skygiants

The other show I recently saw on Broadway was the new revival of Sunset Boulevard, which is just an absolutely fascinating example of what staging and direction can do to a familiar show.

The friend I went with pitched it to me with a link to this review: "have i ever seen sunset boulevard. no. am i FASCINATED by a show that hates its source but is maybe good? yes." Thinking about it, I don't think I'd ever previously seen Sunset Boulevard staged either, but I've heard the music a bunch, which is what listening to Broadway Pandora Radio a lot in the early 2000s gets you, and read a lot about it because that's what reading a lot about the history of noir gets you, so it feels deeply familiar and known to me despite the fact that I have never, technically, been to a production.

So forth we went, and returned afterwards to the question of whether the show does hate its source: no! I don't think it does! Genuinely, I think it loves its source/s, the film and the musical both, and what it's trying to do is aggressively situate itself as a musical in the context of them.

For those to whom it is less familiar, the basic plot of Sunset Boulevard: in 1950s Hollywood, a desperately out-of-work screenwriter extremely behind on his rent accidentally ends up at the house of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond, who lives in a mausoleum to her own past fame and is convinced that once she finishes the script she's working on, she can launch herself back into stardom. Once he takes a job as her script doctor, he finds himself feeding her professional and romantic obsessions in an increasingly Gothic spiral that inevitably culminates in tragedy.

In the original film, Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, a famous silent screen siren who was once once such a valuable asset to her studio that she was "carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the set", and her Significant Gothic Butler by Erich von Stroheim, a famous silent film director who had not directed a picture since 1933. It is a gothic noir About Movies, About Hollywood Culture, About Fame -- and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical is likewise About Movies, About Hollywood, About Fame; what this new production does, I think, is also make it About Theater, about film and theater, about how those are and are not the same thing.

The show's sets are existent, but minimal. The biggest element is a huge projection screen, and the crew -- and sometimes the cast -- have cameras with which they walk onto the stage, getting up close, projecting faces. The cameras are not invisible; the cast know that they're there. Norma is always playing to them. Other characters react to them in variable ways, but they know that they're being watched. The projections are always in black and white, and so is most everything else; it's high-noir, high-chiaroscuro, almost no color on the stage whatsoever, really effectively creepy. If you had asked me before this if an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could genuinely scare me, I would have confidently said no! I would not have been correct!

The most striking staging choice of the show -- and, I think, the one that most clearly portrays its directorial vision, its argument -- is

( staging spoiler I guess?? cut for length anyway )

Good production! The friend I went with is planning to see it again and I wish I could too. Also I guess now I do have to actually see the movie.

For some reason all current ambient stress in my environment is manifesting itself as really big emotions about pets, so the opening number of Maybe Happy Ending -- in which Darren Criss plays an obsolete helper robot convinced that his beloved owner is someday going to return for him -- played on my feelings Extremely Effectively and perhaps moreso than it would have at any other time.

The show, which is set in and originally premiered in Seoul, focuses on two retired helperbots, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), who live across from each other in a big retired helperbot complex that I think they are not legally allowed to leave. Both of them, but Claire in particular, are slowly deteriorating due to the fact that replacement parts for their models are no longer available; they meet when Claire has to come borrow Oliver's charger because hers isn't functioning anymore. After some initial bickering, Oliver reveals his ill-conceived plan to go on an epic Brave Little Toaster journey to Jeju Island to find his old owner James, and Claire -- who owns a car as a gift from her old owner, despite the fact that she is not allowed to drive it -- offers to drive him there, because she's always wanted to see Jeju's fireflies again.

When I first saw the title and read the 'robots fall in love' little promo summary on the website, I thought the show's failure mode might be a certain level of cutesy or twee. But it's not, not really, and I think that would have been be true even if I didn't spend much of it feeling Big Sad Pet Emotions -- inherently it's a show about entropy, and the inevitability of loss, and there's a kind of melancholy that pervades it even in its cutest moments. There was a point 2/3 of the way through the show where it could easily have ended before the robots officially explicitly fell in love, and there's a part of me that wishes that they hadn't Officially Explicitly Fallen In Love and that the show had let the connection between them sit in a place that was real and significant and important without being Exactly Like Human Romance. But the ending is satisfying and makes for a nice thematic landing point right on that knife-edge of cuteness and melancholy, and who am I to tell the robots they shouldn't fall in love?

In other notes, it's technically very well-done -- the visuals and sound effects are superb, and Darren Criss in particular is doing a very effective job with Robot Physicality -- and really my only actual complaint is that I do not think the music is particularly memorable. There's a lot of jazz oldies in the soundtrack because Oliver picked up Being A Jazz Fan from his owner, and IMO all the new/non-diegetic music suffers in contrast .... is what I started to type and then I looked up the music and realized that everything I thought was a jazz oldie was in fact written for the show. So! I take it back! Good job on the convincing jazz oldies! They were great!

Also shout outs to HwaBun the potted plant and congratulations to him on his Broadway debut; his bio was the best thing in the program.

When I heard 'Florence and the Machine Great Gatsby musical coming to Boston' I knew immediately that was a Theater Experience that I needed to have and I would never forgive myself if I did not have it.

Did I expect it to be good? No!

Did I think it was, in the event, particularly good? Well, no. But it wasn't terrible either!

( cut for length )

Sidenote: in the program, there were two contributors who were both credited for having previously worked on Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet and Moby Dick -- both other recent A.R.T. Weird Musical Spectacles that

genarti and I made a point of seeing -- and then the one was also listed as having worked on a show called RooseElvis and the other as having worked on The Communist Dracula Pageant and I spent the rest of the night convinced I was being punk'd because they'd locked our phones up at the beginning at the show and I had no way to verify these were real productions and surely they could not have happened without us hearing about them and going?? There was nothing on hell or earth that would have kept me from The Communist Dracula Pageant if it really existed???

Anyway it did turn out these were real shows, they just happened long enough ago that they were before our time. Alas for the constraints of linear chronology!

The other piece of theater we saw on vacation was Operation Mincemeat, which both

genarti and I had both sort of assumed would be a kind of musical shitpost until multiple different friends individually and independently recommended it to us. We had been planning to see it when we thought it was a musical shitpost anyway and were sort of bemused to learn that it was apparently so good that everyone we knew had already seen it twice, but now, having seen it, I have to agree: I would also see it twice!

For those unfamiliar, Operation Mincemeat recounts a legendary WWII spyjink in which the British floated a corpse loaded with fake secret documents to convince Nazi Germany to move their troops off of Sicily. The leader of the project, Ewen Montagu, then wrote a book which was made into a movie in the fifties starring Clifton Webb as a noble and patriotic Ewen Montagu, and then Ben Macintyre of spy nonfiction fame wrote another book which was made into another movie starring Colin Firth as a handsome and tormented Ewen Montagu.

Operation Mincemeat is coming in with a hot take, which on a broad scale is that that wealthy and charismatic upper-class officers who write narratives about heir own heroics are probably taking credit for a lot of work put in by other people, and on the more immediate scale is that Ewen Montagu -- introduced with a scathing song titled "Born to Lead -- ain't shit. This is perhaps a little unfair to the real Ewen Montagu but on the other hand Ewen Montagu has already been played heroically, as aforementioned, by Clifton Webb and Colin Firth, so I think he'll survive [metaphorically speaking, as Beth reading over my shoulder points out that he died in 1985.]

And, I mean, in the Operation Mincemeat musical he's being played by a hot actress in period menswear projecting "charismatic asshole" for all she's worth, which is honestly not so bad for Ewen either. It's a five-person cast and everyone is slipping in between their major role and a number of background roles. The two main-character secretaries -- quiet middle-aged professional Hester and ambitious young Jean -- are played respectively by an actor and an actress who are both wearing the same default trousers and suspenders, Hester's actor in specific really doing all the work to convey her character with body language and vocal intonation alone. The cross-casting could come across as cheap comedy but never does, partly because Hester's character is taken by far the most seriously by the show as a whole, and partly because of the way the whole cast is constantly switching between roles -- sometimes they're all sailors, sometimes they're all secretaries -- in a way that not only means the whole cast is constantly putting gender on and off with their costume pieces but also just allows for some exceptionally cool tricks of stagecraft. I really loved the Act I finale, which uses lighting changes to evoke the effect of 'cross-cutting' between a couple of our main characters partying in a club and a group of sailors solemnly releasing the dead body into the ocean: at one point I found myself thinking 'how are they getting everyone on and off-stage so quickly?' before I remembered that the whole cast were just five people switching between being sailors and being London partygoers very very fast.

There are definitely bits of the show that didn't work for me (the Comical Nazis Musical Number felt pretty extraneous) and most of the actual music is fun but not necessarily anything I'd listen to or that stands on its own outside its context, with the one exception being Hester's song Dear Bill (note: although I am linking this, I am also relaying on

genarti's firm opinion that she preferred not to have heard it beforehand.) Also as we left the theater a very indignant young man in front of us was complaining to his companion about the show's appalling erasure of the role of the Soviet Union in WWII, which I do think is a pretty funny take about a satirical British musical comedy about MI5 but, like, I can't argue!

But, overall, I really liked it -- first, for its genuine interest and attention to unseen and invisible work; second for just how much it loves to show off what it can do just with the power of stagecraft and acting. Absolutely unfilmable theater! We love to see it! If it comes to Broadway (as I think it may well, we received a very funny survey For Americans asking hopefully if As An American we could follow the plot and the accents etc.) we too will probably be seeing it again!

Vacationing various places at the moment -- almost certainly more on this anon -- but we saw Macbeth (an undoing) last night in Edinburgh and I really want to try to write down my thoughts on it while it's still all fresh in the mind, so I'm seizing the moment and the available internet on the Orkney ferry.

What I knew about this going in was "some sort of Lady M-focused riff on Macbeth," which (I thought going in) might well be either fun and clever or trite and reductive, but if one has the opportunity to see a Macbeth in Scotland one might as well do it.

The first act begins with a deeply metatextual R&G-esque intro with the woman who plays the lead witch and also Lady M's housekeeper aggressively addresses the audience and remarks upon the stage setting before the witches have a deeply eerie encounter with a wounded soldier on the heath ... after which most of the first act is, indeed mostly more or less a Macbeth, more or less straight from the text. There's some more natural-language scenes and dialogue woven in, generally pretty well and fluidly, and some odd plot additions, mostly focused Lady Macduff (she's Lady Macbeth's cousin, she's staying at the Macbeths' house, she's having an affair with Banquo, "wasn't this supposed to be a Lady Macbeth-focused riff?" I thought). We also learn that Lady M is political, and the housekeeper tells her several times that those three old women are at the gate to talk to her and she waves them away. Murders start happening, Macbeth is king, there's a banquet, we hit intermission.

ME: well, it's interesting, but I'm sort of confused by the choices
BETH: I'm waiting to give an opinion until I see how it's all going to come together
ME: I am trying very hard to reserve my opinions likewise .... but as of right now I'm not sure where the metatextual stuff went and I'm not disliking the Macbeth fanfic that replaced it but sort of confused about why it's happening ....

( then the second act hit! spoilers for Macbeth! )

... and in conclusion, I am like 75% sure this entire play is functioning as an aggressive argument about reductive takes on Macbeth and how you can't fix Macbeth as a narrative just by supporting women's wrongs enthusiastically enough, any more than you can fix it by blaming everything on Lady M. If this is the case -- if the bit that fell flat was indeed supposed to fall flat -- then I think I like it? But does it work if you're not going into this theatrical experience already primed and ready to have a good solid fight about themes in Macbeth? And does it need to work if ditto ditto? These and many others are questions I am not yet ready to answer but I would love to hear thoughts if anyone has seen/will see it!

We saw Duel Reality tonight, a show that billed itself accurately as "circus competition Romeo and Juliet."

What do I mean by 'circus competition?' well, the Montagues and the Capulets are the Red Team and the Blue Team, and they are aggressively engaged in a competitive sport, and the sport is Circus. We are doing aerials! We are building human pyramids! We are strutting around the stage flipping each other the bird and holding up our hand in the shape of an L on our foreheads while a poor stressed referee measures the exact precision of our pole slides! We are ANGRILY JUGGLING!

(... obviously we, as in me and

genarti and

sandrylene, were not doing any of this. But we did have seats on stage so it FELT a bit more like we were doing this than is usual. They gave us all colored armbands so we could cheer on Team Blue and occasionally a Team Blue circus person would run round to enthuse over what another Team Blue person was doing and give us a high five.)

What do I mean by 'Romeo and Juliet'? well, we had a forbidden love story between two members of the rival teams, of course, and also every so often a circus performer would valiantly recite a line of Shakespeare more or less at random, and also the soundtrack was mostly made up of what I can only call image songs that also string together various lines from the play over the circus scenes that vaguely correspond to the narrative. Tybalt's involved a lot of "king of cats".

Moments in the show when I had to cover my mouth not to laugh out loud:

- when the stressed-out referee character came out and performed a passionate diabolo juggling solo to the mournful strains of an image song with the lyrics "it's hard to be in the middle ... red is not my color .... blue isn't either .... all colors fade to grey ...."

- when Juliet, enraged against the dichotomy of Red and Blue, stalked round the stage angrily stripping the colored shirts off the rest of the cast to reveal black sports bras and undershirts On Everyone Except Romeo. Romeo simply did not get to have a shirt anymore.

- when (after Romeo's triumphant topless aerial solo) the cast explained that they decided they did not want their version to end in tragedy, and all started dancing onstage while Romeo and Juliet snuggled happily on a trapeze and the lead vocalist sang a bright, jazzy version of "for never was there a tale of more woe/than that of Juliet and her Romeo" on repeat

I did not laugh when Tybalt and Mercutio dueled by furiously doing competitive acrobatics off either end of a giant seesaw because it was extremely cool and effective and I did believe someone might die, but the fact the remains that Tybalt and Mercutio did duel on a giant seesaw and I am duty-bound to report it.

Here's the trailer, which gives you a strong sense of the various cool human tricks on display:

Watch on YouTube

As we were leaving the theater, I said to my companions, "That was an incredible time and I'm so glad we saw it, and I AM DESPERATE TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MUSICAL DECISIONS THAT WERE MADE. I don't understand! I need to understand!!"

Unfortunately, there is nothing at all about the musical choices in the program, so I am probably doomed never to understand. REALLY a great time though.

The other play I saw while traveling was a satire at the Vineyard Theater called Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, which I felt compelled to check out somewhat against my better judgment and which

obopolsk bravely accompanied me to see despite the fear of miserable flashbacks both from the 2016 election and from previous Very Online jobs.

I'm not sad to have seen it; I would have been forever curious if I didn't, and it had beats and moments that I quite liked. The show has a cast of five:

- Masha, Disaffected Millenial Working A Soulless Job and obvious audience surrogate
- Nikolai, pretentious hipster, endlessly working on a screenplay, endlessly flirting with people who are not his well-connected wife
- Egor, Top Performer, who does not want to make friends with his officemates but IS discovering that he wants to make friends with the #BlackLivesMatter accounts that he's been infiltrating for work and does NOT want to target middle-class women in Wisconsin instead
- Steve, alt-right office asshole, played with the horrible impish energy of an evil Jack Black
- Ljuba, ex-KGB, Hated Boss

I laughed when Masha and Nikolai, deeply starved for fulfillment in the workplace, became obsessed with the Rules of Story and started trying to create Narrative with their troll accounts; as commentary, was it subtle? as a Looney Tunes hammer. Am I an easy sell for evil metafiction and also easy workplace comedy? Sure. I also enjoyed Egor's plot, which for me landed somewhere between a fun satire on the Spy Who Gets In Too Deep and a genuinely somewhat poignant portrayal of a lonely guy forging ultimately impossible connections, and was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for out of the show in general.

( The point where it really lost me was about 2/3 through; playwrights I think ought to use second person monologues with GREAT care )

I went to go see Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway with

genarti and my parents last week -- my second time seeing this show, the first in 2012 with

aquamirage with (apparently) Lin-Manuel Miranda in one of the lead roles, though I must not have cared much at the time because of this fact I had no memory. This time it starred Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, though Lindsay Mendez was not in fact there on the night we saw it, but her understudy Sherz Aletaha was phenomenal so no complaints there.

We all had a great time and walked out of the theater enthusiastically arguing with each other and with the ghost of Stephen Sondheim -- Merrily We Roll Along is, famously, a Sondheim flop, and there are definitely still reasons for that even in this most recent and much-amended production. The show is about three Creative Best Friends -- composer Frank Sheppard, novelist Mary Flynn, and playwright Charlie Kringas -- and the various creative and financial pressures and compromises that eventually tear their friendship apart, but it's told in reverse, so you start with Frank at peak Successful But Unhappy and the relationships at Maximum Broken and then rewind the clock back to the moment they all first meet as young idealistic artists and fall collectively in creative love.

And it's the way that they are in creative love with each other, all through -- the way that the play is about that kind of creative love, the absolutely incomparable high of making cool shit with people who you think are geniuses and who also inexplicably think that you are a genius too -- that makes the show work, inasmuch as it does. And I say that, but it doesn't actually work, once you start thinking too hard about it, because the creative tie is only really between two of them. Frank and Charlie are partners and collaborators and have a long ongoing project together that they're trying to make happen all through the show, but Mary is a novelist, her work isn't tied in with theirs at all and in fact we learn appallingly little about it; Frank hasn't let Mary down creatively, just personally, because she's unfortunately in unrequited romantic love with him which IMO is a boring choice.

(I had a theory, which I told

genarti, that the reason that Charlie and Frank's breakup is so intricately tied up in creative codependency and artistic betrayal and Mary gets the unrequited love is because Sondheim was a gay man writing in the 1970s and so he just split out the romantic part of Charlie and Frank's massive mutual creative crush into a female character. But then I also was reading up and saw that in the play that Merrily is based on there are also three of them so I don't know if that theory holds water ... anyway I do think there should be three of them, they're more fun and interesting as a trio, I just think all of them should be inhabiting the same undefinable Intense Creative Friendship space and we should perhaps have at least a vague idea of what Mary's bestselling book is actually about.)

AND YET all that said it does frequently work and frequently hit, largely because the scenes and songs when they're all together sell the friendship so well and make you believe in it as the most significant relationship in all of their lives, make you believe in the show as a show that is centralizing the friendship. The whole theater when you walk in is plastered with 'Old Friends' signage -- I turned to

genarti when we walked in and said "remember that tumblr post about how the phrase 'old friend' is inherently homoerotic" and she said "I don't know that I ALWAYS agree with that but it is Certainly Fraught." Anyway, here's a music video of the cast singing 'Old Friends', I really enjoy when Jonathan Groff gives Dan Radcliffe a piggyback ride.

My favorite scene is when young Frank and Charlie are at a rich-and-famous-people party, and the rich people coax them to sing their song Good Thing Going, a wistful breakup song that of course awfully foreshadows everything that we know is going to happen later, and it's a beautiful and quiet moment and they nail it -- and then they're coaxed into singing it again despite their own better judgment, and now people are bored with it and talking through it and it's awful and frustrating and there's simply no way to recapture the magic. But the magic was real, and it was there, and maybe if they hadn't tried to push it they could have held onto it, or maybe there wasn't any way to hold onto it at all. For me, that hits.

I do of course have a lot more thoughts on how to fix Merrily ....

genarti has ideas about Mary which I'll let her drop in a comment and for myself I will just say that I think Gussie (Frank's Temptress Wife who gets a real villain edit) is like seventy percent of the way to being a genuinely effective foil/parallel for Frank and COULD get there with some better and more nuanced dialogue, I think. I will also say that it is always very charming to see Dan Radcliffe dance on stage, he always seems to be having such a great time with it.

I saw the new production of Camelot at City Center, with the book entirely rewritten by Aaron Sorkin!

( I did not like it! )

(ETA: also

genarti has now posted a much more thorough write-up!)

We watched "The Prince," a filmed play airing on nebula.tv, because my friend kept getting incredibly targeted advertisements announcing that the show was full of "sword fighting, lesbianism, Hamlet, and disappointed parents."

All of this is true but also very funny as an advertising ploy because the entire first act is a Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternish riff on Henry IV: Part 1. "This is great," we said, during intermission, "we are having a wonderful time, but was Hamlet a lie? Did they think that Henry IV was not popular enough to be worth advertising or did they just get their H-plays mixed up?"

Anyway: The Prince is a Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternish riff on Henry IV: Part I, in which two trans women trapped in the bit parts attempt to stumble their way through the background of the play to extratheatrical freedom, struggling along the way with how much they can or should attempt to rescue the main players from the roles in which they are likewise trapped (with a heavy emphasis on gender and masculinity). The broader metaphor is not necessarily subtle but it's extremely well done -- Abigail Thorn, the author, has a great ear for Shakespearian rhythm and I often had a truly difficult time distinguishing the exact moments where the play slides back off Shakespeare's tracks and onto its own (though it's also been a long time since I've encountered a Henry IV so my memory for what exactly happens in it is not as clear.) And whenever the show did jump onto scenes/monologues/etc that I knew well, I was consistently impressed with the way that it situated and reframed them within its particular contexts to make them its own; it's the kind of riff you can only do when you're really deeply immersed in a text, with enough knowledge and affection to claim full ownership of it.

This play has a really strong and compelling read on its two Harrys -- quite different from how I usually see them played but I thought it worked really well. (The Kate thread didn't work for me quite as well, and felt a little like it was falling back on easier tropes, but that may just be personal preference on Kates and Kate-and-Harrys.)

I also want to do a shout-out to the costuming, which used small details extremely well and was constantly changing in delightful ways.

You can watch a trailer for the show here -- I actually only just now watched it myself while writing this post and was kind of surprised at how extremely dramatic it was! The play is also funny ... there's a plot-significant Diet Coke bottle that was personally delightful to me ....

(Okay, one other small complaint -- there's a lot of thematic emphasis put on metered dialogue as representative of narrative constraint and Shakespeare does not always use metered dialogue! Sometimes his characters talk in prose! It's fine, I trust that Abigail Thorn knows this too and is choosing to ignore it to make her point, but the nits gotta be picked.)

Last night we went with

sandrylene to see Preludes, the Lyric Stage's production of Dave Molloy's musical about Creative Depression as represented through Sergei Rachmaninoff's sessions with his hypnotherapist.

Musically speaking Dave Molloy always sounds like Dave Molloy and Preludes sounds extremely like Dave Molloy even when it sounds like Rachmaninoff, for better or for worse. The period of the show is very deliberately slipstream-y, with Rachmaninoff talking about dealing with the coffeemaker and people on their cell phones during his performances in the same breath as he talks about adulating Tolstoy and needing the Tzar's permission to marry, which for me at least brings Molloy back into the picture more than he already is; obviously we all write from the inside of our own heads but Molloy is not a guy who is ever bothering to even try and move past that or obscure it, also for better or for worse.

Also, one of the conceits is that Rachmaninoff is eternally divided between the Rachmaninoff who speaks and sings and moves anxiously around the stage and interacts with the other characters and another Rachmaninoff who is eternally a Guy At A Piano pounding angrily away in the center of the stage, and these two Rachmaninoffs hate each other, and often Piano Rach was pounding away so loudly that I could not for the life of me make out what the other Rach was saying, which might be intentional but I think was probably more likely a quirk of where we were sitting and the acoustics of the theater.

But audio issues aside there were a bunch of moments in the show that I thought really hit; the one in particular that is going to stick with me is a bit where Rachmaninoff and his wife and opera singer buddy are out at night having a really good time, singing together and riffing off each other and visibly experiencing the kind of sheer high of creative play, and all of a sudden in the middle of it Rachmaninoff is struck by absolute miserable creative panic -- who made this music? was it him? did he steal it from someone else? is he ever going to be able to create by himself again? -- and the whole moment comes crashing down.

As a complete sidenote, the last time I saw the guy playing Rachmaninoff (the talking one, not the piano one) was as Martha Jefferson at the New Repertory Theater's production of 1776 and I absolutely would not have recognized him if I hadn't looked at the program, but I'm very glad I did; he was extremely tamped-down, mumbling and small in this show (which did admittedly contribute to how difficult he was to hear) and remembering his wildly charismatic Martha Jefferson confirmed for me how much this was a deliberate choice for the show.

genarti and I went with a friend to see Plexus Polaire's Moby Dick on tour today, ft. "seven actors, fifty puppets, video-projections, a drowned orchestra and a whale-sized whale," (to quote the press copy) and now I have been sitting here for several hours trying to figure out how to express how incredibly effective this was as an adaptation.

( write-up includes spoilers for Moby Dick... )

Before I saw the show, I was thinking to myself, 'I'm very glad I've read Moby Dick but also it would have been very funny to base my entire sense of Moby Dick off the Dave Malloy show and the Plexus Polaire puppet show.' But now I can't think this because I have no idea if this show would have hit at all if I hadn't gone in already knowing some of the themes -- the way it's working with the text is brilliant if you know what you're looking at and I truly don't know if it makes any sense if you don't -- and I would have been so deeply sorry to miss the experience of it hitting right, which the vast majority off it really and truly did! Love to be emotionally compromised by whale puppetry!

Anyway. Unfortunately I cannot tell everyone to go see it because I don't know where or when it will be next; we all desperately wished afterwards that there was a recorded copy we could start foisting on people but instead I will just drop the trailer which at least conveys the sense of underwater haunting.

Watch on YouTube

Yesterday

genarti and I had the nostalgic experience of waiting in line for five hours for Shakespeare in the Park tickets so that we could see the musical adaptation of As You Like It created by Shaina Taub for Public Works, which I have been wanting to experience since 2017. As You Like It is my favorite Shakespeare play and I have never seen a production that I actually liked very much, which is not surprising because it is not really a very good play and large parts of it simply don't work. However, I love it, and there has always been a version in my head that does work and someday I feel sure I will get to see it!

This version was not that version, but I did have a wonderful time, as I always do with Public Works productions, which make a hallmark of incorporating large casts of Ordinary New Yorkers to run gleefully around the stage along with the usual Public Theater seasoned professionals.

genarti describes these performances as "an explosion of glittery OTT groundling joy" and it is simply impossible not to have fun watching a hundred New Yorkers in red and blue cheerleader outfits shouting enthusiastically for a Shakespearean wrestling tournament!!

However, I also wish to argue with Shaina Taub a little about our conflicting visions of As You Like It ... okay. You know how every Twelfth Night worth its salt has That moment with Orsino and Viola -- usually it comes around the Patience on a Monument speech -- where they come this close to making out and you know that the shoe has just dropped on Orsino that the person he is actually pining for is the youth in front of him and not the dream of a distant lady, and As You Like It is a much more playful show in this regard and engages much more directly with these themes and yet I have never seen an As You Like It that gives me that moment, which I do feel is a crime against me personally.

Anyway. This As You Like It does not have that moment either; it's interested in Rosalind's interiority and the fact that she is constantly playing roles to avoid honest conversations but not particularly interested in Orlando's reaction to that or in landing them in a place that's explicitly queer, and it's not particularly interested in the Celia-(/)-Rosalind relationship, either. Obviously I would prefer it to be gayer but that isn't a problem per se except that also in this production Touchstone's lover Audrey becomes Andre and Phebe's admirer Silvius becomes Silvia, which means that the queer themes in the play are all displaced out from the main cast onto the Bad Idea Comedy Couples ...

And, like, let's be clear, the Bad Idea Comedy Couples in As You Like It are always pretty bad. Is there a way to do the Bad Idea Comedy Couples well? Maybe! It'd be challenging! We spent a while trying to workshop this and came up with, maybe if you have Rosalind and Orlando really kind of engage with them as foils on the theme of love at first sight and idealization, and also maybe if nobody actually gets married? Anyway there are a lot of things that do not work in the play and Shaina Taub, given the opportunity to fill in some gaps with musical numbers, has put most of her attention on Rosalind and a little bit on Orlando and Jacques and then added a lot of jokes, which, again, is fine, but on the other hand these people already have more interiority than anyone else in the text and you could have spent some of that time bridging some of the play's twelve-foot-wide plot holes instead ... like, for example, what is with the Forest of Arden's anti-fratricidal-feelings field! We are all continually concerned about what happens when they leave and Oliver suddenly wants to kill Orlando again because he's no longer breathing in those magical forest uppers!

Also I still can't quite believe that we had a full Touchstone-woos-Andre boyband number and five minutes of Silvia valiantly attempting to make 'she Phebed me' catch on as slang and not a single musical number for Celia. JUSTICE FOR CELIA. And more gay pining for Orlando.

ALL THAT SAID, it was a great time to watch and I would absolutely recommend if you happen to be in a position to hang out for a couple hours in Central Park to acquire tickets. Other things I particularly liked:
- the fact that Duke Frederick's appearance is always preceded by a chorus escort interrupting the rest of the plot to sing "ALL HAIL Duke FREDERICK!", a fact which simply got funnier and funnier as the show progressed
- Duke Senior and Jacques had a real "someone will die"/"of fun!!!" dynamic, half our party thought that the Forest Arden's genial love cult came in too strong by the end but I truly enjoyed Shaina Taub as Jacques moping around in multicolored patchwork clown overalls to glumly inform everyone that their forest lifestyle was insufficiently anticolonial
- INCREDIBLE lion puppetry
- Touchstone and Andre's first (failed) wedding is presided over by a ten-year-old with a daisy ... all the weddings imo should have been presided over by a ten-year-old with a daisy but that goes in the notes

For Beth's birthday celebration this year, we dedicated several hours as a household to watching

genarti's Blu-ray videorecording of Robin des Bois, the French Robin Hood musical we discovered a few years ago and she has since become moderately obsessed with.

ME, FIFTEEN MINUTES INTO THE DVD: Beth. Beth. Beth.
BETH: .... what.
ME: I have to screencap this show. I have to. I'm compelled. Will you be mad.
BETH: ......... only if you don't make it clear in your post that I GENUINELY LOVE IT AND IT'S FUN AND GOOD.
ME: Yes! Absolutely! It is fun and good! It's also, just, [gesturing at screen],
BETH, LONG-SUFFERING: ... yes. I understand.

So, with Beth's blessing, I have screencapped and summarized the show below for your reading pleasure.

Notes: I am not at all fluent French, but can sort of read it. Beth is pretty fluent in French, and had listened to most of the music of the soundtrack previous to our viewing, but not looked up all the lyrics. We confidently expected the Blu-ray to provide the option of French subtitles; it did not. As a result, it's entirely possible that everything that happens in this wildly entertaining, and deeply mystifying musical would make perfect sense to someone who could actually understand all the words as they were happening and was not simultaneously trying to live-translate to a non-fluent partner, and thus we would not be left asking questions like "wait, is Little John literally an angel, or was that a metaphor?"

( Our story begins in Sherwood Forest, where Maid Marian is now a revolutionary single mom )

If you want a better sense of what the actual dancing and stage presence of this show are like than still images can give you, then I recommend checking out this promo video which combines clips from the show with some very cute backstage backflip footage. If you want more of an experience than that, I recommend catching

genarti on a day when she feels like spot-translating two hours' worth of Robin Hood musical, which may be easier than you'd think!

I learned about Synetic Theater's lesbian Phantom of the Opera ballet via

ambyr's Yuletide write-up; at that time it was not internet-available, but an archive video has since been made available through the dance company.

ambyr is hosting a discord watch of the currently-available recorded version at a time that I cannot do, so instead I made several people watch it with me last week and it was a FANTASTIC choice.

Here's the trailer:

Watch on YouTube

In this no-speaking no-singing all-dancing version, the Phantom is a ballerina who's haunting the Opera House catacombs after acquiring the signature Phantom scarring and a boatload of PTSD in a stage fire. (The Phantom and the ghost of the Phantom's ambitious younger self are played by different dancers, which allows for a lot of very cool staging and doubling around the Phantom's lost dreams and the way she's projecting herself into Christine.) Aside from obsessing over Christine, the Phantom's hobbies include staring into mirrors with anguish and despair, murder, building automotons (?), and playing a large stringed instrument with an exceptionally long neck that we dubbed the celloelloello.

Christine is a young dancer who's very clearly delighted to have a mysterious hot older woman giving her some strict ballet discipline under the opera house -- shout-out to the extremely funny (to me) sequence where the Phantom is like "here, I've turned my creepy ghost/automotons into furniture for our date in my lair, would you like some tea," and Christine is very visibly weirded out but also very visibly attempting to project "PLEASE DON'T THINK I AM A SQUARE, I AM DEFINITELY COOL AND DOWN WITH YOUR CREEPY LAIR, PLEASE LIKE ME" --

Anyway, this relationship may not be strictly healthy but everyone (except Christine's cute but useless boyfriend Raoul, dumped for a ballet lesbian) is having a good time until the Phantom kills Mean Ballet Rival Carlotta to give Christine a chance at center stage.

From there, everything proceeds rapidly through a condensed version of the familiar Phantom of the Opera story that includes the Phantom/Christine demasking and breakup, the Phantom's entree into the Masquerade (the Phantom's extremely dramatic Masque of the Red Death outfit is maybe my favorite costume of the show), the Christine kidnapping, and Raoul's progression through the opera house for a rescue attempt. All this plot really happens in maybe the last half hour of the ballet, though -- the first full hour is intensely focused on the Phantom/Christine dynamic, which means that this is the first version of the story I've ever experienced where I was like "oh, Christine is ... really digging this? Christine is having fun!" instead of "Christine is experiencing some very intense gaslighting." (Christine obviously also still justified in dumping her girlfriend for nonconsensually attempting to advance her career through murder, but.)

Aside from the obvious appeal of lesbian Phantom of the Opera, it's also just a really fun show to watch as a ballet -- all the dancers are doing an incredible job projecting character and emotion (Mean Ballet Rival Carlotta is SO much fun to watch, her dance-fights with Christine are a JOY). Extremely worth the $4 I spent to access the recording! Would spend $4 again!

ETA:

genarti reminds me I should definitely however warn for strobes & dramatic lighting effects!!

Another few weeks, another set of Theatrical Experiences!

( National Theater Live's Frankenstein )

( Andrew Lloyd Webber's By Jeeves )

( National Theater Live's Barber Shop Chronicles )

I've been having a weekly National Theater Live viewing party over Zoom with pals and it has been lovely! We have seen all the ones that have aired so far and the plan is to continue on as they go, but this seems like a reasonable point to pause and write up my thoughts about the first lot.

( One Man, Two Guvnors )

( Jane Eyre )

( Treasure Island )

( Twelfth Night )

Last week I saw a National Theater Live live-cast production of a new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac starring James McAvoy, Anita-Joy Uwajeh and Eben Figueiredo, and I'm still thinking about it; I didn't agree with all the choices made, but it was an incredibly compelling production.

The thing I liked best about this Cyrano was how fully it engaged with questions of art and artifice and poetry -- the translation is mostly rhyming and it's significant that it rhymes; Cyrano's friend Ragueneau runs a poetry workshop where she firmly instructs her students that rhyme is essential, verbal duels become something akin to rap battles, and Cyrano only drops the rhymes and speaks in blank verse during his most vulnerable and honest moment, during the balcony sequence. At the end of the play, after the tragedy and the timeskip, our cast are just beginning to grapple with the introduction of prose. The language is, frankly, gorgeous, and the cast all manage to pull it off the tricky feat where it sounds like poetry and like natural dialogue at the same time.

The constant verbal artifice is set up in very deliberate contrast to an incredibly stripped-down black box set, with the cast using very little to convey setting and action except their microphones (with which they occasionally duel.) No costume changes, which includes The Nose, though James McAvoy actually does a surprisingly skilled job conjuring a nose right onto his very conventionally attractive face using only the Power of Acting.

...I mean, that said, I still have a little bit of trouble with a Cyrano in which Cyrano is the most conventionally attractive person on the stage, especially after seeing Peter Dinklage as Cyrano, and spending a lot of time thinking about all the other things you can say with The Nose and all the reasons a person might have to reject society with aggressive style before it has a chance to reject firstback. I would have desperately loved to see the cast of the musical I saw in the fall handle this text, but conflicted as I am, I am also glad I got a chance to see McAvoy in the part; it's by far the most interesting acting I've ever seen from him.

( A few other comments, some spoilery )

I believe there's going to be a few more opportunities to see live broadcasts (I know there are a couple coming up in Boston in mid-March); I'd definitely recommend it if you have the chance! And then come back and talk to me about it, because I'd love to hear what people think.

As I mentioned a couple posts ago, last month I went with

whalefern to go see the new Cyrano de Bergerac musical starring Peter Dinklage and Jasmine Cephas Jones.

All the leads gave incredible performances, and the show absolutely had powerful moments, but overall didn't pack the punch that it should have. The main thing that I personally noticed was the music, by the National -- and I enjoy the National, but they don't necessarily have, uh, a vast ... musical range? Cyrano is a story that's deeply and profoundly about personal style and the ways in which people are and are not able to express themselves, so it's a bit unfortunate to have a Cyrano musical in which the solo numbers for Cyrano, Roxane, and Christian all sound more or less the same.

(ME: The language of the play itself is just so good that it would be difficult to write lyrics clever enough to match ... I think if I were doing it I would just have all the music be diegetic to avoid the problem.

whalefern: Think of the amazing patter-song you could do for the scene in which Cyrano mocks his own nose though! And Roxane attempting to engage Christian in a duet and Christian desperately capping all her interesting rhymes with hopelessly flat ones!
ME: OH YOU'RE RIGHT THAT'S BETTER.)

I hadn't read the actual play since I was a teenager, so I didn't catch the other thing that ended up really bothering both of us until

whalefern pointed it out: the theme of the play, Cyrano's most important character trait, is his panache. It's his last line as he dies, the thing he holds onto, the personal triumph snatched out of stupid defeat and meaningless death.

In this musical, the word 'panache' is not used; instead, it's translated throughout as 'pride.' These things are not the same. They're especially not the same when the story of Cyrano is specifically framed as being about disability, as it was in this production.

Panache, as Rostand (who innovated the modern use of the word in French as well as English) defines it: "To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero; panache is therefore a timid heroism, like the smile with which one excuses one's superiority." Panache is about wit, confidence, and style as both a virtue and a defense mechanism; these things all mean something, and they mean something especially for a person who is marginalized and nonetheless makes a deliberate decision to live life flamboyantly and on their own terms.

If you strip the humor and the aesthetic out of panache, then maybe what you have left is pride -- a deadly sin and a tragic flaw, without the style in it that also makes it a little sublime.

And for all the fact that it's a story about people consistently making very bad and self-defeating decisions, Cyrano de Bergerac is a little sublime. I just finished rereading the Christopher Fry translation; it's only like 100 pages and it took me two whole weeks because I was enjoying rolling around in the language so much. I'm resisting the urge to just splatter a bunch of quotes in here as I did all over Twitter, but I will say I'm now also extremely mad at the play for not including Roxane's appearance on the battlefield in the fourth act, which I had one hundred percent forgotten about until I reread it.

... but all that said, even though the text disappointed in several key ways, I do think the explicit framing of the play as being about disability was in fact a good and worthwhile staging of the story. We also spent a lot of time after the show talking about how good a queer Cyrano would be. I had never thought to connect Cyrano's enormous nose to the Dreyfus Affair until Nicholas Cronk did it in the introduction to the edition that I was reading, but Edmond Rostand was a Dreyfusard and now I also desperately want to see a production that leans into a Jewish Cyrano:

A good nose is the sign
of a good, courteous, intelligent, benign
liberal, courageous man: such as you see
before you, and such as you will never be.

In conclusion, more Cyranos that are explicitly about the experience of marginalization, please and thank you and goodnight.

All right, so I have bad news and good news.

The bad news is that -- although

genarti very kindly acceded to my requests for her to a.) drive us an hour away from her family's home in Vermont to the nearest movie theater that was playing Cats in the hopes of seeing the film in all its originally-released glory and then b.) watch Cats with me -- we did not manage to catch the un-patched version before they "fixed" the "CGI errors". This was apparently not just a tragedy for me but also for everyone else in our theater: "Is this the old, disaster version?" the people ahead of us in line asked hopefully, and when they were told it was in fact the new version, everyone around us groaned in unison.

The good news is that the "patched" version decides to have done away with the apparently CGI-messy question of "hands or paws" by just giving up on the notion of cat-paws entirely. Instead, every single cat just has human hands all of the time. So, you know, if you were worried you've missed your chance to experience this uncanniest of valleys: rest assured! You have not!

Also, there remains no such thing as a 'consistent' sense of 'scale', half the cats wear shoes and half of them just have normal human feet, and Mister Mistoffelees' ears are constantly clipping through his sparkly hat.

So, Cats! Cats. The Cats experience. Where do I begin.

( Cats. )

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