The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at the English National Opera: Richard Wagner was a Sumbitch

​It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are discussing “Girl from the North Country”, which is playing at the Noel Coward theatre in London until March 24.

​As I’ve said hundreds of times, I love going into shows cold, not knowing any spoilers, not knowing the words to all the music yet, just a blank slate ready to be won over. But I may have gone overboard this week because not only did I know nothing about London’s new play “The Girl from North Country”, I knew wrong information. I thought this was about farming life in Ireland. Cue all the laughing-crying emojis because it’s about MINNESOTA. Duluth, specifically. I guess that is easily confused with Dublin? Regardless of my hysterical laughing when the show started and I heard them say ‘Duluth, Minnesota’ (internalized laughing, of course), and despite the awkwardness of this disjointed, rickety show, it’s a nice piece of theatre, enjoyable in spite of itself.

“The Girl from North Country” is about a family in Duluth in the 1930s and the cast of characters renting rooms in their ramshackle inn of sorts. They’re all suffering from the Great Depression and a lil bit of just normal depression too, it seems. It’s written and directed by Conor McPherson. Listen, when you aren’t working with Greta Gerwig or sweet lil Guillermino, it’s rarely a good idea to produce a show written and directed by the same person. You need that variation and sometimes clashing of ideas to make sure you make the best decisions for the work, as more often than not the strongest choices come out of having to defend them. If no one is challenging what’s written as is, the work can’t rise to its full potential. That’s clearly the case here, and although it doesn’t ruin the play – it’s still a lovely time, as I said – it’s not as good as it could be, and it’s full of unnecessary and ineffective aspects that would have been easily cut if more than one creative mind had been discussing them.

There are two patent examples of large, bad decisions that aren’t compelling. One is the completely annoyingly unnecessary framing device of the narrator. One actor, who plays the town doctor, also narrates the story and gives a lot of details to the audience that we don’t need. Using this needless device shows a lack of faith in the story to present what the author is aiming for. And never once did the narrator’s monologues share anything worthwhile to the story or anything that would not have been better left to the imagination. The play is pretty decent as is, but this device, borne out of a lack of confidence, distracts from the parts of quality.

The second example is the reason why I haven’t used the word ‘musical’ yet, even though everyone else (and the Oliviers) calls this production a musical. To me, it is the very epitome of a play with music, not a musical, because the music does not drive the story-telling. Instead of having the characters sing to each other to further the plot, a play with music uses the songs for their own sake unrelated to the plot, like in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” when Billie Holiday was simply performing at a concert. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing to choose, not at all, but the use of the chosen music seems haphazard. The music should still be well considered and there for a reason, and if the characters in the show are singing, the songs chosen should somewhat reflect on them enough to make sense. Here, the songs sometimes make sense, but often don’t. The one thing I knew going in was that this show uses the music of Bob Dylan. So every so often, the characters will sing a Bob Dylan song, and it will have nothing to do with the plot, but the problem was they often didn’t make sense for the characters or for what the show was ostensibly trying to achieve. I’ll point to specific examples later.

Aside from these missteps (huge as they are), the show is decent, inoffensive and overall pleasant. It tells the story of the Laine family in Duluth, headed by the stern, imposing Nick (Ciaran Hinds (I know)), whose wife Elizabeth (Shirley Henderson) is suffering from a form of dementia that keeps her alternating between having no idea what is going on to having zero filter on her speech and actions. Their son, Gene (Sam Reid), has amounted to nothing and is a piece of a nothing shithead, we see because of how he treats a black man, but I honestly think the writer wants us to feel bad for him for some reason, which um no. Their daughter, Marianne, is a black woman (Sheila Atim) that was left in their inn as a baby, so they decided to raise her as their own. There’s a whole other show to be made just about this relationship and how their town reacted to it, but we strangely don’t get much in the way of racial unease, which is odd because it for sure would have created some. I wonder if the writer wanted us to think highly of all the characters for not calling attention to this, but it just seems unrealistic. I mean come on it’s Minnesota in the 1930s. Or, it’s America at any time. People would have torches.

Marianne is pregnant, and single – she won’t tell anyone who the father is. At one point, she tells someone that she was impregnated by the ghost of the wind of Jesus or something weird like that and I have no idea what they were going for with that. It seemed meant to add a mystical element, but such an element had no business in a straightforward show like this. An old man in town, Mr. Perry (Karl Johnson), has offered to marry Marianne and raise the baby, which seems like a nice offer but he’s super ancient and Marianne is like nah thanks. Unfortunately, her father has no patience for her idealistic decision-making, wanting to marry someone she actually loves and all. Elizabeth, in one of her unfiltered episodes, shares that Mr. Perry once assaulted her when she was young (he’s hella old so he was an older man even when she was young) and no one seems to care, which is the most realistic part of this show. I love that Elizabeth, in all her raw, crude honesty, is often the only voice of reason in the community.

Soon two men arrive to spend the night, a man presenting himself as a reverend but he is really a slimy Bible salesman (Finbar Lynch (I mean can we talk about that name? that’s the real name of the actor. Man alive)), and a former boxer named Joe Scott. Joe for my performance was played by the understudy Emmanuel Kojo, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled because Kojo is one of the West End names I actually remember from several past productions, so lucky me. The men join existing guests Mrs. Neilsen (Debbie Kurup), a hot widow who is sleeping with Nick and maybe loves him even though he’s old and wrinkly and mean; and the Burke family, an older married couple with a grown but developmentally disabled son, Elias (Jack Shalloo). The Burkes have an interesting but ultimately unfulfilled storyline about how the grown son may have killed a woman unintentionally, and how they may be fleeing from the authorities. It sounds a lot worse than it is. Not the crime, the crime is bad, but how this fit into the show. It was random and nuts but it kind of all worked, because we’re learning about all the sad stories of those involved.

And then we have the town doctor (Adam James) who should have remained a doctor instead of moonlighting as a narrator.

The first act is actually quite well done. The chosen Bob Dylan songs, although they don’t really inform the story or characters, seem at least a little bit relevant. And if not, at least the choices are mediocre and not aggressively bad. The twangy Dylan sound of the less famous songs worked with this setting. It helps that I didn’t know 90% of the songs, so for a while everything seemed suitable and interesting. The second act, however, falls apart. They perform songs back to back (to back, I think) apropos of nothing, and you can feel the thing falling off the rails and see that the songs are the desperate attempt to keep it moving. Then, the character of Joe Scott, a really interesting, well performed and mysteriously drawn character, is done a huge disservice by having to sing “Hurricane”. This is not a song that jives well with the small, rural action of the play, a huge contrast to the other songs used, so it is seriously shoehorned in to make it fit, and it was a bad idea. Like I said, Joe is a former boxer, which seemed acceptable in the first act, but having him sing “Hurricane” made me think, wait, did they make up his backstory in order to fit this song? It’s hard to believe otherwise when the writing reveals him to have committed a robbery and be on the run from authorities. This is where they really lost me. Forcing this song into the show and molding the story around it felt so amateur and for all the damage it does to the story, the payoff is exactly nil.

After that, the action seems to happen without compelling reason shoring it up. Truly dramatic things occur, and rarely do they feel earned or warranted. Marianne’s character is poorly drawn, for such a central character, and her decision to leave town without saying goodbye to her family feels unjustified. It’s hinted at (more than hinted at) that Nick might resort to a little murder-suicide and just, like, what? And don’t get me started on the ambiguity of what actually happens to Elias (who has the second best musical performance of the night, but it is very ill-suited to the story).

What keeps the show largely afloat are the performances. Not all – most of the ensemble was obviously focusing on their American accents to the detriment of their acting. This was especially clear in the case of the poor sad Mrs. Neilsen, whose ‘I just came from my elocution class’-style of speaking was inappropriate for this setting. “Oh I will MEETUH you OUTUH-SIDUH,” she said once. She was the female equivalent of Gary Oldman when he guested on “Friends”, spitting all his t’s and popping all his p’s. Then we had other ladies giving full-on Fargo-style accents, dontcha know, because North Dakota is pretty much Minnesota, yah fer sure, so the clash was blatant and upsetting. Why don’t West End shows all have dialect coaches?? But the leading performances by Ciaran Hinds and Shirley Henderson are the compelling parts of this show and what makes it worth seeing. Ciaran, whose name I literally just found out yesterday is not pronounced as written (I’m sorry), as the gruff, well-meaning but wrong-headed patriarch Nick Laine, is so natural and believable. The tinge of his Irish accent works really well actually to convey mid-West America, and even though his character is wrong so often, he’s such an incredible actor that he makes you want to understand why.

The real star turn here is that of Shirley Henderson as Elizabeth Laine. At first, she just kind of sits in her chair and makes faces at the goings-on, and I was thinking ‘she got an Olivier nomination for this?’ However, slowly but surely her performance grows and builds so much that I would honestly think about voting for her over the “Follies” ladies. (Don’t get me started on the fourth nom.) I didn’t know at first that Shirley was that Shirley, the one I know best as Bridget Jones’s brunette friend and as Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter. Yeah, her. She’s fantastic. Her portrayal of a woman with dementia is so honest and uncomfortable and you have fremdschamen watching the whole time and you want to look away because it’s so painful, funny at times but painful, but you can’t because what she is doing is extraordinary. It’s mostly a physical role, peppered by line deliveries that could not be more perfect. She takes these words and chews them up and spits them out at such perfect moments with timing and venom that could be deadly. And then when she breaks into song, my goodness, I had no idea this lady could sing. She has the strongest voice in the whole production (and gets to do most of “Like a Rolling Stone”) and why hasn’t she been in more musical theatre? She could have single-handedly been saving British musical theatre! (Okay they still need someone besides Tim Minchin who can write scores but still.) Her performance is remarkable, how she does so much with so little and makes you invested in this story for her sake.

So clearly there are a lot of things wrong with this show, but in spite of all of that, it’s still enjoyable and a little bit moving, which I think is a testament to the performances, and also the writing. If this play could have been just a play, forgetting the weird Bob Dylan constraints, and if Conor had someone reigning him in and editing this draft, it could have been excellent. As it stands, it’s just fine, but entertaining.

AUDIENCE
Oh the joy – this was one of the best audiences I’ve witnessed in London. I didn’t see ANY phones during the show – and I was sitting in the way way back of the stalls, which usually means all you see is phones. There was a super old lady singing along sometimes and slapping her knees to the music and I shot her death stares but she was so old that that was probably dangerous. The girl next to me was coughing literally the entire first act so I moved for the second so that was fine. Honestly, most of the bad behavior came from the ushers I heard talking in the back and the back of house staff I could hear through the doors! Nonsense! Cameron Mackintosh better get his people under control.

STAGE DOOR
There were only like one or two weirdos there so I didn’t want to stay too long and also be a weirdo. The cast seemed super uninterested in talking to anyone anyway so best to skip this one.

It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about ‘It Happened in Key West’, which played at London’s Charing Cross Theatre this summer.
 
See how nice I’m trying to be nowadays with my wording? I could have said, like all the other critics, “this is not good”, but no, it’s actually “full of potential”. It’s because I’ve been watching ‘The Good Place’ so much, like over and over (BSE). Whoever said television can’t make you a better person was full of shirt. I want to talk about ‘It Happened in Key West’, even though the London production is now closed, because it has the ability to be a much better show if the creators put more work into it. I really believe that there is nothing but potential for this truly original romantic comedy musical (something that the boards really need right now) to be a success, but that’s if the creators treat the Charing Cross run as a test, learn what worked and what didn’t, and make the necessary improvements without being precious about protecting the work they’ve made thus far. The show needs new songs and a good dramaturg to nail the right tone instead of leaving it the wavering muddle it is at this stage. As it is, it’s not a bad show; it was quite entertaining. But it could actually be good.

​‘Key West’ tells the true story – I shirt you not, it is – of Carl Tanzler, or Count Carl von Cosel as he presented himself, a German radiologist/inventor/scientist with nine degrees (he tells you that a lot) who moves to Key West in the 1920s and falls in obsessive ‘love’ with a young Cuban woman named Elena. The young woman (who was married but her husband left her) comes to him with a bad cough, and unforch it’s tuberculosis in its late stages. At this time, TB was a death sentence (just ask Nikki K high-kicking it down at the Moulin Rouge), but Carl instantly became obsessed with Elena’s youthful beauty (he was hella old btw) and tried whatever he could to save her. Elena’s death did not kill Carl’s obsession, and so – gird your loins – he stole her corpse from her tomb and lived with it and cared for it as if it were his wife for SEVEN YEARS.
 
Can you imagine the smell.
 
Carl used lots of perfumes, waxes, varnishes, and other tricks to try to keep the corpse from, well, you know, and I guess some of it worked because SEVEN YEARS but man alive! (or not!) In the show, Carl tied the body to his tandem bicycle and would ride around town with it, pretending it was his new girlfriend. And I guess the townspeople just didn’t look too closely? It’s a weird forking story. I remember listening to a This American Life podcast about this story years ago so I knew what was coming, but hilariously, Husbo did not know the background. At the end of the show, the projection screen displays the photos of the real Carl and Elena. Seeing the old-timey photos of people who weren’t the actors, Husbo said “that makes me nervous that this wasn’t entirely fiction” and so I had to explain to him that no, we actually just saw a weird af musical about actual real-life necrophilia being presented as a love story.
 
And that’s the main problem with this show, that they sometimes remember to treat this as the bizarrely wacky madness that it is, but mostly they overly romanticize Carl’s actions and treat it as a love story that ‘sadly’ can’t last forever, forgetting I guess that it’s about criminal, horrifying, revolting necrophilia and tomb raiding and lots of other real weird stuff. The biggest issue is that it doesn’t know what tone it wants to strike or how to strike it. Sometimes it’s overwhelmingly maudlin, sometimes it’s bizarre and eerie, and sometimes it’s funny. This issue is not a surprise to me at all, since creator Jill Santoriello had the same problem with her Broadway musical “A Tale of Two Cities”. Granted, I got the first rush ticket for the first preview of that show (10 years ago!) and I sat front row center right behind the conductor, who I chatted with for a little, so I had a grand old time. But even in my giddy cloud I could tell that the lyrics I was hearing in the songs just didn’t make sense. I remember one actress with a big booming impressive voice singing about how she wanted to exact revenge for the death of her family…but the lyrics she was singing were angry in the wrong way, saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and so the message didn’t come across properly in the least. The whole show was like that, and that’s why it failed. Here too, the entire tone is unsettled and unclear, and that can kill a show.
 
I hate to say it because I think it is baller that Santoriello is one of only two women in history to write an entire show – book, music, and lyrics – on their own, but the creative process requires other minds to bounce ideas off of, because then the best ideas are used. In ‘Key West’, she had some book help from Jason Huza and Jeremiah James, but neither of them, from my research, has ever been involved in musical theatre before, so that’s not the best kind of collaborator for something like this show, which requires defined intentions and meticulous efforts in order to work at all, even more than other shows since the right tone is so important here.
 
And they really didn’t get the tone right. Like I said, sometimes the jokes landed, but often times they merely resulted in a ‘oh, that’s weird. Huh.’ The main proposal was that Carl and The Spirit of Elena actually loved each other, so when he was caught after their long ‘marriage’, it was sad because he couldn’t keep her. In the show, a judge dismisses some charge or other against him because ‘it was clear he really loved her’, and someone in the audience actually woo-hooed. You don’t woo-hoo at some creep getting away with long-term necrophilia!! WHAT ARE PEOPLE TODAY. With all the ghost-wedding (such ‘A Blessing on Your Head, Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov’ vibes in that scene) stuff, the endless reprises of the main “Undying Love” theme, and the sympathy shown towards Carl at the end, it’s clear that the creators wanted this to be a straightforward romance story, and it just can’t be.
 
The deviations from reality to add something to the story were entirely unnecessary, and caused more harm than good. I mean, did you hear what it’s about? You don’t need to add drama to this. For example, Elena’s sisters were portrayed as one-dimensional villainous evil step-sisters, blocking Carl from treating Elena even though it may have been helping, and instead letting a different ‘doctor’ experiment on her with harmful bleeding techniques in exchange for bribe money. Can these two characters really be that evil that they’d risk their sister’s life for money? They were extremely annoying and unsympathetic, yet it didn’t make me feel any more sympathy for Elena, which I feel was the intention. In fact, the family’s horribleness almost made it seem like Carl should take care of the corpse, which is not the message you want to send.
 
The cast was overall good, with American Wade McCollum as a strong Carl (and with his beard, eerily looking like the real one) and Alyssa Martyn as the lovely Elena. Both were good singers and seemed to be really committing to this material, so I wish it better served them. My favorite was Johan Munir as Mario, Elena’s brother in law who was sympathetic to Carl. He seemed to be the only family member with any kind of common sense so that might be why I liked him. And although the score had a couple catchy tunes, and some hilarious and clever lyrics, they need more of them.
 
With more work, I think it would succeed best with a purely comical take, because when it’s funny, it’s really funny, and with more precise direction a lot of the lines that were clearly intended to be funny would actually…be funny. A comical route would be especially apt because the story is absolutely bonkers, and trying to sentimentalize it too fervently renders it toothless and, more importantly, makes me uncomfortable. This is not a story to portray as a sweet love story; it’s not one, and trying to make it one is disturbing. And that’s one of the biggest missteps of the show as it is now. Instead of clearly showing that Carl is off his rocker and – lest we forget – guilty of a pretty significant crime, the entire ending paints him with an overly sympathetic brush, with all characters – including the judge, I mean come on – wishing that they could give the rotting corpse back to him so he could go on with his happy love story. Playing it this way, the show has trouble staying together or feeling at cohesive, kind of like Elena’s body after seven years, I imagine.