Tony Award Nominations are Out! Thoughts, Snubs, Surprises, Rudinsby Randi / April 30, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the new production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ playing at London’s Southwark Playhouse until June 1.
The sheer exuberance resounding at the Southwark Playhouse these days is enough to bring anyone a little bit of joy (and almost enough to erase the memories of the last time we were there). With the new production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the musical revue of Fats Waller songs, there’s so much sensory overload from the loudly impressive vocals, the energetic dancing, and the glittering (and very cool) set that there’s barely a moment suitable for reflection. When those rare moments arise, and you reflect “wait a minute…there’s absolutely zero story here…this is just a revue isn’t it” (if you didn’t know beforehand, as I did not), you’re just about to go “hmm” but then another lively song sung by a bubbly performer swings under way and you forget to go “hmm” because it’s all so fun.
Fats Waller was one of the biggest names in jazz music in the early 20th century, responsible for some of the most recognizable standards from that era. In less than 40 years, he wrote hundreds upon hundreds of songs, 400 of which he copyrighted (I hope he got a frequent user discount from the Copyright Office). His many memorable hits include the title song “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, as well as my title’s song “This Joint is Jumpin’” (god all these triple quotes ahhh), both of which provide high points in this show that’s operating almost nonstop at full throttle. An enthusiastic audience did its part to keep the whole experience as close to max enjoyment as possible, despite the shortcomings of the show itself.
And despite enjoying the heck out of this (literally) sparkling show and its high-spirited talented cast, there are some shortcomings. Mainly that it’s just a straightforward revue of Fats Waller’s songs. This guy was a key player in one of the most important musical scenes in history. His Harlem style piano is responsible for modern jazz piano, and he achieved international success when that was still really hard to do, and at such a young age too. (Fats died super young of pneumonia while on a cross-country train, which, like, not to make everything about me but that doesn’t exactly make me feel better about all the long train journeys I take. Poor Fats.) Yet you don’t learn anything about him from this show. Sure, you get general hints from the actual music, but no facts. I get that the creators were trying to let the music speak for itself, but while each song conveys a certain sentiment, it doesn’t share actual information, when it so easily could have. At one point late in the second act, one of the cast members introduced a song saying a quick word about what happened when Fats brought his music to Harlem. Why weren’t more songs framed with a historical anecdote or fact from Waller’s life? It was so simple and so effective. It’s a shame (and super random) it happened just once.
Now, this is an old(ish) established show, so it’s unfair to call out these issues with the bones when discussing Southwark’s production in particular. With what they had, however, the Southwark is doing a fantastic job just blowing the roof off the place. The cast never stops working, and they’re working hard as hell. The five cast members all belt their lungs out and dance their asses off, and they try their damnedest to play characters where there are none. (And there are none – they even call each other by their real names.) A standout for me was Carly Mercedes Dyer, who in the first act mainly shows off her incredible dancing while playing a lot of silly characters who goofily appear to not sing too well. And then in an early second act solo she pretty much goes “oh surprise, bitches, I’m the most talented person here” and belts her forking face off.
Aside from the book issues (the lack thereof), there were only a few slow moments, like a few clunkers to begin Act II and the just unwinnable song “Jitterbug Waltz”, with the constantly cascading melody that sounds super flat no matter who is singing it. But the slow moments are few and far between when you are barely given a second to breathe before the frenetic cast picks back up with an insane dance and a thrilling group number, or with a movingly belted solo (so much belting), or with another beloved classic like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do” (last okay use of that first word) and, my favorite, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” (from You’ve Got Mail, obvs). And the humor! Even without a book this cast filled the show with hilarious moments. It’s almost (/very) embarrassing how hard I was laughing during the RIDICULOUS song “Your Feet’s Too Big”. This song, this amazing, incredible song that I somehow never knew but now adore, has a man literally going “Your feet’s too big/don’t want ya cause your feet’s too big/mad at you cause your feet’s too big/I hate you cause your feet’s too big”. I mean book or no book, nothing gets better than that. And book or no book, there’s too much to enjoy about this wildly entertaining show.
INFORMATION
The show is in two acts of 45 minutes each, with a 20 minute interval. Since there’s no story, it would have made more sense to have it as a longer one-act, but the cast probably needs that break. Don’t sit in the front few rows if you have sensitivity to light, as the stronger lights bounce off the gold floor (yep there’s a shiny gold floor) and it can get a little uncomfortable.
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How to Make “Treason” into a Full-Fledged Musical
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the concert stream of “Treason” the musical, recorded at Cadogan Hall and shown earlier in March with an encore last weekend.
What I knew previously about Guy Fawkes: Bonfire Night. Gunpowder Plot. V for Vendetta masks. After watching the concert stream of the new concept musical “Treason”, based on the events and players in England’s 1605 gunpowder plot, I also know that his name was Guido. (All I can hear is his name replacing Sweeney Todd: “not Guido…not Guido Fawkes! the demon plotter of some! thing!”). The show focuses not on that mysterious man but on the group of his co-conspirators, yet it wasn’t so much intent on history as it was expressing the emotional beats of the stories of those involved. With some critical and editorial touches, “Treason” could achieve that intention, and maybe even become a successful full-fledged musical. But it needs work.
The Gunpowder Plot was essentially a group of Catholics plotting to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords, ostensibly because of anti-Catholic persecution but who knows why men do anything. “Treason” begins at the end of the plot, when conspirators are executed and their wives are mourning. Without having met anyone yet or heard anything about the events, this reverse prologue feels unearned. This flat opening exemplified the quintessential problem of telling instead of showing. Completely cutting these first two songs will give the show a chance to begin in a more energetic, dynamic way – with the group of conspirators starting to chat and meet and plan. We could get to know them naturally, as they get to know each other. Start with showing – showing the men talking and plotting. With this odd, stale beginning, it felt plodding, and only started to get moving at the thirty minute mark.
“Treason” is billed as “a historic tale of religious persecution and brutality”, but honestly, none of it felt as weighty as that tagline makes it out to be. There’s a lot of talk talk into our earholes about how persecuted the Catholics were, and how they were the victims, but without any nuance of the historical situation (surely it’s important to note what came before…maybe someone named Bloody Mary?) it’s coming across as “these poor yt mens tried to blow up a building and kill people and they GOT STOPPED!” We need a reason to not be like “…and?”
I think a full version of this show would succeed if it focuses on Catesby as the main character with all the other conspirators are interesting side characters. As is, it tries to put too many characters on equal footing, but splitting the spotlight with the others ends up diminishing all of their stories. It would be more compelling with a clear main character. Don’t half ass so many things. Whole ass one thing.
Of course a full musical would flesh out the format more, but even so I can’t see how opening with the aftermath and mourning and then repeating that segment in its entirety when the plot reaches that point is worth it. It doesn’t have any emotional power to have the audience realize “oh we already saw this bit…now it’s making chronological sense…so they are repeating it…cool.” It was the same two songs they repeated too, so if they really want that to work, they have to work on those songs too. There’s a lot of promise but they aren’t great yet. The song meant to be an emotional wallop, where Lucie Jones sings about kissing her husband’s white cold corpse in the cold hard ground is…I mean…those lyrics. We were like “ugh please stop saying how you want to kiss his cold corpse” I mean YEESH. There are a few instances where the lyrics need a little polishing, like when the men start plotting and Catesby hints at taking the lead and things feel like they’ll get moving but they blow it by singing this song in which the men literally say the word ‘blow’ 483 times. We started joke-singing along with it just repeating the word ‘blow’ and we were right
Also, is every single musical portrayal of a British king going to make them the hokey joke comedic part from now on? It kind of felt obviously derivative.
Okay that’s a lot of negativity and I was supposed to be putting more positivity out there this year. This feels very first draft but really there’s a lot of potential, and with some obvious changes, some critical reformatting, and some work on the music, this could be as epic as they want it to be.
RAGS the Musical at Park Theatre: A Moving, Relevant Production of a Lesser (Known) Work
Today’s show is the new production of RAGS the Musical at Park Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, playing until February 8.
There is nothing more incredible than when musical theatre shares something magical that changes my life from that point forward. Sometimes it’s a superb, gorgeous score that will forever live in my heart. Sometimes it’s a performance so magnificent it remains indelible. And then you have the new production of RAGS, which hath bequeathed upon me the most fantastic term of endearment for my husband: my Shabbos goy.
Now it sounds like I’m joking but I’m so serious, this is the best thing ever, and I wonder how I never before came across this perfect phrase for a non-Jew who comes into a Jewish household to do the prohibited work (like turning on the lights) on Shabbat. I LOVE IT. No matter how I felt about the rest of the show, this is what I’d call a successful night at the theatre. And you know husbo’s happy with his new title [Ed. Note – he is not].
But fortunately for theatre fans in London, the new production of RAGS at the Park Theatre is a good one, providing much more than a bit of fun with Yiddish. The tale of Jewish immigrants making a new life in 1910s America may be predictable and clichéd but it’s enjoyable and ultimately moving, featuring classic immigrant struggles, good pacing, some great comic relief (sup Rachel Izen), and above all, great performances, especially from Carolyn Maitland reigning over the stage as Rebecca and an adorable Jude Muir (alternating) as her young son David. Honestly, the bones of the show itself are not that strong. It’s an overall mediocre score (with highlights) and a trouble-making book if there ever was one (more infra), with a truly unnecessary Hamlet (*cough* Haim-let) bit. But the production as a whole is strong enough to elevate the material, making this quite a successful undertaking of a show most people have written off not only as lesser known but also as less than.
When RAGS premiered on Broadway in 1986, it closed after only four (4!) performances, making it one of the most infamous flops in musical theatre history. Whether it was due to the somewhat pedestrian score, the confused and overloaded book, or just the lack of interest, I don’t know (I do know most theatregoers were still making their way to the ridiculous spectacle of Cats that year), but it came, went, and was mostly forgotten, failing to achieve what Ragtime would with a very similar story a decade later. With RAGS, Joseph Stein set out to ostensibly write the sequel to Fiddler on the Roof (which he also wrote the book for, you knew that), imagining what would have happened next for the victims of the pogroms if they made it out of the shtetl and sailed to America. You can’t blame him for wanting so badly to convey the emotional and dramatic heft of what these people would have gone through that he overfilled the story, but unfortunately, he focused on the results he wanted from the audience and not the means of authentically getting there. So much of RAGS clearly demands an emotional reaction, but unlike with Fiddler, it doesn’t build up the necessary world or develop characters sufficiently to reach that point as often as it wants to. The moments where Stein et al. wanted us to CRY are so blatantly demanding emotional connection, and when you demand it instead of earn it, you don’t get it.
In the decades since its premiere, RAGS has been rewritten, refocused, and retooled to try to make it something worth salvaging. Now with a revised book by David Thompson, this current incarnation may not be perfect, but it’s definitely an improvement and definitely worth the effort, though there are still blatant moments where there may as well be a light-up sign flashing CRY or BE MOVED (as opposed to the sign actually held onstage at one point that read NO DOGS NO JEWS, which is terrible but made me laugh because I was like ‘those are literally the best things on earth idiots, why not add NO CHOCOLATE and NO TV to it, Nazi morons’). Luckily for us, the performances manage to earn the desired outcome: Dave Willetts’ grief-stricken Avram, Maitland’s repeat anguish, Muir’s remembered terrors – the performances manage to move us where the book wishes it could.
And this revised book is HUNDO P better than the original. Not to be morbid but killing off Rebecca’s husband before the story begins makes much more sense. Not saying the name of the factory where Bella goes to work is a necessity (or maybe I just didn’t hear it?), because once you hear Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (which is, as we learned on Crazy Ex Girlfriend, the favorite fire of Rebecca and Greg, which is supes dark), you been know what’s going down: more than 100 factory workers died, mostly young Jewish and Italian girls so yeah, it’s good they don’t have her say “I got a job at the TSF” because then you’d just be sitting there waiting for it to happen, whereas it’s more of a shock (though not at all a surprise, what a gd mess industry was at this time) this way. The character of Bella is still underserved, banking on bullshirt traits like ‘nice’ and ‘good’ and ‘pretty’ instead of making a fully fleshed character, but it’s improved, and Martha Kirby gives a winning performance nonetheless. And making the character of Saul now Salvatore, an Italian, (the supes charming Alex Gibson-Giorgio) pays off in several ways. I especially loved the scene of the Sabbath prayer mixed with the Italians at prayer (so well done). However, I’m shocked that the proposed love affair with Rebecca never leads to any conversation or hesitation about him being a gentile (given the black hats and David’s payot, I assumed they were Orthodox). It’s cool to think of Rebecca as like the OG interfaith relationship proponent (does my fam bam have her to thank?) but it would need some shoring up in the story, or like, any commentary at all.
Best of all, moving the one SPECTACULAR song in the score, “Children of the Wind”, from early on to now the very end is a genius move, because that’s what we remember. Charles Strouse’s music suffers from the blahs for some of this show but this is where he comes through. (Though it’s Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics that felt surprisingly pedestrian (surprising, I guess, when my favorites from Pippin and Wicked are in the forefront of my mind; not so much when you remember much of Godspell or “Something bad is happening in Oz/something bad/happening in Oz” (I’m sorry no one has a perfect track record.))) I don’t know how Maitland has any voice left in the show to deliver this final number (espesh after shouting at Avram, which seems mean I mean he’s grieving) but she does and it’s worth seeing the show for this moment alone. This song is a sweeping, gorgeous summary of why this tale keeps feeling so necessary and so relevant. As an American, I was crushed to realize just how little progress we’ve made in welcoming immigrants (and, you know, Nazis are in power), and as a Brit (heyoo that’s right) I was depressed to consider how this country is also falling down the idiot slide of blaming immigrants and Jews for its problems. But as a Jew, this song was a revelation: I don’t consider myself a Zionist and I definitely don’t approve of Netanyahu’s government, but wow if this song isn’t the best explanation for why Jewish people feel the need to have a land that is truly and safely theirs. I get it. I don’t understand how anyone could hear this song or watch this show and not get it – for any minority – which is a testament to the power of theatre.
INFORMATION
RAGS plays at the Park Theatre until February 8.
The Park Theatre was designed by, to quote Lewis Black, a guy with scoliosis who is really forking pissed. At least in the circle (just two rows! Not a bad seat in the house, really, view-wise), the seats are all love seats (for two) and there is no leg room, so the entire row has to like, exit the area for anyone to move down it. It felt like sitting on a high bar stool for 2 ½ hours (complete with the inability to reach my purse on the floor). I think it’s a new theatre too so like, what? How!
The circle bathrooms are upstairs in the bar, 3 stalls for ladies. RUN BITCHES.
