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Aug. 24th, 2013 09:50 amI've seen two musicals recently! The first was Love's Labour's Lost at Shakespeare in the Park, and it was . . . not good. I mean, Love's Labour's Lost is not really the greatest play anyway - it has too many subplots and the main romance plots are deeply silly and have no emotional impact. This is a thing that you could really improve on in a musical version, if you wanted to. Instead, Love's Labour's Lost takes extra time and depth away from all of its lead characters, plays up the frat-boy aspects without resolving them or making them in any way sympathetic, and throws in valuable bonus features like Random Guy Who Sings A Love Song About Wanting To Eat Cats.
But enough on this, because the other show I saw last week was the recent revival of Pippin and it was AMAZING.
For those of you unfamiliar: Pippin is at least nominally about the adventures of Prince Pippin, son of Charlemagne, as he attempts to flail his way towards a life that is "completely fulfilling."
That is the show-within-a-show. The real show of Pippin is sort of about that, but it's also about performance, and the lure of spectacle -- the self-destructive seduction of the larger-than-life. So the fact that it is staged as a full-color circus filled with acrobats performing humanly impossible feats and choreography that fuses Fosse with Cirque du Soleil is, basically, perfect. (Also perfect is the fact that the actor playing Pippin can in no way keep up with the acrobatics. There's one hilarious moment during one of the songs where a couple of the acrobats are performing a balancing act and invite Pippin up to echo them; Pippin takes a step, hesitates, announces "NOPE!" and bops right back on down. EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE.)
Pippin aside, the real lead role in Pippin is the part of the Leading Player - narrator, director, ringmaster - and we can pause here for a moment of appreciation for Patina Miller's everything:
I should mention, by the way, for those who have not heard this story before, that my last experience with Pippin was our middle-school production. This was hilarious in ways that are ( spoilery for the show, if anybody cares )
I feel like I've already talked a lot about this (it's just so novel for me to actually go see a GOOD musical, rather than one that's lolariously bad!) but a few last points:
- I had forgotten how good the Pippin score is -- not that the songs are so absolutely great in and of themselves, many of them are just kind of cheery 70s pop ballads, but context makes all of them so ironic! IT'S AWESOME
- it took me ages to recognize Terrence Mann as Charlemagne, aka Original Javert and Original Chauvelin, but once I did it was kind of hilarious to watch him get murdered by a bright-eyed revolutionary shouting about tyranny
But enough on this, because the other show I saw last week was the recent revival of Pippin and it was AMAZING.
For those of you unfamiliar: Pippin is at least nominally about the adventures of Prince Pippin, son of Charlemagne, as he attempts to flail his way towards a life that is "completely fulfilling."
That is the show-within-a-show. The real show of Pippin is sort of about that, but it's also about performance, and the lure of spectacle -- the self-destructive seduction of the larger-than-life. So the fact that it is staged as a full-color circus filled with acrobats performing humanly impossible feats and choreography that fuses Fosse with Cirque du Soleil is, basically, perfect. (Also perfect is the fact that the actor playing Pippin can in no way keep up with the acrobatics. There's one hilarious moment during one of the songs where a couple of the acrobats are performing a balancing act and invite Pippin up to echo them; Pippin takes a step, hesitates, announces "NOPE!" and bops right back on down. EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE.)
Pippin aside, the real lead role in Pippin is the part of the Leading Player - narrator, director, ringmaster - and we can pause here for a moment of appreciation for Patina Miller's everything:
I should mention, by the way, for those who have not heard this story before, that my last experience with Pippin was our middle-school production. This was hilarious in ways that are ( spoilery for the show, if anybody cares )
I feel like I've already talked a lot about this (it's just so novel for me to actually go see a GOOD musical, rather than one that's lolariously bad!) but a few last points:
- I had forgotten how good the Pippin score is -- not that the songs are so absolutely great in and of themselves, many of them are just kind of cheery 70s pop ballads, but context makes all of them so ironic! IT'S AWESOME
- it took me ages to recognize Terrence Mann as Charlemagne, aka Original Javert and Original Chauvelin, but once I did it was kind of hilarious to watch him get murdered by a bright-eyed revolutionary shouting about tyranny
