Academy Award Prediction/Rant Time!!

​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.

​For a show that begins with four Jews in a room bitching, in a song called “Four Jews in a Room Bitching”, you would think I’d love “Falsettos”. But when I saw the current Broadway revival of this show, I was somehow left cold, which is pretty hard when the focus is on family dynamics and, suddenly, AIDS. I was having trouble with the choppy direction and erratic pacing throughout the show, but I believe the suddenness of the AIDS story is what fully shut down all my feelings aside from ‘disbelief’ and ‘like you’re being punked’. I’ve been told that I would have enjoyed this particular production more if I was at all familiar with it beforehand (I wasn’t), and I could see how this cast would be a treat if you were a fan of the show. But you shouldn’t need to know a piece beforehand to enjoy it. And honestly, it’s a weird show. There are moments of brilliance (possibly due to the actors involved here), but oof, it was difficult to get through. I’ve never been so impatient for a show to end. And I barely remember ¾ of what I saw.

 “Falsettos” is the story of a ‘tight-knit family’ of Trina (Stephanie J. Block), her ex-husband Marvin (Christian Borle), their son Jason (a child), Marvin’s new male lover Whizzer (Andrew Rannells), and their therapist Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz). Marvin has just left Trina for Whizzer but still wants to keep his family close and have them accept Whizzer as a new member, which is supes awks for everyone. But even more awkward is the opening number, which I enjoyed tremendously before thinking, wait, WTF, what’s happening. The four male characters are dressed like Israelites straight from the desert as they ‘bitch’ and Trina does some community-theatre-style assistant directing, flying flags and banners and adding some props to the mix. So, going into this cold, my actual first thought was, is this show about an acting troupe? Not joking. It made more sense than the truth, which is that this opening had nothing to do with their reality because no, they weren’t putting on a show, so it was just breaking the fourth wall I guess for a few laughs. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the show, so I can’t knock it too much.
 
Weirder was when that vaguely odd number ends and the real story begins, and you realize that despite this being an expensive Broadway production, there is no set aside from some giant gray cubes. And the actors throughout the entire show are constantly rearranging the blocks into different shapes to represent tables, chairs, therapy couches, beds, exteriors of houses, &c. This set design was really distracting and had very little payoff, the only interesting uses being as a house that could be easily knocked down, a decent metaphor for the family strife, and when all the cubes rearranged into a grave at the end. But despite how strong that ending visual was, I don’t think it was worth two hours and 45 minutes of wasted set design and extra jobs for the actors. It looked very ill-fitting for such an enormous stage, and I thought how much more appropriate this production and show in general would be in a small black box theatre. I think I could have appreciated it more in that setting.
 
Early on, as the cast forms the gray blocks into living room and bedroom furniture, we learn that Jason, the child, is scared that he’ll be gay because his ‘father is a homo’, as he sings. The funniest part was that Anthony Rosenthal, playing Jason, seemed to have a bad cold, and he kept sneezing and coughing in Christian Borle’s face and they tried not to laugh. Not as funny was that, in the wake of Sydney Lucas in “Fun Home” putting all other child actors and child roles to shame, this role (and sadly the actor) was indeed put to shame. We also learn that Marvin sees a therapist to figure out his tumultuous relationship with Whizzer – based more on lust at first than love, though they do admit that they truly love each other. Christian and Andrew’s chemistry was stronger than that of most couples, onstage or onscreen, and these two Broadway superstars made the thin story of the first act more compelling because of it. Nonetheless, their characters were kind of thankless until the very end, which is unfortunate for such incredible actors. They both do extremely well with what they’re given, but aside from a few money notes and their killer chemistry, they aren’t given much.
 
Then we learn that Trina needs a therapist because of this very difficult time for her family, which is understandable. But what isn’t understandable – except for purposes of the fake story – is that she goes to Marvin’s therapist Mendel. And then they all decide that Jason, who is having an understandably rough time with this transitional period, needs a therapist too…so they also enlist Mendel to therapize Jason. One really important lesson that I wish the characters learned before the show started is that there are lots of psychiatrists in New York City. Like I bet there’s at least one on every block of Manhattan and more when you get to the Upper East Side. So, there’s no good reason for a father, mother, and the son to all see the same psychiatrist. That’s the kind of crazy talk that would merit a visit to a psychiatrist. A different one.
 
Mendel quickly falls in love with Trina, which is against lots of rules and makes Marvin feel even more alienated from his family. He also needs a new therapist now. We’re supposed to feel bad for Marvin when these things start biting him in the ass but he did leave his family for a hot young thang so I mean what did he expect would happen. Mendel seems great at first, if severely in breach of ethics rules, but he really is the same immature sort that Marvin is, and Trina knows it, but having a husband turn out to be gay has apparently destroyed her confidence so she tells herself she could do worse and convinces herself that its in her best interest to marry Mendel. And I can see how one could arrive at that conclusion because Brandon Uranowitz is flipping hilarious. His subtle gesticulations really made the character and I was loving it for a while. But his character didn’t live up to the early potential. At one point amid all the constant familial drama, Marvin slaps Trina, and I was sooo ready for Trina to stand up and fight back (physically or verbally) but Mendel physically holds her back to prevent any escalation.  I think that’s when I lost it. I was pretty close to the stage so it was really hard for me to remember that this wasn’t real and it took all my might to stop myself from climbing up on that stage, punching Marvin for hitting a woman/his ex-wife and then beating the crap out of Mendel for failing to stand up for his new wife. Like what is that shit about. It doesn’t matter that there are two lesbians in the second act (conveniently referred to continuously as ‘the two lesbians who live next door’); this is really a show by, about, and for (gay) men.
 
Even so, I really tried to love it. I wanted to love it. And one scene got me closer to that point than any other. In fact, as incongruous as it sounds for a show I didn’t really enjoy that much, this one scene – Trina’s “I’m Breaking Down” – might be one of the best performances of a song I’ve ever seen live. I know! Stephanie J. Block is that talented, and this song is directed that perfectly and performed that impeccably. In it, Trina is chopping up food for dinner or a pie or something while she sings a hilarious song about how all this tumult and disorder in her family and in her life is making her lose her mind and all her control, which isn’t that funny on its face, I guess, but Stephanie nails every nanosecond of this scene with perfect comic timing and hysterical frenzied humor, and this one song was worth the ticket price alone. She gets so wild in her crazy that by the end she’s singing through a mouthful of banana and is just a complete mess and it’s amazing. I never thought of Stephanie as a comedian or saw her do anything funny, but this shot her up to the top of the musical comedy list. So, everyone else in the theatre community thought this production was fantastic, to the point where it’s a frontrunner for the Best Revival Tony award. As much as I disagree with that, I would condone such a win just because of Stephanie and this one song. She was that great. As much as I kind of wished I chose a different show to see that night, I am so happy I got to witness this expert performance. I really can’t get over it.
 
After that scene, I tried even harder to get a bit more into it, as the dynamic was more understandable, with a growing family trying to get through all these changes. But I could not get past how unfortunately terrible a lot of the music was. Not all; there are some bright spots. But too much of the score was terrible. I remember literally gagging when Mendel sings a line about going ‘to jaw’ – as in TO EAT, just so it would rhyme with ‘my paw’ – as in A HANDSHAKE. I can’t stop having nightmares about how terrible that lyric is. There’s no reason for a rhyme that forced when both sides of it are horrendous. Just change both lines!!
 
And then two insane surprises happen. The first is the most unforgivable because I still don’t understand what it was going for – “The March of the Falsettos”. The four male characters come out in the dark and march over the cubes which are set up as a city skyline or some such. They are wearing bodysuits with patches that reflect the blacklight in the dark, so it’s very 1970s college dorm vibe. And they are singing in falsetto voices. This is legit the one reference to the title of the show. And they march and they sing in those high voices “march of the falsettos, march of the falsettos” and it’s WEIRD. Like, look-around-at-all-the-patrons-around-you-to-see-if-it’s-just-you weird. It was like the opening number in that it was divorced from the reality of the characters’ story and was just for fun or something, I don’t know, but I know my eyes were open rull wide.
 
The next unforgivable thing is unforgivable for an entirely different reason. See, this is the 1980s, and it’s about some gay men. So maybe I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t because so far it was a comedy, and a silly one at that, at least at times. And its first act didn’t let on that anything of the sort was coming. So when Whizzer starts getting sick, I didn’t get sad; I got ANGRY. Really angry. You can’t have a kind of absurd tone and then all of a sudden start talking about AIDS and expect everyone to quickly get on board with the requisite depth of emotion necessary to discuss the AIDS crisis. It made me angry that they broached this topic in such a poor manner as to prevent me from getting emotionally invested, because we all should always be emotionally invested when this disease comes up. I was pissed that I wasn’t able to connect with this more serious material because it came out of nowhere. And I guess the argument is that well the disease came out of nowhere, to unsuspecting people, and that’s totally true. But so far, this show wasn’t about reflecting pure reality, as the march of the falsettos showed. So I don’t buy that, instead of continuing to tell the story in an artistic way that allowed for maximum empathizing and connection, they suddenly switched to a cold blank reflection of reality. And the whole section of the story about Whizzer dying was incredibly emotional and well done, but because there was no bridge from the former section of the story (the whole first act and change) to this intense drama, I never found a way to catch up to that drama. We were never given another route to it, so it felt very far away and detached from any emotional connection with the audience. Well, some people did manage to find another bridge because there was some SERIOUS sobbing at the end, and I wanted to be there with them, but I wasn’t.
 
I learned after the fact that my feelings of disjointedness and choppiness were warranted, because the original show was a series of three separate one-acts presented Off Broadway in 1990, like sequels. The Broadway incarnation of “Falsettos” is composed of the second and third one-acts in that series, so, although they are related and follow the same characters and story, the first and second acts are really two completely separate shows. That explains a lot for me. Well, except for the “March of the Falsettos” number. And why they didn’t work more on combining the two more cohesively. And why they kept the second act longer than the first, which should be rule #1 of theatre – never have a longer second act omg especially when people’s attention spans are getting shorter. The show was so long. My hair is so now.
 
A few days after I saw it, I heard that they are going to air it this season on PBS, as is usually done with one Broadway production per season or so. Despite my frequent exhortation that musical theatre has to be enjoyed live to be appreciated, and despite how lucky I feel having seen these amazing actors live, I kind of wish I’d skipped this one and waited to see it on TV. For free. Still, I’m ecstatic about a few things: one, that I did indeed get to see these actors live, and especially that I saw Stephanie J Block perform this role so wonderfully, and two, that I get to see her perform that role again. For free.