An Electric, Exuberant Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatreby Randi / July 16, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Present Laughter at the Old Vic, playing until August 10.
Noel Coward is such a goofball, am I right?! In one of his classic plays, Present Laughter, he basically goes autobiographical and has a jolly old time caricaturing his own outsized persona. Representing Coward is the lead character Garry Essendine, a famous actor who has several romantic exploits and several exaggerated breakdowns over the course of the few days we see. More than anything, Present Laughter is a vehicle for a star to have the time of his life as Garry. Recently, Kevin Kline won a Tony for his portrayal, because he was probably perfect as always. The draw of this current Old Vic production is Andrew Scott, hot off his stint as the hot priest on the universally acclaimed Fleabag. The show is worth seeing for his fantastic performance, but the changes to the source material are less than ideal.
While the show starts out strong, with an impeccable, uproariously funny first act, it quickly turns maddening, as all farce and farce-adjacent work tends to do. Andrew’s Garry wakes the show by trying to usher out a flaky one-night-stand named Daphne Stillington (a very funny Kitty Archer; they could have swapped the real and character names for perhaps an improvement) amid the judgmental eyes of his household staff (all three the steady highlights of the show). With this material, Andrew gets to play so much, it’s amazing. He shines so bright, so pitch perfect and hilarious in this first act that it’s almost distasteful. He looks to be having the time of his life, relishing some of Coward’s funniest lines and his ability to turn the regular ones into the funniest lines.
But then, it starts farcing all over the place and it took all my might to not shout at everyone to just communicate better. Okay so in this 1940s play, they were obsessed with marital affairs to get their minds off war. Garry is dealing with an issue in his close-knit ‘family’ of people who work for him: his secretary Monica, his ex-wife Liz who is still pretty much his wife, his manager Morris, his producer Henry. Henry is married to Joanna, who is rumored to be having an affair with Morris. Monica has a serious conversation with Garry about finding out whether this is true about Morris and Joanna, and instead of Garry trying to put a stop to this lest it destroy their little family, Garry goes and shtupps Joanna himself. Bad call Gar! As people find out, things get SHOUTY, like MAN ALIVE SHOUTY, and Garry gets apoplectic a lot, like a LOT a lot, and Morris is like BUT I LOVE JOANNA, and Henry is like BUT SHE’S MY WIFE (and John Mulaney is like THAT’S MY WIFE) and Daphne for some reason comes back to audition for a theatre school?, and Liz is like I’m fine and calm because monayyyyy, and for some reason Garry’s staff KEEPS LETTING some random stranger INTO HIS HOUSE who is very clearly going to murder everyone in the sequel (Luke Thallon was so funny as Roland but OMG) and everyone’s like WHEEEE THIS IS CRAZY and I’m like MY BLOOD PRESSURE.
But in this production, because, I’m guessing, people realized that the whole idea of three rich men fighting over a married woman like she’s property is…kinda gross, they took a note from the recent success of the Company revival and had some fun with gender switches! In theory, I love this idea, because it would have been too outdated and frustrating to watch Joanna get treated simultaneously like a piece of meat and an uncontrollable hoo-er. So, in theory, they made the right call making Joanna now ‘Joe’, a man, married to the producer ‘Helen’, a woman. This change does several things. First, it makes literally everyone in the cast bisexual, which, okay fine, I’ll go along with that (“it’s 2018! More people should be bi! It’s like, get over yourselves!”). But it throws off the dynamic like hella hard, because the casting is not done well. There’s no way the couplings in the show would happen and I just couldn’t buy it. But most of all, worst of all, the actor playing Joe is miscast. Whereas Joanna is a flighty and glamorous young woman who seduces all these men but like is fun, Joe is a too-serious, gloomy, severe mufucka who brings the action to a screeching halt. It makes no sense that Garry would say anything to him when he comes a’knocking other than like “gtfo my house you’re in the wrong show, this is a fun one not an Italian murder mystery where you’re clearly the butler and you clearly did it.” With the wrong actor playing Joe, you’re just like, why.
The changes continue in the same direction the quality of play goes in after that first act. Most of all, I was disappointed in the ending. Through all of Garry’s breakdowns, all his mid-life crises and all his issues he’s clearly dealing with, it’s clear most of all he wants someone to love the real him and cure his loneliness. (Oh another burning question I had several times: why doesn’t this famous actor have a bodyguard or someone who actually sleeps at his house to prevent 100 of the annoying things that happen.) It’s obvious throughout the play that his ex-wife Liz is still this person, and at the end they reconcile. In this version, after Liz announces that she’s coming back to him, and you expect Garry to be like YES PLEASE THANK GOD I NEED YOU, he literally is silent, and walks over to the window while he has a drink, and I truly thought he was going to jump out the window. It was a weird vibe and did not work for me, and definitely not as an ending. It made the original ending of Pippin look like a Mamma Mia!-style dance party.
Regardless, it’s still overall a fun time, and it’s worth seeing Andrew shine in a role that seems tailor-made for him.
INFORMATION
Get ready for big bunches of small purple fruit as said by an Australian because I have me some gripes. First of all, yes the Old Vic is still under hella construction, which you can’t hold against them. But I am so over theatres not giving paper tickets at will call and telling you to just use your phone, and it was an especially bad move here: Given all the construction, the staff have to check your tickets frequently because to get to the temporary toilet area or the bar you have to leave the building entirely (toilets are outside only on one side! Don’t sit upstairs you’ll never get there!). But hi, hello, this is the theatre, where people should be TURNING THEIR PHONES OFF! Everyone stop with the e-tickets please and thank you. Any decent people have shut their phones off.
Secondly, speaking of phones, London theatres in general need to forking quit it with those little white NO PHONES signs that two ushers in dark corners of the theatre hold up like any forking person in the audience notices them. Make a GOTTAM preshow announcement that everyone must shut their phones off and not use them during the show like a GROWN ASS ADULT.
Third, there was a super frustrating technical problem that I’m not even sure the stage managers or lighting people realized: During most of the show, an amber light was reflected out of the mirror by Garry’s bar table, and it was blinding us from looking at the stage. INFURIATING. That’s the kind of technical thing you’d think would have been caught and handled by now. It was the worst in the 20-minute scene right before the interval and for most of Act II (so, just Act I was fine (maybe that’s why it was my favorite, because I was able to watch it without corneal damage)).
Lastly (lol am I ever done), I am sick and tired of plays trying to establish characterization with smoking. Literally, I am sick and tired from it, because it gives me breathing issues. If you can’t establish something without having an actor harm their own health with cigarettes, then you aren’t doing a good job.
Oh I thought of another: I am tired of the Old Vic’s boring af programmes and show art. For the love of god add an image. I’m not going to pay $5 for block letters and weird color schemes.
STAGE DOOR
This is the saddest part for me to recount, because I love(d) Andrew Scott. Who doesn’t adore the Hot Priest? I was excited to see that the stage door (wisely) had a barricade up and a security guard at the ready, telling everyone to line up in single file and that you could either get an autograph from OR a photo with Andrew. So with things progressing like that, with a security guard already taking care of business, with maybe 80 people already lined up?? all of that suggests that Andrew was coming out. Now, I’m the first person to state that actors have no obligation to come to the stage door (hell, they have no business doing it; why on earth would anyone want to greet a crazy mob) and that they should absolutely not face any scrutiny for not doing it. BUT, that’s a different situation from lining up your crowd in single file, making sure they know all your rules, &c…and then making them wait a frankly offensive amount of time. I’d be saying absolutely nothing except ‘good on you’ if he had decided not to stage door. But to make sure his crowd was organized to his requirements and then just not come out for hours is plain rude, showing zero respect for anyone’s time. That security and staff waiting outside (but hidden from our view after a while so they didn’t have to answer any questions) didn’t relay any message was bullshit. We left after about 50 minutes of waiting, but I was told on the socials that Andrew came out at about 11:40 – an hour after we left. That sucks. Just don’t come out if you don’t want to! But to make people wait and wait and not say anything is a weird kind of torture, and it sucks.
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“Amadeus” at London’s National Theatre: Toxic Masculinity at its Finest
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the revival of “Amadeus” at London’s National Theatre,
The best theatre, in my opinion, comments on society or humanity in a smart or clever or meaningful way. Sometimes it makes you feel things, and sometimes the thing it makes you feel is anger. I haven’t felt truly angry from a play in a long time, but “Amadeus”, a fascinating, provocative, wonderfully staged revival of the Peter Shaffer classic at the National Theatre, made me so angry I couldn’t talk for hours afterwards. Granted I was angry about other things too (hellooooo cops are terrorists and a traitorous turd cheeto runs America and will any lads EVER care that drinking is illegal on the tube?? Ugh my stomach hurts all the time like Chidi) but this show definitely added to my seething yet impotent rage. And overall I’m glad for it, because theatre should do things like that. The depths of evil that man can sink to are well known today, especially in the political and business realms, but it was nice to see that evil men exist in music too! Evil men everywhere!
“Amadeus” tells the tale of Antonio Salieri, once considered the best musician in Austria, and if you were the best in Austria in the 1700s, you were the best in the world. He’s throwing back champagne and high-kicking it at parties with royals and the best of society in Vienna and eating all the mascarpone cream he can get, and he’s enjoying a considerable amount of power in the court as Kapellmeister, which my computer recognizes as a word yet it has underlined both turd and cheeto so wow bravo to all involved. Soon though, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrives on the scene to challenge Salieri’s place as numero uno in music. It’s not really a challenge because Mozart is, well, Mozart and there’s room for everyone in music and their relationship in real life was a lot more amiable than the play depicts. But facts are not what this play cares about, and though it makes me angry how many people might think that it’s a factual retelling of history and thus consider both figures to be sickening in certain ways, it does make for a more interesting play to pit them against each other as lethal rivals. Well, in one direction only.
This play, called “Amadeus” as you can see because that’s Mozart’s middle name and a play called “Wolfgang” would probably draw the wrong crowd (though I’d be there for that play too) (omg it could be an absolutely terrifying crime drama or just about pups) (please let it be about pups), instead of taking notes from history completely rewrites history, so know that before going in or seeing the movie. The characters as depicted are fictionalized entirely except for names and like jobs and things they wrote. Got it? It begins with Salieri as an old man bemoaning his lot in life and how his God betrayed him by making Mozart so talented and also he kind of admits to poisoning Mozart and being responsible for his death and his entire downfall so you’re like hmm this guy is a piece of shit, right? He is, good observation. Old Man Salieri clearly has lost his marbles and is scared of meeting his God that he had denounced and failed by being such a shitty person. Salieri, played by Lucian Msamati, is captivating throughout the play, but it’s a difficult jump into his performance in the beginning. It opens with him talking, and talking, and talking, and you really have to listen and it was kind of exhausting because it’s the most tedious part of the show. And it takes a minute to get used to his enunciation. My mind wandered a little in those first few minutes and I had to remind myself to pay attention, which is not a good sign but it is a result of how this is written. It’s a very big ask to dive straight into endless monologuing. Anyway I got over it in five minutes like Doug Dorsey (omg remind me to check if “The Cutting Edge” is on Netflix prayers up) and then I was in it.
After Salieri’s deathbed confessional/droning, we flashback to his heyday in the Viennese court, as he impresses everyone with his simplistic compositions and stays true to his god. Everything looks peachy keen for him but then he hears about young upstart named Mozart. He goes to a party to hear him play and is riveted, stricken with the realization that the person he is listening to play is beyond earthly talents and gifts. But when he sees that the person bequeathed by god with such gifts is an infantile, idiotic fool of a man, Salieri is disgusted and angry with his god. Salieri is very self-involved, you see. He believes that his god, whom he has been so devoted to his entire life, has betrayed him personally by giving such musical gifts to such a fool. So, naturally, Salieri denounces his god and commits his life to destroying Mozart’s. And destroy it he does, all while making Mozart believe that he’s his friend, which is as cruel and deceptive as you get.
Lucian Msamati’s performance is remarkable and very powerful. However, I was most taken with Adam Gillen’s as Mozart. It’s a bizarre, kind of wacky, unbelievably physical portrayal and a very divisive one. I heard old British farts afterwards talking about how good the show was but how Mozart was just ‘altogether too much,’ with too much going on that it was distracting. But I am HERE for it. or WAS THERE for it. I thought Gillen’s rambunctious physicality and strange mannerisms and truly nutty line readings made for an extraordinary performance. It was overwrought but clearly carefully considered and it worked to convey Mozart’s peculiar, immature, zany, and truly crazy character. (Remember he wasn’t actually an absurd fool.) I’m surprised too because usually I’d be like ENOUGH ALREADY I GET IT YOU ARE KOOKY but he was quite effective. It helps that his role is significantly smaller than Salieri’s; I’m sure that if he were onstage the whole time it would be as exhausting for the audience as it no doubt is for the actor. But as is, it was a great performance, and through all the folly, he really connected emotionally with the audience in Act II so much as to be heart-breaking, which is no small feat.
The other highlight of the production was how the entire thing was staged. Having never seen this show before, I can’t comment on how much is due to director Michael Longhurst’s vision but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hurt to give him the credit. I loved how the orchestra was part of the show, with all of the musicians and all of their instruments on stage whenever music was playing. The musicians, all dressed in black, were the townspeople, the court, the citizens reacting to gossip about the two famous composers, all while playing the composers’ works. Not only did this staging effectively show how the populace played into the drama, but it was also simply nice to see the orchestra onstage instead of hidden underneath it. A great spark of life came from it.
And we do hear lots of Mozart’s work throughout the show, so even for a play there is still a good deal of music, which is my kind of play. We hear his operas as they are produced and performed for the first time, we hear them with Salieri and react in the same way – in total awe. Well maybe not the same amount of awe, for most of us have heard them before and in better ways but you get what I mean. We get a scene from The Marriage of Figaro and watch Salieri positively aghast at how ingenious it is. We get a snippet from Don Giovanni and are like howww did the rest of the populace not realize they were amongst a genius? We unfortunately get the most famous part of The Magic Flute – the Queen of the Night aria – and yes it’s the best part and yes it’s so famous that they had to do that part but it is also the hardest part to sing and let’s just say it’s not like the greatest opera singers in the world are spending their time doing plays where they have 10 minutes of stage time. Not to be mean not to be mean.
The music was used very effectively to match the drama, as Salieri realizes how great it is and how bad he is in comparison and the music grows along with his horror. At the end of the first act the music of the performance builds into a giant dramatic ‘boom’ of an ending as Salieri cowers in insignificance and I thought HOLY CRAP that is a KILLER way to end an act! It was that kind of act break that totally pumps you up with its drama and its success in making you feel all kinds of emotions and then…it wasn’t actually the act break. It should have been, but instead Salieri talks to the audience for 5 or 10 more minutes, putting words to what we just witnessed kind of unnecessarily. This monologue after what I thought was a great button to the entire act was like letting air out of a balloon. Just so unsatisfying when the most incredible alternative was so close within reach. Salieri talks about how Mozart is so good despite being a fool, and he’s so angry that his god has given such gifts to such a fool so now he will turn against god and destroy Mozart as a way to get back at god. And you’re like a) we kind of just saw that with your good acting show don’t tell and all that and b) you couldn’t have explained anything left unclear at the beginning of the next act? I just really loved that button that wasn’t meant to be.
The build-up of how Mozart’s unmatched musical genius destroys Salieri’s sense of self and sense of how he himself fits into the world occurs dramatically and believably, but the problem for me was that Salieri is such a piece of shit that there is no chance of feeling any empathy for him, and if you don’t feel empathy for the main character it’s kind of hard to care. All the caring, at least on my part, came for poor sad Mozart, unwittingly destroyed by another man’s jealousy. But Salieri made me furious because he was a monster, and I realized how that’s the most realistic part of the whole show – that some people really truly are horrible monsters with zero capacity for empathy themselves and so they give no reason for you to have any empathy for them. With two lead actors in the play (and one black even though it’s a white historical figure so yay because that’s just common now and that’s great) I couldn’t help but think of Hamilton, and how we have a historical villain and our hero. But Hamilton blurs the lines between good and bad, and although Burr makes some pretty significant mistakes, he ends the show aware of his failures and remorseful of his mistakes. He regrets thinking that because Hamilton was better than him at certain things that that meant he had to destroy him. Whereas Salieri is like shit this idiotic fool is better than me I must destroy him, and even on his deathbed he regrets nothing. Even then, he bellows about how his deplorable actions ensured that he will be remembered forever, because history will always remember Mozart and his incredible talent, but it otherwise would have forgotten about ordinary old Salieri, so by linking himself with Mozart’s destruction and death he will always be remembered too. He doesn’t care one bit that it will be in infamy; he’s glad for it lest it mean he would be forgotten. The comparison to Hamilton is clear, in that Burr is forever linked to Hamilton’s name, but at least in that fictionalized account of things he didn’t aim for that. Salieri thinks the desire to be remembered excuses his actions, and that is despicable and infuriating. And that’s what was so provocative about this play, the questions it raises about legacies and about being appreciated in your own time. It is never a question to me that it is better to be a good person and do good deeds in real life than worry about how history will treat you but I’m not a psychopath now am I.
“Amadeus” obviously makes for a very in-depth discussion of various issues. I haven’t even talked about how mind-numbingly clichéd its treatment of women is but chances are I’ll have plenty more opportunities to broach that subject in the future. The real dramatic element here is yet again the toxic male ego and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen recently that does a better job at exploring that.
INFORMATION
Okay I just looked it up and it closed on Tuesday! I had NO IDEA we were seeing it on its final weekend! Eek sorry. It had a super short run (3 months) for such a huge production. I wonder why! Okay I looked it up again and apparently this was just a sweet little revival of the revival, which had its real run over a year ago! It was so beloved that they brought it back for a 3-month hey-thanks-for-loving-us farewell tour. Can’t believe I wasn’t aware of any of this ahhh.
AUDIENCE
The audience at the National skews older so they are usually more whispery than phone-y. Honestly whisperers are harder to deal with because you look like a jerk if you say omgggg stop whispering so much but you are a hero for reporting people who use their phones well at least that’s how I think of it. I report phone users ALL DAY ALL DAY.
NATIONAL THEATRE
If you guys are reading this, know that my fury after the show was like 40% from the questions raised by the play as intentioned and eleventy billion percent because of your incompetence. There was NO STAFF in the circle (the mezzanine, which is the only upper level in this theatre). There were no ushers or guards or anything during the interval or after the show ended. And there was zero personnel at the start except for ticket-takers, but they were not acting as ushers. No one told people to shut their phones off, and more glaringly no one told the people in the front row of the circle not to put their shit on the overhang. The ledge – where speakers are attached – was lined with drinks because British people can’t go an hour without alcohol. In every single theatre in the world, an usher would come down and remind those patrons that you cannot put anything on that rim, let alone liquid, because if it tips, it falls on people sitting below. Or into the speakers. But no one apparently works there and so the drinks stayed there. I wanted to report something at intermission but couldn’t find anyone to report it to. It’s a good thing it wasn’t a very serious problem but I guess this means that that National Theatre is a-ok with anything you might think of doing since there’s no need for ushers or managers up there. I talked to a representative about this on twitter and they basically said ‘eh we don’t really need anyone up there and after the show there was a security guard by the FRONT DOOR’ (meaning down 5 flights of stairs) so I guess that is blanket permission to take pictures and film whatever performances that you want to so have fun! (Theatres here must do better, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet.)
This play, called “Amadeus” as you can see because that’s Mozart’s middle name and a play called “Wolfgang” would probably draw the wrong crowd (though I’d be there for that play too) (omg it could be an absolutely terrifying crime drama or just about pups) (please let it be about pups), instead of taking notes from history completely rewrites history, so know that before going in or seeing the movie. The characters as depicted are fictionalized entirely except for names and like jobs and things they wrote. Got it? It begins with Salieri as an old man bemoaning his lot in life and how his God betrayed him by making Mozart so talented and also he kind of admits to poisoning Mozart and being responsible for his death and his entire downfall so you’re like hmm this guy is a piece of shit, right? He is, good observation. Old Man Salieri clearly has lost his marbles and is scared of meeting his God that he had denounced and failed by being such a shitty person. Salieri, played by Lucian Msamati, is captivating throughout the play, but it’s a difficult jump into his performance in the beginning. It opens with him talking, and talking, and talking, and you really have to listen and it was kind of exhausting because it’s the most tedious part of the show. And it takes a minute to get used to his enunciation. My mind wandered a little in those first few minutes and I had to remind myself to pay attention, which is not a good sign but it is a result of how this is written. It’s a very big ask to dive straight into endless monologuing. Anyway I got over it in five minutes like Doug Dorsey (omg remind me to check if “The Cutting Edge” is on Netflix prayers up) and then I was in it.
After Salieri’s deathbed confessional/droning, we flashback to his heyday in the Viennese court, as he impresses everyone with his simplistic compositions and stays true to his god. Everything looks peachy keen for him but then he hears about young upstart named Mozart. He goes to a party to hear him play and is riveted, stricken with the realization that the person he is listening to play is beyond earthly talents and gifts. But when he sees that the person bequeathed by god with such gifts is an infantile, idiotic fool of a man, Salieri is disgusted and angry with his god. Salieri is very self-involved, you see. He believes that his god, whom he has been so devoted to his entire life, has betrayed him personally by giving such musical gifts to such a fool. So, naturally, Salieri denounces his god and commits his life to destroying Mozart’s. And destroy it he does, all while making Mozart believe that he’s his friend, which is as cruel and deceptive as you get.
Lucian Msamati’s performance is remarkable and very powerful. However, I was most taken with Adam Gillen’s as Mozart. It’s a bizarre, kind of wacky, unbelievably physical portrayal and a very divisive one. I heard old British farts afterwards talking about how good the show was but how Mozart was just ‘altogether too much,’ with too much going on that it was distracting. But I am HERE for it. or WAS THERE for it. I thought Gillen’s rambunctious physicality and strange mannerisms and truly nutty line readings made for an extraordinary performance. It was overwrought but clearly carefully considered and it worked to convey Mozart’s peculiar, immature, zany, and truly crazy character. (Remember he wasn’t actually an absurd fool.) I’m surprised too because usually I’d be like ENOUGH ALREADY I GET IT YOU ARE KOOKY but he was quite effective. It helps that his role is significantly smaller than Salieri’s; I’m sure that if he were onstage the whole time it would be as exhausting for the audience as it no doubt is for the actor. But as is, it was a great performance, and through all the folly, he really connected emotionally with the audience in Act II so much as to be heart-breaking, which is no small feat.
The other highlight of the production was how the entire thing was staged. Having never seen this show before, I can’t comment on how much is due to director Michael Longhurst’s vision but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hurt to give him the credit. I loved how the orchestra was part of the show, with all of the musicians and all of their instruments on stage whenever music was playing. The musicians, all dressed in black, were the townspeople, the court, the citizens reacting to gossip about the two famous composers, all while playing the composers’ works. Not only did this staging effectively show how the populace played into the drama, but it was also simply nice to see the orchestra onstage instead of hidden underneath it. A great spark of life came from it.
And we do hear lots of Mozart’s work throughout the show, so even for a play there is still a good deal of music, which is my kind of play. We hear his operas as they are produced and performed for the first time, we hear them with Salieri and react in the same way – in total awe. Well maybe not the same amount of awe, for most of us have heard them before and in better ways but you get what I mean. We get a scene from The Marriage of Figaro and watch Salieri positively aghast at how ingenious it is. We get a snippet from Don Giovanni and are like howww did the rest of the populace not realize they were amongst a genius? We unfortunately get the most famous part of The Magic Flute – the Queen of the Night aria – and yes it’s the best part and yes it’s so famous that they had to do that part but it is also the hardest part to sing and let’s just say it’s not like the greatest opera singers in the world are spending their time doing plays where they have 10 minutes of stage time. Not to be mean not to be mean.
The music was used very effectively to match the drama, as Salieri realizes how great it is and how bad he is in comparison and the music grows along with his horror. At the end of the first act the music of the performance builds into a giant dramatic ‘boom’ of an ending as Salieri cowers in insignificance and I thought HOLY CRAP that is a KILLER way to end an act! It was that kind of act break that totally pumps you up with its drama and its success in making you feel all kinds of emotions and then…it wasn’t actually the act break. It should have been, but instead Salieri talks to the audience for 5 or 10 more minutes, putting words to what we just witnessed kind of unnecessarily. This monologue after what I thought was a great button to the entire act was like letting air out of a balloon. Just so unsatisfying when the most incredible alternative was so close within reach. Salieri talks about how Mozart is so good despite being a fool, and he’s so angry that his god has given such gifts to such a fool so now he will turn against god and destroy Mozart as a way to get back at god. And you’re like a) we kind of just saw that with your good acting show don’t tell and all that and b) you couldn’t have explained anything left unclear at the beginning of the next act? I just really loved that button that wasn’t meant to be.
The build-up of how Mozart’s unmatched musical genius destroys Salieri’s sense of self and sense of how he himself fits into the world occurs dramatically and believably, but the problem for me was that Salieri is such a piece of shit that there is no chance of feeling any empathy for him, and if you don’t feel empathy for the main character it’s kind of hard to care. All the caring, at least on my part, came for poor sad Mozart, unwittingly destroyed by another man’s jealousy. But Salieri made me furious because he was a monster, and I realized how that’s the most realistic part of the whole show – that some people really truly are horrible monsters with zero capacity for empathy themselves and so they give no reason for you to have any empathy for them. With two lead actors in the play (and one black even though it’s a white historical figure so yay because that’s just common now and that’s great) I couldn’t help but think of Hamilton, and how we have a historical villain and our hero. But Hamilton blurs the lines between good and bad, and although Burr makes some pretty significant mistakes, he ends the show aware of his failures and remorseful of his mistakes. He regrets thinking that because Hamilton was better than him at certain things that that meant he had to destroy him. Whereas Salieri is like shit this idiotic fool is better than me I must destroy him, and even on his deathbed he regrets nothing. Even then, he bellows about how his deplorable actions ensured that he will be remembered forever, because history will always remember Mozart and his incredible talent, but it otherwise would have forgotten about ordinary old Salieri, so by linking himself with Mozart’s destruction and death he will always be remembered too. He doesn’t care one bit that it will be in infamy; he’s glad for it lest it mean he would be forgotten. The comparison to Hamilton is clear, in that Burr is forever linked to Hamilton’s name, but at least in that fictionalized account of things he didn’t aim for that. Salieri thinks the desire to be remembered excuses his actions, and that is despicable and infuriating. And that’s what was so provocative about this play, the questions it raises about legacies and about being appreciated in your own time. It is never a question to me that it is better to be a good person and do good deeds in real life than worry about how history will treat you but I’m not a psychopath now am I.
“Amadeus” obviously makes for a very in-depth discussion of various issues. I haven’t even talked about how mind-numbingly clichéd its treatment of women is but chances are I’ll have plenty more opportunities to broach that subject in the future. The real dramatic element here is yet again the toxic male ego and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen recently that does a better job at exploring that.
INFORMATION
Okay I just looked it up and it closed on Tuesday! I had NO IDEA we were seeing it on its final weekend! Eek sorry. It had a super short run (3 months) for such a huge production. I wonder why! Okay I looked it up again and apparently this was just a sweet little revival of the revival, which had its real run over a year ago! It was so beloved that they brought it back for a 3-month hey-thanks-for-loving-us farewell tour. Can’t believe I wasn’t aware of any of this ahhh.
AUDIENCE
The audience at the National skews older so they are usually more whispery than phone-y. Honestly whisperers are harder to deal with because you look like a jerk if you say omgggg stop whispering so much but you are a hero for reporting people who use their phones well at least that’s how I think of it. I report phone users ALL DAY ALL DAY.
NATIONAL THEATRE
If you guys are reading this, know that my fury after the show was like 40% from the questions raised by the play as intentioned and eleventy billion percent because of your incompetence. There was NO STAFF in the circle (the mezzanine, which is the only upper level in this theatre). There were no ushers or guards or anything during the interval or after the show ended. And there was zero personnel at the start except for ticket-takers, but they were not acting as ushers. No one told people to shut their phones off, and more glaringly no one told the people in the front row of the circle not to put their shit on the overhang. The ledge – where speakers are attached – was lined with drinks because British people can’t go an hour without alcohol. In every single theatre in the world, an usher would come down and remind those patrons that you cannot put anything on that rim, let alone liquid, because if it tips, it falls on people sitting below. Or into the speakers. But no one apparently works there and so the drinks stayed there. I wanted to report something at intermission but couldn’t find anyone to report it to. It’s a good thing it wasn’t a very serious problem but I guess this means that that National Theatre is a-ok with anything you might think of doing since there’s no need for ushers or managers up there. I talked to a representative about this on twitter and they basically said ‘eh we don’t really need anyone up there and after the show there was a security guard by the FRONT DOOR’ (meaning down 5 flights of stairs) so I guess that is blanket permission to take pictures and film whatever performances that you want to so have fun! (Theatres here must do better, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet.)
London’s Current Opera Offerings Apparently Chosen by E.L. James, Directed by Roman Polanski, with Chris Brown as Consultant
macauley.cuny.edu
WHAT is happening in London’s opera scene? A whole lot of shit, that’s what’s happening. Like there wasn’t enough misogyny in the world and in all forms of entertainment, now London’s opera bigwigs apparently decided that all the biggest summer productions at the city’s most respected opera houses would not only be anti-feminist but anti-female, pro-rape, pro-violence against women, and not good. Big steaming poop messes are at the English National Opera and the Royal Opera House and are unrelated to this week’s heat wave.
First off, the one that has been in the news. Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera. This Rossini opera is about William Tell, could you have guessed? You know what’s interesting about this show? It was the last opera Rossini wrote even though he lived for 40 more years after it. I think he was shamed by nighttime visions of this future production that kept him up at night and he was all, I’m never giving these futuristic f**kers any more fodder to be assholes with, or something.
So, it starts with the Lone Ranger theme, and then villagers sing about weddings, archery contests occur, and Swiss people get upset that their country is oppressed (by Austria). After two acts of that comes a scene in which soldier baddies celebrate 100 years Austrian oppression in Switzerland. The baddies drink and sing and then notice that Tell and his son aren’t joining in, so they’re like, oh we gotta arrest you, even though we respect what a great archer you are, do you want to tell your son to run or is he gonna stick around?
So that’s the third act of Guillaume Tell. Do you know what happens in the current abomination at the Royal Opera House? When they celebrate Austrian rule, the soldiers drink and sing and sing and drink, and then they take the servant girl who is providing the alcohol, and they force themselves on her, and they pour all the wine on her so she’s soaked through, and then the men put her on the table and take off her clothes (the audience sees her naked), and all the many many men sexually assault her further at gunpoint before Tell rescues her.
That doesn’t sound like the opera as written, does it? It’s not. That is utter bullshit completely added in by the dirty f**kface director Damiano Michieletto, bag o’ dicks director of opera at Covent Garden Kasper Hotlen, and the producers at the ROH. None of that violence adds anything to the show, so there is no excuse for it. I’m sure they argue that they wanted to show how terrible those men were, but it was not necessary to do so, especially to such an extent. All it really accomplished was reminding everyone in the audience that people still consider violence against women to be totally okay and permitted. Luckily, the audience booed during this scene, so much so that news outlets actually did mention the booing, but how many people walked out? How many cancelled their subscriptions? What’s more important, and disturbing: how many people are now buying tickets to the rest of the performances to catch this ‘newsworthy’ production?
This production should have been vilified for this gratuitous brutality and I know I will not be giving the Royal Opera House any money until they apologize. Indeed, Holten said they will not apologize for the scene and they refuse to edit it even though it will be broadcast in movie theatres. He described it as “an honest attempt to talk about the reality of war” and said people maybe “felt we should have warned them better, as people may not want to be exposed to sexual violence”. That’s not it, you ignorant douchebag. People don’t want to see in their entertainment depictions of what at least 60% of your audience has to live with and fear every day of their lives if it is not necessary to convey the message you hope to. And this was not necessary. Did you know, Kasper, that that’s the definition of gratuitous? I’m sure it was really fun for all you men involved to be like, ‘oh hey we can do this shit because it makes people realize how bad war is.’ A) People know how bad war is. B) All it did was remind people how terrible modern society still is when it comes to understanding rape culture. You, sir, do not understand it.
***
Now to the one that has not received any media attention that I know of, probably because people with the power to make things known in the media don’t really realize how misogynistic this one is, especially since there’s only so much opera coverage allowed by the populace. “Carmen”, Bizet’s famous opera about the wiles of a Gypsy woman, is playing at the English National Opera. First things first, the ENO does all their productions in English. It sucks. I’ve been there a lot, and the productions are sometimes great, but it’s never my or most opera fans preference to see works translated from their original language. I saw “Rigoletto” once in Austria and it was in German instead of Italian. It was terrible. Oh but they did the famous aria “La donna e mobile” in Italian. Just that part.
Moving on, “Carmen” is a pretty misogynistic opera to begin with, but ENO succeeded in making it even more gratuitously so with this ‘modernized’ production. I don’t understand why directors feel the need to unnecessarily change aspects of great works just for the sake of changing it, when it doesn’t add any artistic value. There are some alterations or reimaginings or revivals that are worthy, like the recent “Spring Awakening” production in California that used many deaf and disabled cast members to highlight the rampant lack of understanding and capability in the show. That sounds brilliant. The half-assed modernization of “Carmen” was not: it kept most of the same ideas – lots of soldiers, being in Spain, smugglers – and added hysterically hideous ‘90s-era-Italy outfits and like 6 cars, doing the smuggling, onstage at one time. I don’t know what they were going for.
So “Carmen” tells the story of a seductive gypsy who seduces men and is a gypsy. She is a cigarette girl among hundreds of cigarette girls who apparently work in the same barracks as hundreds of soldiers. It was a big cast. The soldiers are all disgusting. They treat the women like toys and Carmen like a piece of meat. They grope everyone and repeatedly stick her face in their crotchular regions. But Carmen enjoys it, apparently, because she is seductive, so she is asking for it. Hence it being a super misogynistic show as written, differentiating it from the above monstrosity.
The soldiers beg for her to choose a lover and stop taunting them by existing, so she chooses Jose, who was ignoring her. Smart plan! She sings her super famous aria that goes ‘da dum dum dum!’ about how those who love her should beware. Then all the girls fight like really actually fight, because who doesn’t love women fighting and hitting and scratching each other with their claws? Carmen is accused of whipping out a knife in what should have been merely a skin fight, so the male official says she’s going to be arrested and tells Jose to tie her hands together while they figure out what to do because small man brain. That’s what happens normally.
Here, the men tie Carmen to a flagpole with the official’s workbelt, take off her shirtdress, and position her so she’s on her knees. People I talked to at intermission thought this was disgusting. One woman who knows the opera well felt that tying her up completely, as opposed to just her hands, unnecessarily made her subordinate and submissive and was just gross.
Carmen then beguiles Jose, tasked with guarding her, and he becomes pretty infatuated with her. He lets her escape, whereupon he is imprisoned for a month or two.
When he gets out, he and we find Carmen with her smuggler friends, who are driving regular-sized cars across the stage to show how modern the show is. Three women (and one little girl, sadly) compose the group with 3 or so indistinguishably disgusting men, who assault them and grope them all with no regard for which woman it is or what she’s doing or how drunk she is (very drunk). They meet Escamillo, the famous toreador, who sings the famous toreador song (and not very well, also sadly). Escamillo ‘falls in love’ with Carmen, who is instead in love with her Jose, whom she is now seeing for the second time ever. Jose has to go back to camp for nighttime, and Carmen, being an awful no good female who doesn’t understand that men have to work, gets really upset that he isn’t willing to sacrifice his job for her, because if he really loved her he would. This is apparently how Rossini thought women’s little brains worked. As written, Jose’s superior officer arrives looking for Carmen (every man thinks he is in love with her), and Jose fights him. Having done that, he can’t go back to soldiering, so he joins the smugglers.
Here, he punches Carmen instead, for mocking his need to go back to work. She falls to the ground in fetal position, where she remains while Jose sings not about how he’s sorry but about how much he loves her. Then he cuddles up next to her and declares his love more. And what choice does she have but to accept it? What other kind of love could she possibly know?
Then more cars appear and it’s really just nonsense.
Then, Carmen gets bored with Jose, because that’s how women are, those fickle people, and the toreador tells her he loves her. Hey guess what, she returns the favor now. That happens really with no build up, I thought she was lying, but that’s how women do, just transfer affection really easily when they’re bored. Then Carmen and her friends do tarot cards, and Carmen gets the one saying she’s going to die. No one else seems really worried, though Carmen tells them it’s probably Jose.
Escamillo invites pretty much all of Spain to see him in his next bull-fight, and during that famous song we get to watch 100 or so actors in neon shorts and smartphones jumping up and down in unison for a good 2 minutes. It’s like they stopped trying. Anyway, outside the arena, Carmen and her two girlfriends are about to enter, before they leave her and are like, ‘Hey don’t get killed, we know that’s a possibility but we’re going to leave you alone now.’ Carmen keeps a watchful eye until she needs to do her makeup, and Jose sneaks in while she is looking in the compact, because oh girls with their makeup! So silly! So Jose is devastated that she no longer wants to be with him, even though he hit her, and even though now she loves someone else, so he kills her. At the end, after Jose kills her, he normally confesses to the murder. Here, instead, he grabs her by the lifeless foot and drags her offstage as the lights go out. Cute!
So ENO is not nearly as guilty as ROH for disgusting and gratuitous anti-female sentiment, because so much of it is in the text, but how they chose to augment what was already a plethora of misogyny reinforces how normal all the people involved considered it to be. This already has violence against women, but let’s make it worse! This one doesn’t have violence against women, so let’s add a lot, for art’s sake. It’s not art, guys. It’s violence, and it’s perpetuating the acceptance and sickening tolerance of rape culture.
So that’s the third act of Guillaume Tell. Do you know what happens in the current abomination at the Royal Opera House? When they celebrate Austrian rule, the soldiers drink and sing and sing and drink, and then they take the servant girl who is providing the alcohol, and they force themselves on her, and they pour all the wine on her so she’s soaked through, and then the men put her on the table and take off her clothes (the audience sees her naked), and all the many many men sexually assault her further at gunpoint before Tell rescues her.
That doesn’t sound like the opera as written, does it? It’s not. That is utter bullshit completely added in by the dirty f**kface director Damiano Michieletto, bag o’ dicks director of opera at Covent Garden Kasper Hotlen, and the producers at the ROH. None of that violence adds anything to the show, so there is no excuse for it. I’m sure they argue that they wanted to show how terrible those men were, but it was not necessary to do so, especially to such an extent. All it really accomplished was reminding everyone in the audience that people still consider violence against women to be totally okay and permitted. Luckily, the audience booed during this scene, so much so that news outlets actually did mention the booing, but how many people walked out? How many cancelled their subscriptions? What’s more important, and disturbing: how many people are now buying tickets to the rest of the performances to catch this ‘newsworthy’ production?
This production should have been vilified for this gratuitous brutality and I know I will not be giving the Royal Opera House any money until they apologize. Indeed, Holten said they will not apologize for the scene and they refuse to edit it even though it will be broadcast in movie theatres. He described it as “an honest attempt to talk about the reality of war” and said people maybe “felt we should have warned them better, as people may not want to be exposed to sexual violence”. That’s not it, you ignorant douchebag. People don’t want to see in their entertainment depictions of what at least 60% of your audience has to live with and fear every day of their lives if it is not necessary to convey the message you hope to. And this was not necessary. Did you know, Kasper, that that’s the definition of gratuitous? I’m sure it was really fun for all you men involved to be like, ‘oh hey we can do this shit because it makes people realize how bad war is.’ A) People know how bad war is. B) All it did was remind people how terrible modern society still is when it comes to understanding rape culture. You, sir, do not understand it.
***
Now to the one that has not received any media attention that I know of, probably because people with the power to make things known in the media don’t really realize how misogynistic this one is, especially since there’s only so much opera coverage allowed by the populace. “Carmen”, Bizet’s famous opera about the wiles of a Gypsy woman, is playing at the English National Opera. First things first, the ENO does all their productions in English. It sucks. I’ve been there a lot, and the productions are sometimes great, but it’s never my or most opera fans preference to see works translated from their original language. I saw “Rigoletto” once in Austria and it was in German instead of Italian. It was terrible. Oh but they did the famous aria “La donna e mobile” in Italian. Just that part.
Moving on, “Carmen” is a pretty misogynistic opera to begin with, but ENO succeeded in making it even more gratuitously so with this ‘modernized’ production. I don’t understand why directors feel the need to unnecessarily change aspects of great works just for the sake of changing it, when it doesn’t add any artistic value. There are some alterations or reimaginings or revivals that are worthy, like the recent “Spring Awakening” production in California that used many deaf and disabled cast members to highlight the rampant lack of understanding and capability in the show. That sounds brilliant. The half-assed modernization of “Carmen” was not: it kept most of the same ideas – lots of soldiers, being in Spain, smugglers – and added hysterically hideous ‘90s-era-Italy outfits and like 6 cars, doing the smuggling, onstage at one time. I don’t know what they were going for.
So “Carmen” tells the story of a seductive gypsy who seduces men and is a gypsy. She is a cigarette girl among hundreds of cigarette girls who apparently work in the same barracks as hundreds of soldiers. It was a big cast. The soldiers are all disgusting. They treat the women like toys and Carmen like a piece of meat. They grope everyone and repeatedly stick her face in their crotchular regions. But Carmen enjoys it, apparently, because she is seductive, so she is asking for it. Hence it being a super misogynistic show as written, differentiating it from the above monstrosity.
The soldiers beg for her to choose a lover and stop taunting them by existing, so she chooses Jose, who was ignoring her. Smart plan! She sings her super famous aria that goes ‘da dum dum dum!’ about how those who love her should beware. Then all the girls fight like really actually fight, because who doesn’t love women fighting and hitting and scratching each other with their claws? Carmen is accused of whipping out a knife in what should have been merely a skin fight, so the male official says she’s going to be arrested and tells Jose to tie her hands together while they figure out what to do because small man brain. That’s what happens normally.
Here, the men tie Carmen to a flagpole with the official’s workbelt, take off her shirtdress, and position her so she’s on her knees. People I talked to at intermission thought this was disgusting. One woman who knows the opera well felt that tying her up completely, as opposed to just her hands, unnecessarily made her subordinate and submissive and was just gross.
Carmen then beguiles Jose, tasked with guarding her, and he becomes pretty infatuated with her. He lets her escape, whereupon he is imprisoned for a month or two.
When he gets out, he and we find Carmen with her smuggler friends, who are driving regular-sized cars across the stage to show how modern the show is. Three women (and one little girl, sadly) compose the group with 3 or so indistinguishably disgusting men, who assault them and grope them all with no regard for which woman it is or what she’s doing or how drunk she is (very drunk). They meet Escamillo, the famous toreador, who sings the famous toreador song (and not very well, also sadly). Escamillo ‘falls in love’ with Carmen, who is instead in love with her Jose, whom she is now seeing for the second time ever. Jose has to go back to camp for nighttime, and Carmen, being an awful no good female who doesn’t understand that men have to work, gets really upset that he isn’t willing to sacrifice his job for her, because if he really loved her he would. This is apparently how Rossini thought women’s little brains worked. As written, Jose’s superior officer arrives looking for Carmen (every man thinks he is in love with her), and Jose fights him. Having done that, he can’t go back to soldiering, so he joins the smugglers.
Here, he punches Carmen instead, for mocking his need to go back to work. She falls to the ground in fetal position, where she remains while Jose sings not about how he’s sorry but about how much he loves her. Then he cuddles up next to her and declares his love more. And what choice does she have but to accept it? What other kind of love could she possibly know?
Then more cars appear and it’s really just nonsense.
Then, Carmen gets bored with Jose, because that’s how women are, those fickle people, and the toreador tells her he loves her. Hey guess what, she returns the favor now. That happens really with no build up, I thought she was lying, but that’s how women do, just transfer affection really easily when they’re bored. Then Carmen and her friends do tarot cards, and Carmen gets the one saying she’s going to die. No one else seems really worried, though Carmen tells them it’s probably Jose.
Escamillo invites pretty much all of Spain to see him in his next bull-fight, and during that famous song we get to watch 100 or so actors in neon shorts and smartphones jumping up and down in unison for a good 2 minutes. It’s like they stopped trying. Anyway, outside the arena, Carmen and her two girlfriends are about to enter, before they leave her and are like, ‘Hey don’t get killed, we know that’s a possibility but we’re going to leave you alone now.’ Carmen keeps a watchful eye until she needs to do her makeup, and Jose sneaks in while she is looking in the compact, because oh girls with their makeup! So silly! So Jose is devastated that she no longer wants to be with him, even though he hit her, and even though now she loves someone else, so he kills her. At the end, after Jose kills her, he normally confesses to the murder. Here, instead, he grabs her by the lifeless foot and drags her offstage as the lights go out. Cute!
So ENO is not nearly as guilty as ROH for disgusting and gratuitous anti-female sentiment, because so much of it is in the text, but how they chose to augment what was already a plethora of misogyny reinforces how normal all the people involved considered it to be. This already has violence against women, but let’s make it worse! This one doesn’t have violence against women, so let’s add a lot, for art’s sake. It’s not art, guys. It’s violence, and it’s perpetuating the acceptance and sickening tolerance of rape culture.
