Shoobie Doobie Down to Dubai Where the Food is Greatby Randi / June 26, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is My Fair Lady on Broadway, closing on July 7 because of reasons, I guess.
Remember when I reviewed this new Broadway production of My Fair Lady last season (sure you do!) and I said I couldn’t stop thinking about how superb it was? Well, my brain recovered a tiny bit after about a year so I went back for another dose of INCREDIBLE THEATRE PERFECTION. I’ve been (hashtag) blessed to see some exquisite theatre, and the current Lincoln Center Theatre production of My Fair Lady is at the top of that list. I saw the Tony-nominated original cast when it opened last year, which included Lauren Ambrose and my main man Norbert “Norbie” Leo Butz, as Eliza Doolittle and her (checks notes) 10-years-older-than-her father, as well as Jordan Donica as a winning Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Brits love hyphenating to show status). I had to go back to see Broadway’s beloved Laura Benanti as Eliza, her dream role, and I ended up being even more devastated by this show’s brilliance this go-round.
If you don’t know the story of My Fair Lady – which, by the way, after an ENTIRE LIFE of knowing this musical, Z informed me for the first time ever that the title could be a joke on ‘Mayfair Lady’, like the area of London that the show generally takes place in, and it works even better because of Eliza’s original cockney accent because that’s how she’d say Mayfair and just like WHAT did everyone know this??? – it’s about a poor girl who sells flowers in Covent Garden (but not herself! She’s VERY ADAMANT about that, she’s a good girl she is!) and crosses paths with the arrogant and self-involved Professor Henry Higgins who makes a bet with his equally rich and equally linguistics-minded friend Colonel Pickering that he can transform this lowly flower girl into a lady just with elocution lessons (and a bath) and the men are like “yes do let’s” and Eliza’s like “eeeeayyyyy” but she wants to rise above her lot in life so she agrees and spends months and months living in Higgins’ GORGEOUS staffed-up house on Wimpole Street and their relationship gets complicated because feelings but also stubbornness and aforementioned arrogance and it’s all wonderful and heartbreaking and glorious. Meanwhile Eliza’s dad is a good-for-nothing who sings a 20-minute song about getting married.
I’m sure you love the movie and everything (and the original ending), but this production, I have shivers just thinking about it. Actual chill bumps. I wish it wasn’t closing; I would see it every year. Bartlett Sher’s impeccable direction and his grasp of Golden Age musicals have never been on more impressive display. Every inch of this show is perfectly orchestrated, including the lush orchestra playing these classic melodies. Every song is a highlight. I especially love the written-to-be-a-highlight “On the Street Where You Live”, now performed by Christian Dante White, the new Freddy, who has quickly proved himself to be Broadway’s new Kyle Dean Massey (i.e. a wonderful replacement). As Alfred Doolittle, Alexander Gemignani was out, but his understudy Joe Hart was wonderful (and actually looked older – Benanti and Gemignani are LITERALLY THE SAME AGE, smdh). And I love that if you choose one ensemble member to watch, you’ll get a whole other story from this person; they’re all doing nonstop character work that builds an entire world to house the story of Eliza and Higgins.
And Eliza and Higgins are so much more than I ever thought before seeing this production. Originally, with Lauren Ambrose, who brought so much acting precision to Eliza and made so much of the character, Eliza and Henry seemed to be on equal footing, in terms of whose story it was. I loved their interplay, and even though Eliza has some of the best and biggest songs in musical theatre, it was a treat to see deeply into this character with the help of an actress who is primarily an actress, not a singer. On the other hand, Benanti is an actress who is primarily an incredible singer (and was clearly sick and still went on and still sounded fabulous, though a little weaker than I know she can be, so deserves all the kudos). A Broadway staple for a remarkably long time considering how young she is, she was obviously great (though her English accent was…not), and looked amazing in the new costumes. But the subtle differences in portrayal showed a different relationship. With her Eliza, she was sassy and brave from the start, and you never doubted that she would always be able to take care of herself and put herself first when necessary. She was always going to be okay. With Ambrose, Eliza was much more delicate, much more in need of confidence and growth, making her decision at the end all the more emotional.
Although the ending is still beyond emotional (I cried like a BABY and might again right now thinking about it okay yep there we go), I felt it this time entirely from Henry’s perspective. Now, it’s clear that this is primarily a show about Henry Higgins, something I never realized before. Above all, this is a show about Henry’s personal failings, the ones that keep him from knowing true happiness. I never knew it, but My Fair Lady is honestly a tragedy, and it’s mainly a tragedy of toxic masculinity. I KNOW! WHO KNEW! All of this profound emotional impact is entirely due to the flawless and heartbreaking performance of Harry Hadden-Paton, a fully formed, fully feeling Higgins I cannot imagine ever being surpassed. Ever. I love me some Tony Shalhoub but it’s a crime that this performance didn’t win a Tony, I see this now. HP sauce shows Henry’s entire life and upbringing and habits and his discomfort in changing any of it, in each facial expression, each line delivery. It’s all incredible, and by the end it’s all heartbreaking. I honestly can’t believe how much he accomplished with this performance in creating what seemed like a real flawed person up on that stage. This production is one of the greatest of all time and I think it’s in large part because of his performance. I’m so glad I saw it again and so upset that HE COULDN’T JUST STOP BEING AN ASSHOLE AND BE HONEST AND BE HAPPY GODDAMMIT HERE WE GO AGAIN THE END.
INFORMATION
Since Lincoln Center is a nonprofit and they like stupid turnaround and crap like that I guess, the show is closing July 7, so if you are in NYC or like can feasibly get there in the next week, you REALLY G-D SHOULD.
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“Chess” on the West End: Great Music in a Weird AF Production
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “Chess” at London’s English National Opera, playing until June 2.
You know how Broadway keeps trying to make shows about basketball and they never really take off? Well at least basketball has some action to it. Imagine a show about the most boring game ever. “Chess”, the 1980s musical from ABBA menfolk Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus with lyrics from Tim Rice, really truly did that. The music still stands as some of the most famous and mainstream to come out of musical theatre (‘One Night in Bangkok’, anyone?), yet the book veers on ridonk. It’s one of the few shows I prefer to be done in a concert version. Still, I had high expectations for London’s new big production at the English National Opera’s Coliseum, but these expectations were not met. The score was well sung, but the production – both in terms of visuals, sound, and more – did more to hurt the show than help it.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
The story begins with men singing about the history of chess, and projections of like Egyptian hieroglyphs line the walls and you’re like wat. Oh yes, so this production’s biggest faux pas is relying on digital projections instead of sets or ya know taste. Weird images that suggest that someone was having a bit too much fun with a new computer program make up most of the artwork projected onto the various block-shaped screens. The set up of the square screens is copied from the original concept album artwork, which is…a nice throwback, I guess, but not enough of a reason to design the entire staging that way. You can see the same idea of the squares in the picture at the top of the page – the set up is such that images projected onto the square screens were chopped up in places where the squares don’t meet, so there was a lot of distortion. I’m sure the set designers and production team will justify the distortion with some lofty statement about how reality is distorted when projected from screens too but that is also not enough of a reason to excuse such horrible visuals for nearly 3 hours.
After the unclear history lesson, things go haywire if you are familiar with the American stage version. The American and British books for ‘Chess’ are COMPLETELY different. Anatoly wins in one, Freddie the other. In one, the first match takes place in Italy, the second in Bangkok, but in the other, the whole show is just one match in Bangkok! The song orders are completely scrambled too. I don’t know HOW that happened. So the British version is what we are talking about here, obvs. Anatoly and Freddie arrive in Merano, Italy for their big world championship chess tournament, and the mayor and townspeople rejoice by singing the lamest song “Merano” that just does not fit the show. It’s a huge white chorus in laderhosen and braids because they are close to Switzerland I guess and they do dorky folk dances and it’s super awkward considering the modern pop taste of the rest of the score. After this seemingly photoshopped insert, Freddie and Anatoly are met with an enormous crowd of TV cameras and lots of shouting. Freddie responds with a song that I think was also about shouting (“Commie Newspapers”) as he fights with his assistant and yells at all the reporters. I would too though; most of them are awful. Here, the projections changed to be close-ups of the actors’ faces. I noticed two cameramen onstage who I believe were capturing the footage of the actors that was projected live, which like that’s cool that you figured that out to do it live but it is not attractive. Most of the projections – and remember, that is the entirety of the set and set design here – for the rest of the show were Tom Hooper-style close-ups of the actors’ faces. It was horrendous. Now this is the first full-fledged production of ‘Chess’ that I’ve seen, so this could be how the show is always supposed to be staged. It doesn’t mean it’s good. If the show was supposed to be on screen it would be on screen, and not in a live theatre. TV requires a completely different set of skills and tools, not just on the part of the actors, so to kind of force these performances to be both theatre and television at the same time made both a big mess. Remember during the Tony performance of ‘The Book of Mormon’ the camera focused on one ensemble member who was doing all his funny-face reaction shots for his track? You weren’t supposed to just be looking at him. Also, I did not want to stare at the giant projected faces of the characters the entire time; I wanted to watch the actual actors and maybe their interaction instead of counting their pores. That’s what theatre is for.
Using all my might to focus on the actors and not the atrocious projections, I followed the ridiculous story. Freddie yells at everyone, Anatoly kind of simmers with unpredictability – it could be either rage or boredom – and the world…watches? Their meeting in competition, broadcast all over the world, represents the larger conflict between the two countries they represent, so the entire world is on the edge of their seats watching. Not really though, because it’s chess. The first round of the match is about to begin and lights focus aaaaaand…then we have just two men sitting at a table playing chess quietly. It doesn’t exactly make for good theatre. Their playing sessions should have had them singing. Instead they just sat there and played and it was super boring. Then of course Freddie yells that Anatoly is cheating (because Freddie is losing) and he storms off like the brat he is and you’re like maybe the ‘action’ isn’t better than the boring chess match.
Freddie’s assistant and presumed lover, Florence Vassy (Cassidy Janson, who is pretty great), begs Freddie to have dinner with Anatoly to reconcile after the storming off, but Freddie gets sidetracked by Bangkok’s nightlife (“One Night in Bangkok”, which is more talk-sung that I remember and when you don’t have Adam Pascal’s incredible talk/scream-singing ability to make it pop it’s really just awkward) so Florence and Anatoly end up alone and they…fall in love? Dudes. Florence is a young attractive lady and Anatoly is MICHAEL BALL. Nothing against Mr. Ball (hehe ball) but he is like 60? And he’s not exactly a hot young guy of the sort that help Anatoly make any kind of narrative sense. Florence’s love for him comes out of nowhere and then is the emotional underpinning of the entire show and the trying-so-hard-to-be-dramatic-ending so if you aren’t invested in their love, or if you don’t believe even a bit of it, the whole piece fails and feels forced and empty.
Anatoly is married, by the way, and has a young son. We see him say goodbye to them in the weird Egyptian prologue. His wife Svetlana is played by Alexandra Burke, the one who won a season of The X Factor. She is NOT EVEN 30 YEARS OLD. She’s like a super hot young recording artist. She’s not married to Michael Ball ffs! And Cassidy is like 37 and beautiful and hot in Ireland (a ginger) and she is not falling in love at first sight with Michael Ball! This is NONSENSE. If you don’t buy right off the bat that all the young gorgeous women love them some Anatoly, then the show doesn’t work. After Anatoly affairs up with Florence, most of the drama has nothing to do with chess. It’s all about the two women dealing with their love for this troubled man. AIN’T BUYING IT.
Lots of nonsense happens after this, like Anatoly defects from the Soviet Union (in Soviet Union, they defect you) and seeks asylum with Florence in Britain; Svetlana teams up with a TV station to confront her husband Jerry Springer-style on live TV (??? AIN’T BUYING IT); and there’s more quiet games of chess in a freaking musical. The book is so strange, the set design is as I said the devil’s work, and yet the score is overall so great. You have Svetlana’s big soul-searching “Someone Else’s Story”, a lovely song that deserves to be about more than this hot woman’s old cheating Rusky husband. Alexandra does a nice job as Svetlana considering she isn’t an actress but a recording artist. Her acting leaves something to be desired but in this production it’s fine. You have Florence’s big angry “Nobody’s Side” which absolutely rocks out as a song but deserves to be about more than a fight she had with her asshole boss. (Florence’s songs seem tailor-made for Idina Menzel, who played the role in a concert version years back. They’re written in a way that lets Cassidy kind of sound like Idina sometimes too, which is cool but just makes you wish you were seeing Idina. (Josh Groban played Anatoly in that version, with Idina. Don’t get me started on how badly I wish I could have seen that version. That’s the goddamn great version.)) Then you have the big duet between the two women, “I Know Him So Well”, the highlight of the show but again, it deserves to be about something better than two women being sad about an inadequate man. I wish these songs had a better book to hold them up in the pantheon of musical theatre but alas.
I know I’m being quite mean to the men in this show, but it’s not their fault. Everyone behind the scenes is responsible for what doesn’t work here, not the actors. Michael Ball is like the greatest British musical theatre actor but he is not right for this part. He sings his songs beautifully but (sadly) this isn’t a concert version. Casting matters! I’ve railed enough about the set design but the sound design was bad too! And this is the freaking English National Opera building. It takes effort to destroy the acoustics. But often, with the fast-paced songs (a lot of them in this poppy score), the lyrics would come through the speakers just as sort of an indecipherable hum or growl. I honestly can’t believe they let that kind of issue stand.
Luckily, the music is so good and generally so well sung that “Chess” is still a decent time at the theatre. This production really should have been a concert version though. Or they should have cast men who better matched with the women they cast, or vice versa. Or they really should have just gotten Josh Groban to reprise his role. I wouldn’t even be writing this complainy complainerson review if that were the case; I’d still be there watching every single performance. Big mistake, men*. Big. Huge!
INFORMATION
Never, and I mean NEVER, sit anywhere at the ENO except for the stalls/orchestra. There’s only one staircase to the upper levels and the crowd is uniformly old so it takes literal hours to get out from upstairs. It’s an infuriating fire hazard for one thing and a real pain in my ass for another.
They do have water pitchers at the bar though.
STAGE DOOR
I saw it on my birthday so I didn’t stage door. I had cake to eat.
*I looked at the production and the creative team and except for the costume designer all the people are men.
The Minutes on Broadway: You Wish Your Local Council Was This Bonkerballs (you really don’t)
It’s Theatre Thursday! We’re still doing those when we remember!
Okay yes The Minutes, Tracy Letts’ latest Broadway play, has recently closed, and I was just too busy to write about it in time for you to read the review and still be able to go ‘oh I want to see this, I will go to Telecharge.com right now and be able to magically use that shithole of a website from 1991 and actually successfully checkout before the show closes and/or I die from frustration.’ Sorry, but hey, what a weird show! If it was still open, I would have recommended checking it out but not paying too much.
The Minutes is a real-time-plus-flashback-also-in-real-time local council meeting (omg I’m forgetting what they are called in USA, what’s happened to me…borough meeting? it’s a small baby government of people who think they have a lot of power and honestly have more than they should) where the new guy is trying to play catch-up with WTAF is going on with this group. Noah Reid – Patrick from Schitt’s Creek – is beyond perfectly cast as the earnest newbie who you can tell makes dad jokes and is friendly, committed to doing his job well, and eager to correct people’s grammar (‘sometimes it’s who!!’).
Right from the start, you get a bad feeling about the council head Tracy Letts, who is just as incredible an actor as he is a writer. Even without the ominous thunderstorm, you’d know from his first scene where he’s kibbutzing politely over the refreshments with the new guy not to trust him, and when he asks the new guy what his baby daughter’s name is, you get the urge to yell “don’t tell him!!” It’s so subtle but he conveys that sinister sense that things aren’t what they seem.
Noah’s commitment to doing his job means not letting Tracy (we are screwing character names) and the rest of the council skirt past the whole ‘incident’ that happened the week before, the one that drove a fellow member to not show up tonight. Someone mentions it in passing, and Noah’s like ‘well what happened last week, remember, this is my first meeting?’ and everyone’s like ‘FORGET IT LA LA LA WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING’. So Noah has Jessie Mueller (NOT SINGING AT ALL) read the minutes (drink!) of the meeting from the week before, which is his right. She reads them and when it gets to the key part, apparently there’s a transcript she made that’s attached as an appendix. Guys, there’s a whole lot of talk about the technicalities of minutes and appendices and transcripts that the Tony-winner likes to do just for completeness sake, and it sounds like it would be a long sigh of a boring mess, but it’s actually gripping. You’re like YES READ THE F-ING TRANSCRIPT, THE APPENDIX IS PART OF THE MINUTES, OF COURSE IT’S PART OF IT!
What comes to light about the conflict the week before focuses on the man who isn’t at the present meeting, the council member with the conscience. Turns out he wanted the council to officially recognize the town’s terrible racist history, the truth that everyone ignores, that’s the opposite of what’s in the popular founding mythology and the town song. The real story is, as we guessed, full of slaughter of the Native population. All of this sounds very believable and without a doubt is the same story for many American towns. But taking this play’s treatment of this subject beyond the recognizable and into the symbolic is the strength of the connection this town, and this council, has to their fake history. Their unwillingness to give up their fake history is treated more like a necessity, a powerful all-encompassing metaphorical spirit that goes beyond what you’d expect in real life, but reflects the strength these false histories have over us. People like this cling to them when letting go would mean also losing a sense of balance in the world, the world they/we created where we benefit from the lies.
So they WILL NOT let them go! The play ends super weird, like war paint and hooting weird, and it’s a little unbelievable that Noah would fold so easily, but maybe I’m projecting. And sure it’s not (hopefully) representative of what happens at your average council meeting, but the sentiment at play is pretty much what’s going on in every town in America. We love a Tracy Letts joint to make us feel bad about the world!
