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Another few weeks, another set of Theatrical Experiences!
Frankenstein
We watched on the first night, which meant Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Johnny Lee Miller as Frankenstein, and subsequently all agreed that this had possibly been a mistake because wee all would have preferred a higher Johnny Lee Miller:Benedict Cumberbatch ratio. Relatedly: I feel like it's important to note that this production lasts two hours, and the first solid 20 minutes are a piece of modern dance in which Benedict Cumberbatch attempts to solve the problem of legs. That's a solid ten percent of the production! That's so much Frankeinstein modern dance!
Anyway, I sort of lost my ability to take this production entirely seriously when the weird Frankenstein modern dance immediately segued into a giant steampunk train careening onto the stage while the conductor sung a song about Empire ... like I appreciate that this production has Themems, but subtle, it's not.
idk, I have a weird love/hate relationship with Frankenstein as a book anyway. I thought the production was genuinely fascinating and I'm really glad to have seen it -- the staging and physical acting really were great -- but a lot of the choices made in this adaptation didn't quite do it for me. I don't like that the monster murdered his blind friend + entire family, pushing him much farther off the moral event horizon much earlier, and I don't like that Victor's capacity for human affection is pretty much entirely removed from the script, replaced by a much more caricaturish vision of a scientist Driven By Egoistic Dreams of Progress Without Love. Like, I would be the first to argue that Victor Frankenstein is a hilariously terrible human! I did not realize there was a world in which I could get defensive about his characterization! And yet, mysteriously, here we are. They did get me to have an emotion in the final five minutes of codependent murder chase, but ... let's be real, I'm always going to have an emotion about a codependent murder chase.
Naomi Harris great as Elizabeth, though. Also doing truly stellar work: the large and impressively atmospheric light fixture over the stage. The cinematographer spent a lot of time focusing on it and that was a really good choice.
By Jeeves
We ended up skipping the National Theater Antony and Cleopatra and swapped it out for Andrew Lloyd Webber's extremely rarely staged Jeeves and Wooster musical, and boy, that was ... an experience! An experience was had!
Was it a bad experience? I don't think I would say that. It was often a very funny experience! I enjoyed it tremendously! It was also often a fairly inexplicable experience ...
So the way this show works is, there's a frame story, and the frame story is about how Bertie Wooster is holding a banjo concert, but Jeeves has stolen his banjo and therefore convinces him to present a dramatic re-enactment of something that is mostly "The Code of the Woosters" with a bunch of additional nonsense thrown in for good measure, using only the stage props that one might find in the basement of a banjo concert. A few notably fever-dream-like sequences:
- Stiffy Byng traps Bertie in a hedge maze from which the entire rest of the cast spontaneously appear dressed asaggressive nymphs -- this is not correct, I misremembered due to powerful pastoral energy; they are actually dressed as hypnotized garden staff determined to complete a maypole dance at all costs -- to sing a pastoral song about love
- Bertie convinces the Token American that British people re-introduce themselves to each other after every meal and subsequently traps the entire cast in an endless, recurring series of musical iterations of their own names
- Bertie breaks into the house wearing a horrifying pig mask and proceeds to flail through the entire stage, while the rest of the cast do the Spiderman conga behind him, carrying an assortment of improvised weapons and sing-screaming "IT'S A PIG! IT'S A PIG! IT'S A PIG PIG PIG!"
- the full cast emerges dressed in Wizard of Oz costumes, for absolutely no reason, and sings a short reprise of every song in the production while Bertie Wooster, at center stage, strums enthusiastically on a completely muted banjo. "I really thought I was following the plot," I announced, at this juncture, "until now."
An additional fun element of the filming of this production is that there is a whole audience worth of non-SAG actors in period clothing who have been hired solely to represent the banjo lovers at Bertie's concert, and the camera pans away from the action and out to their moderately perplexed faces far more often than I personally would have thought necessary, but what does that matter? Mine is not the artistic vision behind By Jeeves!
Barber Shop Chronicles
This production is a very cool bit of theater in which a Shakespearean drama of a storyline set in a London barbershop, about the tension between the shop-owner and the young barber who thinks that his mentor betrayed his father, is interspersed with story-vignettes set in other barbershops across Africa: Lagos, Johannesburg, Harare ...
The story is tied together by time -- everything's happening on the same day, everyone watching the same World Cup football match and (mostly) rooting for the same team -- and by the web of connections that slowly builds between the people in the vignettes and the people in the main storyline over the course of the show. It's extremely well-done, and the staging is neat in a very different way than the elaborate constructions of craft that we've seen in the other National Theater Live productions: lots of chairs and small bits of furniture whirled around the stage in different combinations to make an infinite variety of barbershop sets, thematically linked but distinct.
(After a lot of Classic Theater and Lit adaptations -- which I always love, don't get me wrong -- it also made for a nice change to see something stronger and very directly contemporary, with an all-black-male cast. No women; this is very explicitly a production about experiences of black masculinity.)
This one is still up until Thursday, for the record!
Frankenstein
We watched on the first night, which meant Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Johnny Lee Miller as Frankenstein, and subsequently all agreed that this had possibly been a mistake because wee all would have preferred a higher Johnny Lee Miller:Benedict Cumberbatch ratio. Relatedly: I feel like it's important to note that this production lasts two hours, and the first solid 20 minutes are a piece of modern dance in which Benedict Cumberbatch attempts to solve the problem of legs. That's a solid ten percent of the production! That's so much Frankeinstein modern dance!
Anyway, I sort of lost my ability to take this production entirely seriously when the weird Frankenstein modern dance immediately segued into a giant steampunk train careening onto the stage while the conductor sung a song about Empire ... like I appreciate that this production has Themems, but subtle, it's not.
idk, I have a weird love/hate relationship with Frankenstein as a book anyway. I thought the production was genuinely fascinating and I'm really glad to have seen it -- the staging and physical acting really were great -- but a lot of the choices made in this adaptation didn't quite do it for me. I don't like that the monster murdered his blind friend + entire family, pushing him much farther off the moral event horizon much earlier, and I don't like that Victor's capacity for human affection is pretty much entirely removed from the script, replaced by a much more caricaturish vision of a scientist Driven By Egoistic Dreams of Progress Without Love. Like, I would be the first to argue that Victor Frankenstein is a hilariously terrible human! I did not realize there was a world in which I could get defensive about his characterization! And yet, mysteriously, here we are. They did get me to have an emotion in the final five minutes of codependent murder chase, but ... let's be real, I'm always going to have an emotion about a codependent murder chase.
Naomi Harris great as Elizabeth, though. Also doing truly stellar work: the large and impressively atmospheric light fixture over the stage. The cinematographer spent a lot of time focusing on it and that was a really good choice.
By Jeeves
We ended up skipping the National Theater Antony and Cleopatra and swapped it out for Andrew Lloyd Webber's extremely rarely staged Jeeves and Wooster musical, and boy, that was ... an experience! An experience was had!
Was it a bad experience? I don't think I would say that. It was often a very funny experience! I enjoyed it tremendously! It was also often a fairly inexplicable experience ...
So the way this show works is, there's a frame story, and the frame story is about how Bertie Wooster is holding a banjo concert, but Jeeves has stolen his banjo and therefore convinces him to present a dramatic re-enactment of something that is mostly "The Code of the Woosters" with a bunch of additional nonsense thrown in for good measure, using only the stage props that one might find in the basement of a banjo concert. A few notably fever-dream-like sequences:
- Stiffy Byng traps Bertie in a hedge maze from which the entire rest of the cast spontaneously appear dressed as
- Bertie convinces the Token American that British people re-introduce themselves to each other after every meal and subsequently traps the entire cast in an endless, recurring series of musical iterations of their own names
- Bertie breaks into the house wearing a horrifying pig mask and proceeds to flail through the entire stage, while the rest of the cast do the Spiderman conga behind him, carrying an assortment of improvised weapons and sing-screaming "IT'S A PIG! IT'S A PIG! IT'S A PIG PIG PIG!"
- the full cast emerges dressed in Wizard of Oz costumes, for absolutely no reason, and sings a short reprise of every song in the production while Bertie Wooster, at center stage, strums enthusiastically on a completely muted banjo. "I really thought I was following the plot," I announced, at this juncture, "until now."
An additional fun element of the filming of this production is that there is a whole audience worth of non-SAG actors in period clothing who have been hired solely to represent the banjo lovers at Bertie's concert, and the camera pans away from the action and out to their moderately perplexed faces far more often than I personally would have thought necessary, but what does that matter? Mine is not the artistic vision behind By Jeeves!
Barber Shop Chronicles
This production is a very cool bit of theater in which a Shakespearean drama of a storyline set in a London barbershop, about the tension between the shop-owner and the young barber who thinks that his mentor betrayed his father, is interspersed with story-vignettes set in other barbershops across Africa: Lagos, Johannesburg, Harare ...
The story is tied together by time -- everything's happening on the same day, everyone watching the same World Cup football match and (mostly) rooting for the same team -- and by the web of connections that slowly builds between the people in the vignettes and the people in the main storyline over the course of the show. It's extremely well-done, and the staging is neat in a very different way than the elaborate constructions of craft that we've seen in the other National Theater Live productions: lots of chairs and small bits of furniture whirled around the stage in different combinations to make an infinite variety of barbershop sets, thematically linked but distinct.
(After a lot of Classic Theater and Lit adaptations -- which I always love, don't get me wrong -- it also made for a nice change to see something stronger and very directly contemporary, with an all-black-male cast. No women; this is very explicitly a production about experiences of black masculinity.)
This one is still up until Thursday, for the record!
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Makes sense to me. For one thing, it feels like it's working more with Received Pop-Culture Frankenstein than Actual Disaster Frankenstein. For another, it makes for a much less interesting story.
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It is also possible, of course, that I am a bit burnt out right now on anti-science narratives.
(this happens while Elizabeth is attempting to convince him to sleep with her while Frankenstein awkwardly flails and shuts her down)
This worked much better in Bride of Frankenstein. It's hard to compete with Ernest Thesiger.