skygiants | (no subject)

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 as ~~aggressive 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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

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.

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.

From:

rachelmanija

By Jeeves sounds hilarious.

I think Frankenstein would have been riveting onstage, but I got so bored by the 20 minute modern dance sequence that I gave up.

From:

kore

the weird Frankenstein modern dance immediately segued into a giant steampunk train careening onto the stage while the conductor sung a song about Empire

Oh boy, that would have been the point at which our household noped out.

From:

innerbrat

The best thing about the MillerMonster modern dance sequence - apart from the fact that it didn't read like modern dance but as fantastic mime work - is that Cumberbatch wasn't on stage.

From:

bookblather

I've seen a different production of By Jeeves and it... did not have some of the weird stuff... but it was hilarious af. Like the cast was not dressed as nymphs in the hedge maze, so it came off more as the actual rest of the cast popping in to either matchmake or laugh at Bertie's suffering, depending on facial expressions. Although I did feel that they made Bertie... too dumb?

From:

grrlpup

I loved the audience close-ups in By Jeeves because it so reminded me of watching the Boston Pops on PBS in the 1970s. It’s like the very most genteel version of a laugh track.

From:

oracne

I saw the Jonny-Monster first, and liked it better.

From:

skygiants

There's a whole very literalized thread about how Frankenstein is all excited about creating life through SCIENCE while ignoring the possibility of creating life NATURALLY through LOVE (this happens while Elizabeth is attempting to convince him to sleep with her while Frankenstein awkwardly flails and shuts her down) and it's like ... a little subtlety would be OK, guys. We can pick up on ironic parallels without having things explicitly spelled out, I promise.

From:

skygiants

I really regret that I didn't have the time to write it up during the 48 hours it was free-streaming because I definitely think other people would have gotten a kick out of it.

The thing about Frankenstein is that now, no matter what else we watch, I have gotten into the habit of looking up at the nineteen-minute mark and announcing "at this point in Frankenstein, Cumberbatch was still attempting to sole the problem of legs."

From:

skygiants

It's probably just as well I did not see it in the theater because that might have been ended up being a point at which I laughed inappropriately in the theater.

From:

skygiants

See, that DOES sound much more appealing!

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I kind of agree, Bertie was ... very dumb. I also didn't love that Bertie was cast as like mid-forties, in the version I saw, and Jeeves was hitting distinguished-elder -- it was weird not to see them both youngish, and Bertie's constant perplexity and occasional bouts of petulance are less charming in someone who really seemed like he ought to be old enough to know better. But it was nonetheless frequently extremely funny!

From:

rachelmanija

Hahahaha. Imagine if you were watching The Fellowship of the Rings.

From:

skygiants

HA, yes, that's exactly the vibe! Extremely PBS.

From:

skygiants

General consensus seems to be that it was the preferable version! I honestly did briefly consider attempting to watch it as well just to observe the differences, but my quarantimes schedule has not sorted itself out such that it seemed the best use of any two hours in that week ... perhaps if they ever air it again.

From:

skygiants

THREE AGES OF MIDDLE EARTH HAVE GONE BY AND CUMBERBATCH STILL HASN'T FIGURED OUT LEGS!

From:

rachelmanija

When you phrase it like that, it's very plausible.

From:

sovay

creating life through SCIENCE while ignoring the possibility of creating life NATURALLY through LOVE

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.

From:

sovay

It’s like the very most genteel version of a laugh track.

That sounds extremely charming.

Edited (HTML) Date: 2020-05-17 02:13 am (UTC)

From:

elsane

Andrew Lloyd Webber's By Jeeves

That cut tag combines two things I never expected to be compatible with existing even metastably in each other's vicinity and now I have to go lie down.

From:

elsane

(I apologize for all my figurative language immediately coming out physics, yikes)

From:

littlerhymes

I have read your By Jeeves write up but my mind refuses to comprehend it. WHAT IS HAPPENING.

I watched Frankenstein when it screened at the cinema years ago, at the height of Cumberbatch fever. The modern dance sequence haunts me.

From:

antisoppist

Me and the 18 year-old musicals fan greatly enjoyed By Jeeves but it was really not what we were expecting. Also we have spent the week earwormed by "Love's Maze" which I merely wish to inflict on everyone else as much as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW5ZJvAQMa0

The Wikipedia entry and a linked account of the 1975 version are intriguing - Tim Rice backed out of the project, Alan Ayckbourn agreed to write the book but "additional problems were caused by Ayckbourn's lack of interest in musical theater as a genre"(!). The original version involved Spode and the Eulalie plot (without revealing what Eulalie was), which sounds like Andrew Lloyd Webber does Springtime for Hitler. They sacked Emma Thompson's father as director and Alan Ayckbourn took over with his lack of interest in musical theatre, and the tryout lasted 4 and three-quarter hours and they cut Aunt Dahlia before opening night although the actress was on all the posters. It makes you quite surprised anyone decided to bring it back in 1996.

From:

skygiants

As soon as I learned this existed I had to take quite a while to process, and then we immediately started discussing who, in fact, we thought would do an actually good job with a Jeeves and Wooster musical. We did not answer this question to any of our satisfaction but the process did bring us round to deciding that Stephen Sondheim would write a great Lord Peter Wimsey show...

From:

skygiants

LONG after I have forgotten everything else about that production, I will recall Cumberbatch slithering out of his womb and flopping around on the stage while earnestly pretending he had no understanding of the concept of knees.

From:

skygiants

I just rewatched it and I'd somehow already forgotten just how beautifully nonsensical the arrival of the dancing corps is ..... I will say this, though, when the music started up, I immediately decided that they could have replaced the entirety of the faux-aria in "Phantom of the Opera: Love Never Dies" with "Love's Maze" and it would have been both catcher and more operatic!

I'm so curious about the 1975 version now ... it does sound like a very classical theatrical disaster!

From:

venetia_sassy

I think my brain is refusing to process most of this but for some reason I am deeply amused by,

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.

and keep going back to laugh at it.

From:

telophase

We got to that point and my only thought was "...nobody told me this was a musical...?"

We watched the whole thing, and I'm not sorry we did, but I also do not feel the need to see it ever again.

From:

tempestsarekind

I have been earnestly Not Watching Frankenstein for years now, every time they do an NT Live encore of it (but do they ever do encores of the ones I had to miss, I gripe to myself, like The Beaux’ Stratagem? nooooo), because I don’t really care for the story of Frankenstein anyway. But it felt dumb not to watch it when it was free on YouTube, so I did.

I...would have been annoyed to have paid for it, I think? But I did watch the MillerCreature version, which was a good choice (I also watched the beginning of the CumberCreature version, afterwards): Miller was interestingly childlike, so watching him figure out how to walk felt like cheering on a baby, whereas Cumberbatch felt like someone who already knew what walking was and just couldn’t figure out how to make his limbs do it - which was much less engaging somehow, for me.