Sting’s “The Last Ship” Leaves Its Mark As It Leaves Broadway

WHAT is happening in London’s opera scene? A whole lot of shit, that’s what’s happening. Like there wasn’t enough misogyny in the world and in all forms of entertainment, now London’s opera bigwigs apparently decided that all the biggest summer productions at the city’s most respected opera houses would not only be anti-feminist but anti-female, pro-rape, pro-violence against women, and not good. Big steaming poop messes are at the English National Opera and the Royal Opera House and are unrelated to this week’s heat wave. 

First off, the one that has been in the news. Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera. This Rossini opera is about William Tell, could you have guessed? You know what’s interesting about this show? It was the last opera Rossini wrote even though he lived for 40 more years after it. I think he was shamed by nighttime visions of this future production that kept him up at night and he was all, I’m never giving these futuristic f**kers any more fodder to be assholes with, or something. 

So, it starts with the Lone Ranger theme, and then villagers sing about weddings, archery contests occur, and Swiss people get upset that their country is oppressed (by Austria). After two acts of that comes a scene in which soldier baddies celebrate 100 years Austrian oppression in Switzerland. The baddies drink and sing and then notice that Tell and his son aren’t joining in, so they’re like, oh we gotta arrest you, even though we respect what a great archer you are, do you want to tell your son to run or is he gonna stick around?
So that’s the third act of Guillaume Tell. Do you know what happens in the current abomination at the Royal Opera House? When they celebrate Austrian rule, the soldiers drink and sing and sing and drink, and then they take the servant girl who is providing the alcohol, and they force themselves on her, and they pour all the wine on her so she’s soaked through, and then the men put her on the table and take off her clothes (the audience sees her naked), and all the many many men sexually assault her further at gunpoint before Tell rescues her.

That doesn’t sound like the opera as written, does it? It’s not. That is utter bullshit completely added in by the dirty f**kface director Damiano Michieletto, bag o’ dicks director of opera at Covent Garden Kasper Hotlen, and the producers at the ROH. None of that violence adds anything to the show, so there is no excuse for it. I’m sure they argue that they wanted to show how terrible those men were, but it was not necessary to do so, especially to such an extent. All it really accomplished was reminding everyone in the audience that people still consider violence against women to be totally okay and permitted. Luckily, the audience booed during this scene, so much so that news outlets actually did mention the booing, but how many people walked out? How many cancelled their subscriptions? What’s more important, and disturbing: how many people are now buying tickets to the rest of the performances to catch this ‘newsworthy’ production?

This production should have been vilified for this gratuitous brutality and I know I will not be giving the Royal Opera House any money until they apologize. Indeed, Holten said they will not apologize for the scene and they refuse to edit it even though it will be broadcast in movie theatres. He described it as “an honest attempt to talk about the reality of war” and said people maybe “felt we should have warned them better, as people may not want to be exposed to sexual violence”. That’s not it, you ignorant douchebag. People don’t want to see in their entertainment depictions of what at least 60% of your audience has to live with and fear every day of their lives if it is not necessary to convey the message you hope to. And this was not necessary. Did you know, Kasper, that that’s the definition of gratuitous? I’m sure it was really fun for all you men involved to be like, ‘oh hey we can do this shit because it makes people realize how bad war is.’ A) People know how bad war is. B) All it did was remind people how terrible modern society still is when it comes to understanding rape culture. You, sir, do not understand it.

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Now to the one that has not received any media attention that I know of, probably because people with the power to make things known in the media don’t really realize how misogynistic this one is, especially since there’s only so much opera coverage allowed by the populace. “Carmen”, Bizet’s famous opera about the wiles of a Gypsy woman, is playing at the English National Opera. First things first, the ENO does all their productions in English. It sucks. I’ve been there a lot, and the productions are sometimes great, but it’s never my or most opera fans preference to see works translated from their original language. I saw “Rigoletto” once in Austria and it was in German instead of Italian. It was terrible. Oh but they did the famous aria “La donna e mobile” in Italian. Just that part.

Moving on, “Carmen” is a pretty misogynistic opera to begin with, but ENO succeeded in making it even more gratuitously so with this ‘modernized’ production. I don’t understand why directors feel the need to unnecessarily change aspects of great works just for the sake of changing it, when it doesn’t add any artistic value. There are some alterations or reimaginings or revivals that are worthy, like the recent “Spring Awakening” production in California that used many deaf and disabled cast members to highlight the rampant lack of understanding and capability in the show. That sounds brilliant. The half-assed modernization of “Carmen” was not: it kept most of the same ideas – lots of soldiers, being in Spain, smugglers – and added hysterically hideous ‘90s-era-Italy outfits and like 6 cars, doing the smuggling, onstage at one time. I don’t know what they were going for.

So “Carmen” tells the story of a seductive gypsy who seduces men and is a gypsy. She is a cigarette girl among hundreds of cigarette girls who apparently work in the same barracks as hundreds of soldiers. It was a big cast. The soldiers are all disgusting. They treat the women like toys and Carmen like a piece of meat. They grope everyone and repeatedly stick her face in their crotchular regions. But Carmen enjoys it, apparently, because she is seductive, so she is asking for it. Hence it being a super misogynistic show as written, differentiating it from the above monstrosity.

The soldiers beg for her to choose a lover and stop taunting them by existing, so she chooses Jose, who was ignoring her. Smart plan! She sings her super famous aria that goes ‘da dum dum dum!’ about how those who love her should beware. Then all the girls fight like really actually fight, because who doesn’t love women fighting and hitting and scratching each other with their claws? Carmen is accused of whipping out a knife in what should have been merely a skin fight, so the male official says she’s going to be arrested and tells Jose to tie her hands together while they figure out what to do because small man brain. That’s what happens normally.

Here, the men tie Carmen to a flagpole with the official’s workbelt, take off her shirtdress, and position her so she’s on her knees. People I talked to at intermission thought this was disgusting. One woman who knows the opera well felt that tying her up completely, as opposed to just her hands, unnecessarily made her subordinate and submissive and was just gross.

Carmen then beguiles Jose, tasked with guarding her, and he becomes pretty infatuated with her. He lets her escape, whereupon he is imprisoned for a month or two.

When he gets out, he and we find Carmen with her smuggler friends, who are driving regular-sized cars across the stage to show how modern the show is. Three women (and one little girl, sadly) compose the group with 3 or so indistinguishably disgusting men, who assault them and grope them all with no regard for which woman it is or what she’s doing or how drunk she is (very drunk). They meet Escamillo, the famous toreador, who sings the famous toreador song (and not very well, also sadly). Escamillo ‘falls in love’ with Carmen, who is instead in love with her Jose, whom she is now seeing for the second time ever. Jose has to go back to camp for nighttime, and Carmen, being an awful no good female who doesn’t understand that men have to work, gets really upset that he isn’t willing to sacrifice his job for her, because if he really loved her he would. This is apparently how Rossini thought women’s little brains worked. As written, Jose’s superior officer arrives looking for Carmen (every man thinks he is in love with her), and Jose fights him. Having done that, he can’t go back to soldiering, so he joins the smugglers.

Here, he punches Carmen instead, for mocking his need to go back to work. She falls to the ground in fetal position, where she remains while Jose sings not about how he’s sorry but about how much he loves her. Then he cuddles up next to her and declares his love more. And what choice does she have but to accept it? What other kind of love could she possibly know?

Then more cars appear and it’s really just nonsense.

Then, Carmen gets bored with Jose, because that’s how women are, those fickle people, and the toreador tells her he loves her. Hey guess what, she returns the favor now. That happens really with no build up, I thought she was lying, but that’s how women do, just transfer affection really easily when they’re bored. Then Carmen and her friends do tarot cards, and Carmen gets the one saying she’s going to die. No one else seems really worried, though Carmen tells them it’s probably Jose. 

Escamillo invites pretty much all of Spain to see him in his next bull-fight, and during that famous song we get to watch 100 or so actors in neon shorts and smartphones jumping up and down in unison for a good 2 minutes. It’s like they stopped trying. Anyway, outside the arena, Carmen and her two girlfriends are about to enter, before they leave her and are like, ‘Hey don’t get killed, we know that’s a possibility but we’re going to leave you alone now.’ Carmen keeps a watchful eye until she needs to do her makeup, and Jose sneaks in while she is looking in the compact, because oh girls with their makeup! So silly! So Jose is devastated that she no longer wants to be with him, even though he hit her, and even though now she loves someone else, so he kills her. At the end, after Jose kills her, he normally confesses to the murder. Here, instead, he grabs her by the lifeless foot and drags her offstage as the lights go out. Cute!

So ENO is not nearly as guilty as ROH for disgusting and gratuitous anti-female sentiment, because so much of it is in the text, but how they chose to augment what was already a plethora of misogyny reinforces how normal all the people involved considered it to be. This already has violence against women, but let’s make it worse! This one doesn’t have violence against women, so let’s add a lot, for art’s sake. It’s not art, guys. It’s violence, and it’s perpetuating the acceptance and sickening tolerance of rape culture. 

Let’s talk about the Phantom of the Opera. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘masterpiece’ (I’m not disputing or agreeing with that; it’s just what it’s called) concerns a deformed prior circus freak who now hides behind a 3/5 mask (because some of his face is apparently still purdy and he wants to show it off to…no one) and becomes scarily obsessed with a pretty young chorus girl in the opera under which he lives in the darkness…darkness…darknesssss. This Phantom (who doesn’t have a name, but in the original novel and some subsequent adaptations was referred to as Erik, which is just the totally wrong name for a Phantom menace) teaches the girl, Christine Daae, to sing uhhh-mazingly, because wants her to somehow simultaneously be the prima donna of the opera house and be his lake dungeon bride, after which he will ostensibly kill her and use her pretty face as a new mask or something because he is hella creepy. 

“The Phantom of the Opera” has been running on Broadway for 26 years now, can you even believe it?  And this production is aging extremely well. The moving sets and the bits of stage magic don’t seem outdated at all, and the music is haunting and wonderful as always. But the real reason to see this show again, now, is because of the new cast members. Two of musical theatre’s best working actors have joined, with Norm Lewis – the first African-American phantom on Broadway – and Sierra Boggess, as Christine. Normy is my favorite. His “Music of the Night” is gorgeous, moving, and his acting makes you actually feel bad for the Phantom at the end of the show. Yet the biggest treat for me, surprisingly, was Boggess’s Christine. Sir Andrew has said that she’s the greatest Christine there ever was, and until now I had thought he was just saying that to be a dick to his ex-wife Sarah Brightman (the original Christine). But he was absolutely telling the truth. She’s incredible. I never gave Boggess enough credit, because the only big thing I saw her in was “The Little Mermaid” which was sad shit. (Crazy weird trivia: Norm played her father in that. Ewww.) She shines here and is positively astounding. They absolutely need to make a new cast recording with her and Norm. I will buy 9.

So back to the story, which in the years since I last saw it, I forgot the craziness of. While Christine is getting her voice lessons from what she thinks is the ‘Angel of Music’ that her now-deceased father had once promised he would send to her (creepy incestuous and patriarchal b.s. runs rampant), the opera is undergoing a change in management. Unfortunately, the new owners and managers can’t be bothered with the talk of this rumored ‘phantom of the opera’ who causes accidents if he isn’t happy, and they reeeally can’t be bothered with paying this ghost his usual salary: 20,000 of some currency per month. Holy crap, that’s some good money. But he lives in the freaking sewers or some such; what on earth does he do with that money? Burn it for warmth? Or is that how much his fog machine upkeep costs? And his wimpy flame thrower? Actually I think he spends it all on sequins. He like invented the Bedazzler, so it would seem. But then he’d have Bedazzler money too! Where does all the money go?! Can I have some??

The new bosses ignore his demands, which he communicates through many notes passed through Madame Giry, the severe dance mistress who generally knows what’s up with Phantom. (Giry also has a young daughter in the ballet who, whenever the Phantom pulls one of his shenanigans, leaps across the stage and sing-songs “the phantom of the opera!” in like no discernible key and it’s hilarrrious.) This upsets the Phantom because being ignored sucks, so he starts offing people! Like, hold up Webber! I don’t know why people refer to this as a family show, but this is totally dark and scary! I can’t do horror movies, so thank goodness there was incredible music here else I would have peed myself.

The Phantom is frustrated that people aren’t taking him seriously. He becomes murderous and destructive, crashing the famous chandelier (which is still a great piece of theatrical magic), and yet he thinks all of this will win Christine’s love? Not that he cares about reciprocation but it seems he is doing everything for her.

Damn I never realized just how creepy this show is. Seriously, it should come with all kinds of warnings, especially about how utterly misogynistic it is! Omg! Really, even more than Sierra, the biggest standout of seeing it again was realizing how patriarchal and anti-feminist the whole thing is. The premise is that this creepster, shadowy male figure wants to take this young naïve girl to his dark lair of darkness to be his child bride forever. And she misses her father and Cannot. Stop. Talking. About him. And she recalls how her father, on his deathbed, promised to send to her the Angel of Music. And she thinks the Phantom, the creepy sort of man that she should have been told to fear and stay away from, is this Angel of Music, so she keeps being nice to him even though he is KILLING PEOPLE. Because she thinks her father sent him to take care of her. So like, the Phantom is himself a father figure to Christine but he’s also obsessed with her and she is in turn kind of drawn to him because of the father figure stuff or maybe because he does magic. It’s all super creepy. So the Phantom is like, “I must have you, I don’t care what you might actually want, because ha ha that doesn’t matter, and I don’t care if you’re scared because women be scared allatimes, and oh wait, you’re already engaged to your childhood sweetheart Raoul? Well I’ll at least pay attention to that, because we all know the universal rule among men is that the only valid reason a woman wouldn’t want to be with a certain man or do what he says is if she already belongs to another man.” Seriously, this is how most men think, and the Phantom and Raoul exemplify that. So anyway the Phantom is like, “I guess I have to kill Raoul…orrrr I’ll kill the poor random guy who works the sets, and just shoot fireballs at Raoul.”

The best part is that Raoul, our Prince Charming/savior/supposedly decent guy, is exactly like the Phantom! Just better dressed and coiffed and less deformed. Seriously, right after the Phantom kills the set guy, Raoul sings to Christine, “Forget your wide-eyed fears, I’m here. Nothing can harm you.” I MEAN, he sings this to her after the Phantom LITERALLY just killed a guy in front of a packed audience! But Raoul’s a man, so he’s like, “Christine, baby, why are you scared? It’s just a crazy unstoppable murderer on the loose, NBD! I’M HERE, AND I HAVE A PENIS. WE’RE ALL GOOD.” How f-ing dumb is that! What can his blond hair and pinkie ring do to stop the violence? I bet you that whenever someone, anywhere in the universe, is struggling to open a jar, Raoul appears in the doorway and goes “Gimme, I got it. I got it. Gimme it.”

Raoul also mansplains to Christine that, since he didn’t see the Phantom’s lair, she is totes prob making it up, because poor small woman brain. Luckily, he gets captured by the Phantom in said lair when he is trying to rescue Christine, so he learns a little lesson. Also, while Christine decides whether to save Raoul and marry the Phantom or…not, Raoul is hanging in a noose and imitating Chiwetel in “12 Years A Slave”, trying to keep a toe on the ground. For like TEN MINUTES, while Phantom and Christine are discussing the options and singing and stuff. It was ridic.

Unfortunately, the fighting over who gets to keep Christine doesn’t end with her being like, “Both of you, begone! I have a career to focus on,” but with her kissing the Phantom to show him kindness (because he deserves it?) and then marrying Raoul. Yet despite the book’s crazy heavy misogyny and light-on-the-happy vibe, the music and the performances make this actually a must-see. If you are like the many, many people who watch Downton Abbey as a comedy, you’ll love all the crazy in this. Norm is fantastic, though aside from “Music of the Night” the music doesn’t let his voice shine as much as it can. It does seem perfectly written for Sierra, though, and her performance is a revelation. (Even though she doesn’t realize how cool it would be to be a prima donna in a great opera house without worrying about two not-so-great men fighting over her.) I didn’t see the sequel, “Love Never Dies”, but I like to imagine that it features Christine saying, “Listen guys, you need to stay at least 50 feet from me because I’m gonna be a great opera star, and you guys are trippin’.”

Obviously a must-see.