"The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk": Love, War, and Marc Chagallby Randi / February 1, 2018
It’s important to have queer stories, but I don’t think you should get points just for ticking a box — they actually have to be good. With “Moonlight”, a film about not only gay characters but black characters winning the Oscar last year (despite the Academy being old white men) (and despite the incredible initial mixup), and with “Call Me By Your Name” up for awards this weekend, our entertainment culture has maybe? hopefully? finally reached the point where it’s not enough to have token minority characters or storylines; they also have to be interesting, imaginative, and worthwhile too. And done with respect. I don’t think any form of inclusivity that seems done just for brownie points should be lauded as the pinnacle of inclusivity. In London right now, however, you still get the points for a paint-by-numbers queer story even if it’s super thin and amateur. Because everybody is indeed talking about “Jamie”, the new London musical, and Brits are loving it, but it is…how do I say…not very good.
Like I said, literally everyone else adores it. And it has a lot of the kind of fun that mass crowds love in things like “Mamma Mia!” – you know, the bright, loud, danceable shows. No one is bothered if the dialogue is cringey or the songs are uninspired if everyone is bopping in their seat. But I am, because I am always waiting for a great British score and, well, I’m still waiting. With the exception of Tim Minchin’s scores (the superb “Matilda”, “Groundhog Day”), British musical theatre has been in trouble since, well, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s heyday. That’s a long time to go with nothing of true substance to show for it. Oh I’m sorry, I forgot that in that time frame of literal decades of dreck was Elton John’s “Billy Elliot” score. Okay so Tim Minchin, Webs, and Elton John. I guess all the promising writers went to Broadway. And to think people are surprised when I explain that Broadway is on a whole nother playing field to the West End when it comes to musical theatre. I know it sounds mean but tell me what British-born original musical of the last decade or two has been of the high quality you would expect from one of the greatest theatre cities in the entire world. Because of this draught, I was so pumped for “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” because all I saw were rave reviews and I REALLY wanted London to have a great original musical finally that wasn’t a Broadway transfer. I wanted to fall in love with a brand-new score and listen to it until I memorized it and wait eagerly for it to go to Broadway. But this score is not that.
While it is outwardly fun — like there are bright colors and happy tunes and people dancing so the masses will be more than satisfied — and it is great to have the representation like this on such a stage and scale, I was just so unimpressed with the actual bones of the show. I wish I loved it, because it’s such a great story and it’s so important to show to people, especially young boys who identify with Jamie. I just wish such a great opportunity for representation came with quality writing.
It’s impossible not to compare this show to “Kinky Boots”. “Jamie”, to me, is about a production team that saw the enormous success of “Kinky Boots” all over the world and thought, ‘Hey, it seems that people really love stories about boys that don’t fit the traditional mold of masculinity, and the psychology that informs their decisions and how it affects the NOPE WAIT IT’S JUST ABOUT BOYS DRESSING UP AS GIRLS THAT’S IT WE WILL DO THAT!’ There was such potential in developing stories inspired by such departures from traditional male roles, but instead they seemed to mine the most asinine humor from it with a sort of baseline effort.
“Jamie” is about a teenage boy named Jamie who is living in a small English town where the accents are such that everyone pronounces his name ‘Jeh-meh’ and he is wayyy toooo faaaabulous for it. He wants to be a drag queen, and his loving but one-dimensional mother supports him, and his classmates and friends seem to find it cool, except for one of the typical asshole boys who thinks he is macho but is really obviously fragile in his masculinity. And his absentee father doesn’t approve but he was never really in his life or wanting to be. Okay, cool, Jamie, go be a drag queen, you are beautiful so you will be great at it. This is all clear in the first five minutes, though, and it’s very formulaic. Even formulaic setups could make great shows if they are handled well, but the remaining hours of the show feel just like filler, and on an amateur level. They fill it with the local drag shop (I’m sorry, what towns in rural England have entire shops for drag queens?) run by a great drag queen from the past named Loco Chanelle, a really low-effort drag name, who sings a very, VERY unnecessary and cringe-worthy song about his past and how he killed his lover maybe??, and it gets a goddamn REPRISE??? They fill it with a stern, annoying teacher who has a serious problem with Jamie’s breaking out of the straight lines she wants boys and girls to stay inside. Her outdated beliefs are only a tiny bit easier to believe than the fact that a school teacher in a tiny town has Christian Louboutin heels, another thing that is mentioned ostensibly to help the writers reach their word limit. And they fill it with bad music.
I hate writing this, because I do like liking things, and I want to love everything musical theatre so badly. Even with a lackluster book, if a show has fun or lovely or even just original music, that’s a win. But this score is complete cringe. The trite, derivative lyrics stick in your head, so it has that going for it. There’s the title song, where everyone jumps around like they’re at a rave and yells “Everybody’s talking about Jamie! Everybody’s talking about Jamie! Everybody’s talking about Jamie!” The melody is exactly how you are imagining it. I don’t even know if that song had other lyrics. The opening number, the one that has to set the tone for the whole show, is called, “And You Don’t Even Know It”, and it just says a phrase and then repeats “And you don’t even know it” over and over and over. “You’re a star! And you don’t even know it! Mini bar! And you don’t even know it!” Okay I made that last lyric up but you get the picture. I LOVE loved (sarcasm) the big ‘I Want’ number of the show, called “Spotlight”, where Jamie’s classmates sang of him “Out of the darkness, into the spotlight, out of the darkness, into the spotlight.” In that one was the part when I realized ‘ohhh this is going to be terrrrible’ — when the female classmates were sitting at a table doing the cups thing from ‘Pitch Perfect’ to the melody, the stupid thing you learn at summer camp when you’re little and somehow Anna Kendrick made cool? Anyway, the girls were doing that as accompaniment and my eyes got stuck in the back of my head. Then, ohh man, my favorite, the big runway catwalk number called “Work of Art” where everyone sang of Jamie (I’m sensing a redundant theme) about how he’s a work of art: “Mona Lisa isn’t she sir, work of art” was one lyric that I almost screamed at. I just…listen, not everything has to have Sondheim-level lyrics, but at least some effort would be appreciated.
Oh my real favorite part was when the mother had one of her hackneyed ballads about how she would do things differently if she met herself again (title of song: “If I Met Myself Again” picture 1000 eye roll emojis) and I SHIT YOU NOT, two dancers were BREAKDANCING during it. DURING A SAD BALLAD. It wasn’t ballet-like emotional dancing to the slow music; it was literally breakdancing to a nonexistent rhythm as though someone somewhere were scratching a record and Jason Mendoza was patiently waiting for the beat to drop but it never would. I looked around me in the darkness for the Punk’d cameras. I have never been so flabbergasted at direction choices. Man alive.
The only real conflict is for Jamie to get enough nerve to go onstage in his dress and not let the stupidest kid in school or the father that abandoned him get to him. That this super-confident, quick-witted boy would waste a moment thinking about what the mean boy in school thought of him was hard to believe, but okay, everyone has bullies in high school and it’s hard to deal with. But is this so-tiny-it’s-hard-to-even-call-him-a-minor-character really the only source of external conflict? To make up for that, Jamie fights with his mother for no good reason, and his mother sings a song about how he’s her boy (called “He’s My Boy”) and the audience was supposed to cry but it was forcing drama onto a cotton candy cloud that vanished into thin air as soon as pressure was applied to it.
Almost every character was stereotyped and lacking any semblance of nuance. I couldn’t believe that this show got this far without people editing it to bring it into the best shape possible. Or at least shape enough to run around the block. Only one character wasn’t completely clichéd and stereotyped, because it is one of the first appearances of such a character in musical theatre. Jamie’s best friend is a Muslim girl named Pritti (played by Lucie Shorthouse) who wears a hijab. As far as I know this is new, and this is minority representation this show deserves to be commended for. Lucie is the only character that gets to shine, aside from Jamie. She gets the one song in the show that didn’t make me want to tear my hair out, called “It Means Beautiful”, about the Arabic equivalent of the name Jamie. It’s not a great melody and the lyrics don’t live up to the nice sentiment that gives rise to the song (i.e., Pritti telling Jamie that he is indeed beautiful and look Arabic proves it), but still, it was decent. Lucie unfortunately does annoying popstar styling with her voice throughout the song, where she kind of catches the sound during held notes (something the director, if he exists, should have stopped) but she is really talented.
And Jamie himself shines bright. John McCrea has real star quality shining through even this pile. He stands out physically, a lithe, otherworldly-blonde, pale young man who regularly shows off how incredibly flexible he is. He manages to imbue the dullness with pops of vigor here and there, usually by doing an impossibly high kick in heels. He delivers one of the only lines that made me laugh – a bit where he’s trying to climb out the bathroom window and the mean teacher asks what he thinks he’s doing and he says “…Parkour??” That actually cracked me up. I hope that John gets a role in the future that is actually worthy of his talent.
Although I’m pretty sure he’s happy with this one. Everyone seems to be loving it.
Aside from the horrendous, actively bad score, the book is a mess as well. There is way too much of everything (so much attention to the drag queen, the teacher, the father, the friends) and yet not enough of those things to make it worthwhile, no real sense of understanding what they are trying to accomplish. And as if this storyline didn’t feel straight out of 1992 enough, there are outdated jokes peppering the book scenes, like talk of how all Kim Kardashian does is wear heels. It’s so low-effort.
OH so part of the nonexistent conflict is that the mean boy calls Jamie a ‘minger’ and Jamie is destroyed by it. So I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it was bad because it was basically the only real drama. Non-British people will likely not understand that part when they see it, but they are going to hate it anyway so whatever. So after the show I text my English friend “hey what does minga mean” because see I heard it with the accent, and she pretty much died laughing. She explained that it’s a very British way of calling someone skanky, like so skanky that no one would ever want to sleep with them. I thanked her for explaining it and then threw a glass at the wall in my fury over a musical basing all of its conflict over something so trivial as a boy calling another boy this word, as if Jamie, our unstoppable protagonist, would actually care that this idiot football player called him that.
Luckily the end sucked, with redemption of the white male asshole because who doesn’t love forgiveness that isn’t deserved. At least I guess we should try to redeem asshole children, who still have a chance to do some good, but I’m pretty sure that kid is going to remain a jerk forever. I’m angry that this disappointing show dragged (no pun intended) for almost three freaking hours. This isn’t “Les Mis”, people! And I’m angry and uncomfortable that a show that is professing to fill the niche of queer and inclusive art can still manage to be so sexist. There’s very often that unspoken but obvious thought that ‘we can’t be sexist towards women; we’re gay!’ and it’s definitely happening here. Its treatment of gender says while men like Jamie can cross gender lines and break down barriers, women shall remain in their supporting positions of the men around them. You may be thinking that there’s not a lot of good they can do for the women when this is a story about this one boy, but they manage to do a whole lot of bad, so. The girls in his school face a constant barrage of sexism from the male classmates, from being shown dicks they don’t want to see from dicks they don’t want to bother with, to being harassed with talk about how the boys will ‘drill’ them (they say ‘drilling’ a lot) whenever they want. And it’s a total Law & Order: SVU situation: The treatment is obviously bad, but it’s there not to serve as an example of bad behavior, but to serve as an example of what is considered normal. That pisses me off and it’s dangerous to include it in the show’s world as unnecessary examples of normalcy.
When the last musical assault on my ears and brain ended, the entire audience shot up to their feet quicker than I’ve ever seen. I guess when all the modern original musical work in your country is kind of on this level, you don’t expect, or get, any better.
AUDIENCE
The two old ladies in front of me were brushing their hair. One fumbled around her purse during the opening number, brought out a big brush, and brushed her hair, probably 100 strokes. Then she gave it to her friend. I can’t with people.
The best part of this show was the bubble tea I got next door afterwards.
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Moby Dick at the A.R.T: An Epic that No One but Dave Malloy Could Attempt
It’s the first Theatre Thursday of the year! What better show to celebrate with than this monster opus, playing at Boston’s American Repertory Theatre until January 12.
The long-anticipated musical version of the classic book Moby Dick is exactly what we expected from Dave Malloy, one of our favorite modern composers: it’s riveting, interesting, unique, too long, needs to be edited, and contains real brilliance. Telling the well-known tale of the for-sure nuts captain obsessed with the white whale and hell bent on killing it even if he takes his whole crew down with him, Moby Dick contains, as Ron Swanson said, “no frou frou symbolism; just a good honest tale about a man who hates an animal.” Just kidding, it’s all symbolism baby, some of the most well recognized symbolism in all of American literature, and Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin have presented a wild and weird, completely unexpected telling of the story. While the second act needs work (and I don’t expect Broadway audiences to happily sit through a two-hour long first act (yes we will talk at length about the peeing situation later)), the first was absolutely giddily brilliant, and the show as a whole is, like its titular whale, a special beast.
And yes, I did say the first act is two hours long. The show as a whole is 3 hours 25 minutes, which is Long but feels Right for such an epic tale. That first act is one of my favorite things I’ve seen at least this year. It feels magical, like a privilege to be there. By having the actor playing Ishmael, Manik Choksi (“Dolokov was in the Caucasus and he killed the shah’s brotherrrr”), talk to us as himself first, commenting on how he feels today in America as a person of color and wanting to see a stage filled with who he considers his America, it did two things: a) it confirmed that Chavkin productions are the most consciously diverse in the entire world, and b) it sealed this experience as one we were all in together, as did further breaking of the 4th wall in other instances, and the fact that the house lights were up for so much of it. This show is an adventure that the team makes sure the audience feels an important part of, making the whole thing extra meaningful. (Although Choksi’s little introduction to us feels out of order, since Dawn L. Troupe has already sung a prologue in character by that point.)
Like the book, this musical is an epic journey, although there are no exceedingly boring bits. Even things that should be cut are still interesting, and the show as a whole is special. But the magic is in that first half. Malloy throws everything into the pot and stirs it with some incredible music, new but still sounding like him, along with straight vaudeville scenes, as well as stand-up comedy. There’s everything going on, and somehow it all feels like part of the same whole. The scientific lessons about whales are done with a humorous touch, meta-critiquing how boring it is in the book. I could have done without the “The Whale as a Dish” song, a ‘funny’ cooking show sort-of take about eating whale meat which is so unnecessary that cutting it wouldn’t change anything, despite how incredible a performer Stubb (Kalyn West) is, moving like a gumby-sort of cartoon character the whole time. The greatest segment of this vaudeville section is the character- and 4th wall-breaking stand-up from Fedallah, Eric Berryman, who takes the opportunity to decry how this ‘exotic foreign’ character was treated in the book AND to call out Malloy and Chavkin’s extra wokeness with their commitment to diversity onstage. It’s a sort of timeout for everyone, and it is absolutely brilliant, giving everyone both a breather and a challenge to their perspective.
Some of the music is magnificent, especially Ahab’s first song (when the band starts picking up, wow), early movements I don’t know the name of because unlike the jackwagon next to us we don’t read the program the entire time??, and the lovely, calm “A Squeeze of the Hand”. Others need work, like Starbuck’s big song before the act break, “Dusk”, which needs to be moving and big but feels lackluster despite her performance. The line about “something ties me to this man and I’ve no knife to cut the line” is okay, but not strong enough to be repeated so much and to hang everything on.
During the first act ‘pause’, about 15 audience members are recruited to join the cast onstage for the rest of the act – in ponchos, and then put in onstage boats and used in all sorts of hilarious amazing ways. Volunteer for this. Do not be like me and get scared and put your hand down. It looked like the funnest, funniest thing ever. There are some blood spurts as they kill a whale (you have to put your vegan blinders on for this one, p.s.) with the abstract representation seeming shockingly real, but that’s what the ponchos are for.
The second act lacks the magical spark that we felt in the first act, even though it’s objectively well done. The first section after the break is entirely about the child castaway character Pip, and it is heart-breaking and moving (with a great performance from Morgan Siobhan Green), though it seems inconsistent with what came before. The second part is the climax as the Pequod sets upon the white whale, and this is where everything – except Tom Nelis’s literally flawless performance as Ahab – falls short. This is the big exciting exhilarating climax – or it should be, but the only staging to show the electrifying action is flashing the lights almost a dozen times. It’s tiring, this blinding flashing, and pretty annoying actually, and doesn’t accomplish any of what these moments should be showing. The ending needs to be bigger and bolder. And having the two sailors, often shown chatting at their lookout up the mast, having another tête-à-tête at the end did not work (along with all but their first such scene). It was very randomly and suddenly The Good Place, with their acknowledging they will die but giving a very ‘why not still try?’ vibe, which felt misplaced and didn’t fit the rest of the show at all. (Also, that line about whale sounds’ different rhythms coming together ‘like West African polyrhythms’ is a REAL clunker, oof.)
But overall, this was one of the most interesting, ambitious projects I’ve had the privilege of seeing. It strives for so much, maybe too much, and definitely needs to be refined before Broadway, but man alive if this isn’t some of the coolest, boldest theatre. It feels right that Malloy be the person to musicalize this epic story, and it can, and should, become an epic in its own right.
INFORMATION
The first thing in my notes: “21:24 intermission I DID IT!”
So the first act is just shy of two hours, with the 5-minute pause coming at the 50 minute mark. That pause is when they pick the audience volunteers. You can’t leave during the pause, but even if you did, even if you have the aisle seat next to the door, you couldn’t hit the bathrooms and back in that time because they are DOWNSTAIRS. It’s a very high school setup. The bathrooms are unassigned gender-wise, open to be used as one sees fit, which should be fine with everyone but caused a lot of conversation among the older crowd (mostly confusion about where to go). The line at intermission went all the way up the stairs and past the bar and just about back to the doors to the theatre, so, yeah, run.
Happily, there is a water refill port downstairs with the bathrooms.
The second half is just about an hour 10 minutes, with the show ending at 22:54. There is merchandise for sale from this show as well as ART’s big successes in recent years, including Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 and my favorite Pippin revival of all time.
Saoirse Ronan Loves Murder in Almeida’s Macbeth
Every time I see Macbeth all I can think is “wow these people love murder more than I remember.” I’m not new to the play or anything; in fact, I debated seeing this production at all because I’ve seen the Scottish play a few times too many in recent years so I’m sort of sick of it (sorry Billy). But that debate died off quickly (like everyone in this show!) because I had to see our generation’s cinema queen as Lady Macbeth. Yep, this production stars SAOIRSE RONAN. Her first name is VERY hard to type correctly in all caps but she is such a good lil actress. While I prefer her cavorting around colonial New England breaking Little Timmy Cham Cham’s heart than being full-out Arizona Murder Horny as she is here, she does a fine job proving to the UK that she can handle our stages.
And wow, does she love murder. Her Lady Macbeth struck me more than the character ever has before as eagerly jumping RIGHT QUICK in for murder. She goes from zero to murder real fast. That god really did replace her milk with gall, as she says, although it’s more pure evil than gall. She hears her husband say two words and then is hundo p ‘OK so we’re doing this!’ Her first monologue is sexual and violent. She is a scary scary sexy lady — they have Sershersh literally writhe around on a bed thinking of how much she loves the idea of murder and power and using murder to gain power and probably vice versa too, that’s how much she writhes. It’s a good thing she doesn’t have a durder because she would definitely murder that durder.
In a wonderful showing of accessibility, the Almeida had a long weekend of livestream-only performances of this production, which is a) amazing and b) what I saw. I thought the livestream would be of a regular performance, like with an in-person audience too, but it was only livestream. I was sad to not hear a live audience coughing so I could revel in my being home, but without them the creative team got to make a more cinematic version. They took advantage of the opportunity with cameras like right up in everyone’s business, getting all the filmic angles right on stage and lots of close-ups. It made it noticeably different from the in-theatre experience, which a stream should be if possible, as it’s a different medium.
Okay so you all know the story of Macbeth, right, like how this Scottish dude is like ‘I wanna be the rulerrrr’ and he asks his wife if she’s up for killing their way to the top because you should never begin a murderous spree for power without your wife’s consent and she breaks out the gold sequins and disco ball and dances around singing ‘livin’ it up on top-ah!’ or something like that (now that would be an interesting version). What really struck me this go-round is how stupid Macbeth is. Like, the witches tell him the prophecy right, that he will be in power? But then he goes and does stuff himself to make that true…which is NOT the point of prophecies. That’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy and that’s a logical FALLACY. If you went to a fortune teller and they were like ‘oh xyz is going to happen’, what kind of jackass then goes and MAKES xyz happen? Who would take it upon themselves to prove a podunk fortune teller to be right? Wouldn’t you test their predictions by just sitting back and being like well let’s see how good you are, make that shit happen universe! If you make it happen yourself you are cheating! It does not prove anything! YOU BLEW IT. I want to see the play where this jamoke has three witches tell him what’s going to happen in the future and he goes “oh yeah? PROVE IT” AND THEN DOES NOTHING.
It struck me this go-round that Lady Macbeth is a real Karen who hates reaping the consequences of what she sowed with her shirty behavior. Not since Atonement has Saoirse played a character so purely evil who only realizes her mistaken ways and feels regret when it’s too late. Luckily though her bastard character here dies, whereas in Atonement she got to be old after ruining lives. I’m still mad about that movie and that I don’t have that green dress. Anyway, Macbeth as always teaches us that you really shouldn’t kill your friends, even if you will get to be king. Who wants to be king? Not me. Hashtag abolish the M. (Am I allowed to say that? I’ll delete ‘-onarchy’.) Saoirse when everything goes to shit was very compelling, although I always want to shout “what did you think would happen, Karen?” Really shouldn’t have killed all your friends there! Speaking of, no matter how jaded I am with this play, the scene where Macduff finds out about his family always wrecks me for a good few days. No, a WEEK! A whole week. It’s just so f-ing sad, debilitating. This one was no exception. (Wish I could shout out to the actor but the Alm’s website doesn’t list the cast by character wtf.)
As for the rest of the cast, they’re all doing a fine job. James McArdle in the title role is solid. Everyone is solid. But for me it’s just another decent production of Macbeth. It’s hard to really set yourself apart from the endless number of strong productions that keep on coming day in day out for the past 400 years, to find something that makes it special. It seemed like another straightforward production, albeit with more modern attire. But according to the Almeida website, there was an attempt at revolutionizing the piece: the action is occurred “a little bit later than now” and “in the ruins of an old theatre”. What do you mean a little later than now, and why? And the ruins of an old theatre? That did not come across at all, nor could I determine the reason for that. And like, why? And like, don’t? The three witches were dressed in suits too, another little piece of the inevitable modernization and distinction process that I wish everyone realized was largely unnecessary and virtually always a downgrade. Also the witches should ALWAYS be played by little girls for maximum creepiness.
INFORMATION
Macbeth is at the Almeida until November 27.
The theatre said it would be 3 hours and 5 minutes but the livestream was 2 hours 50 minutes so that’s fun. Still, a few years ago at the official Billy theatre in Stratford upon Avon it was 2 hours 20 minutes and the ushers were like ‘we love this one because it’s the shortest!’ so where did that extra halfsies come from? Is this Billy’s unrated version?
It’s sold out now, but the livestream options are now over too so if you can’t get in off the waitlist at least you are saving yourself from the unmasked coughers. Go watch Lil Wims on your TV and a different production of Macbeth on a computer at the same time and just like see what happens.
