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9 months ago
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EXCLUSIVE: Succession’s Sarah Snook, now the toast of the town for her dazzling one-woman performance playing 26 characters in a breathtakingly innovative staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, will likely head to Broadway early in 2025 once she’s had a break, and if she wants to do it.
There are tentative, in no way definite, plans for the production to be filmed for the National Theatre’s NT Live.
Look, movies and television are great art forms, and I love ‘em to bits like everybody else, but nothing beats watching an artist at the top of their craft live on a theatre stage. And in Snook’s case in The Picture of Dorian Gray, she’s able to command every inch of the Theatre Royal Haymarket stage.
Snook went into rehearsals last November to shoot the extensive video content that features portraits of her inhabiting Wilde’s creations, adapted and directed by Kip Williams, artistic leader of the Sydney Theatre Company. There’s so much video content it took three weeks to film the sequences in Melbourne, where the actress and her family are based.
Rehearsals paused over the holidays and then Snook went to Los Angles to attend the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and the Emmys. Shen then traveled directly to London where work on Dorian Gray resumed at the English National Ballet’s center for dance in Stratford, east London.
“The fact that she’s just been able to navigate that all and not lose focus is beyond impressive,” Michael Cassel, founder of the Michael Cassel Group and the show’s lead producer in partnership with London-based Adam Kenwright’s Kindred Partners, tells me over afternoon tea at a hotel next door to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where the play runs until May 11.
The production with Snook will have further life, if the acclaimed thespian is willing.
“I would love to take it to New York,” says Cassel. “I think the show will be well received there and I’m hoping Sarah might be keen to do it there. Let’s see if the stars align: Sarah’s availability, and desire for the show, theatre availability. You know, all that sort of jigsaw puzzle.”
He adds that “Sarah deserves a bit of a break” and that “we’ll probably look to, probably, the New Year.
“In my ideal world that would be an ideal timing if everything aligned, you never know,” he says.
As for a possible NT Live version, Cassel confirmed that “we’re having those discussions at the moment.”
He tells me that “it would be great to memorialize the show” but cautioned that the producers won’t make a commitment to NT Live until decisions are made and finalized about Broadway.
Many conversations are still to be had with those involved in the show, primarily its star.
Cassel concedes “it would be nice to do it and have it memorialized like it deserves to be. We’d have to act quickly if we want to do it.”
Those discussions would include how to film a live version of a production that features so many split-second camera changes. “We’d have to dig into that to see … I’d leave that to the creative geniuses,” Cassel says.
Williams’ adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of the first shows to reopen theatres in Sydney in late 2020. It received spectacular reviews for both the production and for Eryn Jean Norvill, who originated the role.
I mentioned the curtain call and how magnanimous Snook was in sharing the bows with the nine technicians who criss-cross the stage filming the actor’s movements, which are beamed instantly on screens often intermingled with the pre-shot footage.
Cassel laughs as he recalled seeing the show in Sydney and how he was “blown away” by what Williams had achieved.
But what “mesmerized’ him as a producer was “this must be really quite easy to run. There’s one actor and I counted, I thought, three camera operators, but it’s not until that curtain call that I remember being gobsmacked as I looked at everybody.”
There’s a cadre of 18 people in various capacities all to do with the camera and sound operation. It’s remarkable how the projections of Snook across the various screens are seamlessly interlinked. The visuals are so astonishing that at one point I thought there was a person in a Snook mask mirroring her movements.
“That’s what’s so clever about it, ”says Cassel, “that reality that Kip has created.”
The stage at the Haymarket is raked so the producers had to de-rake it because of the way the filming works. However, in the studio back in Melbourne, technicians had to build a replica of the de-raked stage because in all of the pre-records Snook’s eyeline must match exactly what character Snook’s interacting with on stage. “That is a work of art, I think, in terms of navigating each moment scene by scene.“
All of the “supporting cast” are technicians, not actors. Even so, ”that has to be as tight an ensemble as a performing company,” Cassel says.
“We cast those camera operators as much as you would actors in a show, so there were auditions for the camera crew,” and they had to know how to move, “to flex their talents beyond the cameras” because every movement “is so tightly choreographed from a camera angle perspective, and so those camera operators have to be right on their mark as much as Sarah is on hers for that to work.”
The camera unit had a week of rehearsals in London ahead of Snook’s arrival.
The original Sydney production played in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland and did a return session in Sydney, all with Norvill playing the multiple roles.
“This is the chance to go and originate it from scratch,” for Snook, Cassel says.
What Snook achieves at the Haymarket can only be done by a creature of the stage. Only a top-flight artist can pull it off. It’s not for novices.
“Sarah is a creature of the stage, that’s where she started; just that depth of character that she’s able to find, because each individual role in that show has to be unique,” he says. “That’s what’s mezmerising to see one person do all of that in quick succession.”
This is a show that’s going to occupy Cassel’s attention for months and years to come.
Charles Finch And Partners To Open Los Angeles Branch
EXCLUSIVE: Finch + Partners, the luxury goods consultants behind Saturday night’s pre-BAFTA dinner that it hosts with Chanel, is branching out by opening an office in Los Angeles later this year.
It’s a move driven by Finch + Partners founder Charles Finch and Claire Ingle-Finch, the group’s managing partner, and it’s something that’s been uppermost on their minds for the past two years.
“The time feels right,” Ingle-Finch tells me. “There are so many areas of our business where an L.A. outpost feels like a super natural reflex.”
The plan is for the Finch + Partners to launch in L.A. “in 2024 absolutely,” Ingle-Finch confirmed.
They will seek out “some interesting partners; senior executives, best in class in their space, obviously leaning into the areas of our business where it makes sense,” Ingle-Finch explains.
Finch + Partners work with brand clients such as Chanel, Dior, Saint Lauren Hermes, Netflix, Focus Features, Warner Bros Discovery, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Columbia, Zegna and many others.
The decision comes as there’s been a titanic shift at the intersection of films, fashion and music, and Finch + Partners have been at the nexus of that convergence.
Whether that’s Jonathan Anderson, founder of his JW Anderson fashion label, working as a costume designer for Luca Guadagnino on the Challengers, or Saint Lauren Productions working with Pedro Almodóvar on Strange Way of Life. “It’s heating up and that space is a super exciting space to be,” Ingle-Finch noted.
Attention was paid when French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault acquired a majority stake in CAA via Artemis, the Pinault family’s investment company. Kering, the luxury goods group that includes Saint Laurent and Gucci, is part of the Artemis organization.
“It’s a natural step,” says Ingle-Finch. “The brands have to support the artisanal nature of filmmaking just as these filmmakers are artisans themselves. I feel like as an agency we’re pretty well placed” with luxury and entertainment clients and then sister businesses in film production and publishing.
“That’s an evolution of everything we’ve been talking about, that’s unparalleled access to talent and opportunity for everyone in that acquisition working within their various eco-systems. That’s a big play and it’ll be interesting to see what develops from that,” she tells me.
Charles Finch actually predicted a lot of what has happened several years ago. It’s certainly true that he’s been hoping for this kind of relationship between movies and luxury brands since I began covering him over 25 years ago, probably more, when he helped lift the BAFTA weekend out of the doldrums with his parties and events.
He’s been doing the same thing in Hollywood for nearly four decades. He likes to say that he was 22 when he hosted his first Oscar party at Mr. Chow’s, and, of course, everybody came. “I’m 61 now,” he boasts. The party has landed at different venues but for the past few years the pre-Oscar soiree has been held in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ”That party is so old it goes back to the silent era,” he jokes.
“I’m very interested in the fact that we’re actually living this synergy of luxury brands to film and all the things that I predicted many years ago are happening between Saint Lauren making films, between Kering acquiring CAA. This is the the leaping-off point for that synergy becoming real,” says Finch gleefully.
He says there’s a need of further support for the kind of “larger grown-up movies” that the studios used to make.
Those kind of films “require support from other methods of financing, where the business makes sense not only in financial returns but in how those movies are promoted and how the activity surrounding those movies gets to the public,” he says. “That’s where the luxury bands can be enormously helpful, because they have the marketing dollars to promote their own product obviously, but also to support these movies.”
He tells me that in the next year “we’re going to see more and more major luxury houses actually financing films.“
“With the support of the brands, I think what can happen is that those studios can lessen their risk with that kind of support,” says Finch. “And potentially, filmmakers can find more freedom because they can also get the support from outsource financing that isn’t equity shareholding into their films.”
Saturday’s pre-BAFTA event with Chanel is ”packed,” Ingle-Finch declares.
Everybody will be there, she says, including Barbie star and producer Margot Robbie who draped herself in Chanel gowns and suits while promoting Chanel.
And let’s hope Christopher Nolan and his Oppenheimer crew also rock up to party the night away.
“I think I brought a little swagger and glamor to BAFTA,” Finch says with a smile.
Ruaridh Mollica Picks Range Media Partners In Hollywood
EXCLUSIVE: Scottish-Italian newcomer Ruaridh Mollica, who starred in director Mikko Makela’s Sebastian that played this year’s Sundance Film Festival, clearly made an impression over there.
The young actor, based in London, has decided to sign in the U.S. with Range Media Partners, who also represent Tom Hardy, Taron Egerton and Keira Knightley. He will continue to be represented in the UK by Greg Herst at Conway van Gelder Grant and Ruth Hollyman of Scotland’s Strange Town agency.
