never got to Broadway, then revived 40 years later for a New York run of 1,000 performances and a shorter one in London, the musical is coming to the Donmar Warehouse, a theatre one would have thought a more appropriate size for a show about a bed-and-breakfast.

Grand Hotel, in its various versions, has memorable associations - it was the movie in which the exquisite Greta Garbo stated that she wanted to be alone, the Broadway show with the piquant set of 30 gilt chairs, the London musical that made Nicholas de Jongh cry. But its progress and transformation also illustrate the changing shape of the musical over the past few decades.

Switching from room to room and story to story, the MGM movie, drenched in the glamour that Depression audiences craved, showed the wheel of fortune spinning and stopping for all the wrong people. Lionel Barrymore plays a downtrodden office worker, who wins a fortune that could change his life - if he weren't a dying man. His brother, John (in a poignant commentary on his own career), is an aristocrat on the skids, stealing from the rich to give to himself. The hot-to-trot Joan Crawford is a secretary, hungry for the high life. And Garbo, the aging, lonely ballerina loved only by her public, glimpses romance - but is she too late? The film was thick with ermine and chinchilla, but the atmosphere was less Berlin than back lot.

Cut to the late 1950s. The screenwriter Luther Davis, rummaging in a second-hand book stall, came across a copy of Menschen im Hotel, the Vicki Baum novel on which the movie was based. "The movie was sort of ponderous, I always thought," he recalls. "But the novel was more sprightly, more journalistic." With Robert Wright and George Forrest, who created the scores of Song of Norway and Kismet, he planned a musical version, called At the Grand. "I set it in Italy, and I made the dancer an opera singer. I really loused it up."

He was not the only one. The story was reworked to focus on Otto Kringelein, the dying book-keeper, to suit the star, Paul Muni. "I started to worry about him even before rehearsals," says Davis. "I visited him one day at the Chateau Marmont, and he pointed out the window to a big, ugly billboard, and said, 'They put that there just to taunt me,' and I thought, 'Uh-oh.'" When the show was up and running in Los Angeles, the huge set, with three revolves, by Reuben Ter-Arutunian, was a sumptuous nightmare. "Muni would ad lib when he was on stage. He didn't know you can't ad lib in a musical. He would go on and on, and finally the director would cut the lights ... anyway, afterwards he had a nervous breakdown. But I should never have made him the star because he totally unbalanced the show, which is an ensemble piece."

Reviews in LA were good, the New York advance sales were high, but Muni refused to take the show to New York, and it got no further. Then, decades later, Davis went to London and caught Les Miserables. "It was a revelation - it was the first time I'd seen a musical with no laughs. I called Wright and Forrest, and said, 'Why don't we try it again?' So I threw away the old book, which was line-line-joke, line-line-joke, and wrote a new one that focused more on the characters. And I made Kringelein Jewish."

What really made - and re-made - the musical, which reverted to the title of the movie, was the contribution of Tommy Tune, its director and choreographer. In 1989, theatregoers were far less likely to be impressed by a grand hotel than in 1932 or even 1958. Postwar prosperity meant that the old-fashioned city hotels, if they were still in business, were no longer awesome. The show had to give its audiences something distinctive, not merely wallow in spectacle. Tune swept away the familiar accoutrements of luxury, summoning up a hotel with just a revolving door, a red carpet, a front desk and 30 gilt chairs. He also introduced a much higher proportion of dance than was usual on Broadway.

With a cast led by Liliane Montevecchi, the musical reached Boston - and a crisis. Despite the striking choreographic inventions, the show wasn't going over. Twenty years after Cabaret, the evocation of the Weimar period seemed tame.

Enter Maury Yeston, lyricist and composer of Nine. Yeston saw at once that the show lacked a decent opening number. "The first night I was there, I wrote it. It tells you where you are and sets the tone. It has a sinuous, almost Kurt Weill-ish melody that creates the period, as the lyrics create the hotel, so you don't need the scenery."

Yeston ended up writing seven new songs and rewriting several others, deepening the characterisations. "In the original, the song 'I Want to Go to Hollywood' could have been sung by any girl. What I did was make it specific to the secretary by adding a section about how she wants to get away from her flat in Friedrichstrasse, where she has to keep scrounging for coins to put in the heater, and where things that get broken stay broken. I went back to Vicki Baum's book - it was all there."

Yeston also gave the entire show an ominous quality. "The Wright-Forrest score was a very benign portrayal of the period. I wanted to add a tone of menace, to make it clear that the society has spun off the rails and is on the brink of disaster. In the opening, I had each character make a phone call that includes the words 'Time is running out'. What had been an episodic show became a ticking clock. But I was writing a show for an audience in 1989, not simply a pastiche of the music of 1928. I also had to take into consideration how the musical had developed post-Sondheim."

Grand Hotel still had weaknesses - though another collaborator was brought in to rewrite the book, no one rewrote Yeston's often cheesy lyrics (we're invited to come "where the wealthy are staying" and "hear what people are saying"). But the show racked up a three-year run. In 1992, the New York production transferred to London. Reviewers praised the vitality and inventiveness, but weren't keen on the material. The show ran for just four months.

When Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, came upon Grand Hotel, what struck him was the rarity of the piece - an American musical with a European setting. But hethought that Tune's production lacked a European sensibility. With Adam Cooper as choreographer, he has tried to make the show leaner and meaner. Grandage went back to the novel and, with its "gritty" quality in mind, set about heightening the most important aspect of the show. "Every character who comes through the revolving door is dysfunctional, depressed. The life force is not in any of these people. It's the hedonistic ambiance that's the star." There's also the sense that the hotel is the cruel, endlessly spinning world. "Uh - yes, but we try not to be too obvious about that." Grandage concedes that the double-bluff treatment of the ambiance will be difficult to pull off. The intimate dimensions of the Donmar, he agrees, would not be suitable for an old-fashioned sort of show that took the glamour at face value, but "in a small space we can almost forensically investigate these characters". Grandage has also cast the show with actors who are believable incarnations of their roles, even close up. Mary-Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who plays the dancer, is a plausible match for Julian Ovenden, unlike Liliane Montevecchi, who looked like Brent Barrett's grandmother.

Like Grandage, Cooper is working to make the show feel "seamless", to have uninterrupted movement that carries the audience along. The dance blends into the set design. "There will be a mural of very chic Twenties characters, and at times the characters will become part of the mural." The dance "emphasises character, rather than being confined to separate numbers. Everyone, even the anonymous guests, is given a characteristic movement. You can tell from the way the baron moves that he's an aristocrat, that he's been a soldier." Movement, adapted to the space, helps create the unifying ambiance. "Everybody's restless, discontented, even the richest and most successful characters. As the show goes on, there's a feeling of increasing pressure, of things coming closer together and people seeming about to crash in to one another. I'm trying to give it a sense of organised chaos."

George Forrest died in 1999, but Robert Wright, who has seen many shows come and go ("I'm over 90, dear, but I'm not going to tell you how much"), takes a benign view of this latest reworking. "Once you write a show, you have to let go of it - it has to make its own way in the world." As the world of musicals has turned many times since it was last seen, we can look forward to a greatly refurbished Grand Hotel.

'Grand Hotel', Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 060 6624) to 12 Feb