January 19, 2023
Tree at the Young Vic: A Maddening Take on Theatreby Randi / August 15, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about a theatre documentary film that will be in select theatres tomorrow, August 23.
Few musicals have the staying power and continued resonance of Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 musical about Tevye the poor milkman, his wife Golde, their five daughters, and their struggles as Jews in their tiny village of Anatevka at the turn of the century. After all these years, it’s hard to imagine a world without this miraculous piece of theatre, and the new documentary Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, from director Max Lewkowicz, shows us how fortunate we are that all the pieces came together as they did. The amount of jaw-dropping names that appear throughout the doc exuding praise over this classic musical is endlessly entertaining. Featuring interviews with composers Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, book writer Joseph Stein, producer Hal Prince (to whom the film is dedicated; he died just a few weeks ago), and tons of actors, writers, experts on cultural studies, journalists, and family members of the creative team, this Fiddler does the unthinkable and makes the musical even more special.
Interspersing footage of various productions, the classic film version, and even footage of Aleichem’s silent films with interviews, the doc provides interesting historical context and testimony as to why it’s such a lasting show. Joel Grey, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Harvey Fierstein, Fran Leibovitz, Itzhak Perlman, and endless amazing historians and writers share worthy thoughts on what makes Fiddler still resonate.
Everyone today loves Fiddler, and for dern good reason, but it opened to surprisingly bad reviews. Variety even wrote that there were no memorable songs, a statement that is beyond ludicrous for a show without a single weak moment and a widely known and widely loved score (okay except for “Now I Have Everything”). But it took a lot of hard work to create the final masterpiece, as Harnick, Bock, Prince, the original actors, and their relatives and those of Jerome Robbins share. H&B got the idea to write a show inspired by Russian-Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s short stories, narrowing their idea down to the story of Tevye the milkman and his daughters in turn of the century czarist Russia. They faced a lot of obstacles in the early days from people who, rightly so, heard this idea and went, ‘are you crazy?’ Who would see a musical based on such a niche story that will likely be super depressing? But this genius team turned this depressing, niche story into one that’s as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking, and one of the most relatable pieces in the canon, since at any time in history, people have been oppressed. One of the best stories is when during intermission of a Japanese production, an actor asked if Americans actually enjoy the show since “it’s so Japanese.”
I could talk forever about how wonderful this documentary and Fiddler itself are, but Ima let you discover some things for yourself because I hope you are seeing it, if you are near a theatre playing it. However, I do want to share a few of my favorite discoveries with you.
A few things I learned from the Fiddler Documentary
The idiot defense attorney from My Cousin Vinny was Broadway’s original Motel the Tailor
Now look, I’m not reducing Austin Pendleton’s stellar theatre career in calling him the bad lawyer from MCV; I just never realized that that was him until I was watching this doc, okay? I wish I could have seen him in this role!
There’s a Sholem Aleichem statue in Kiev.
Oops.
I don’t think I love any move more than Danny Burstein’s Tevye Shimmy
If you read my review of the 2016 Broadway revival of Fiddler, then you know how I feel about Danny Burstein’s Tevye and, above all, Tevye’s Lil Shimmy. With a solid amount of footage from this production interspersed throughout, we get to see a few of his positively delightful shimmies and I couldn’t be happier. (I put a clip of what I’m talking about in my instagram stories today, and it will be saved in the 2019 Theatre highlights so you can enjoy the Burstein Shimmy FOREVER.)
Jerome Robbins and Zero Mostel were not BFF
Although an undeniable genius, Jerry Robbins was extremely difficult to work with, and Zero was not a fan. During Joe McCarthy’s (more like McCunther (“that cunther made a list???”)) Senate hearings for Trying To Find Commies and Destroy Careers, Robbins named names, like the one thing you were not supposed to do if you wanted to still be considered Not An Asshole. But as always, it’s not as simple as that. McCunther S. Prick and his cronies threatened to out Robbins as a gay man if he didn’t cooperate, and back then that would have been a serious problem. They say he always regretted it afterwards, which like of course, but it wasn’t exactly a black-and-white situation. He was still an asshole to actors and others on set though, and no amount of genius can excuse that away, but he was a g-d genius.
The original Tradition lyrics were hilarious
Luckily, H&B perfected everything before the show was frozen, but we saw an early CBS television appearance of theirs in which they sang a song to the tune of what would later become “Tradition”: “There’s noodles to be made, and chickens to be plucked, and liver to be chopped and challah to be baked.” It’s a good change, it’s a goood change.
Every character has a name – like every character
Despite my assumption that my ensemble role in high school was just ‘one of the village daughters’, she had a specific name. In the original rehearsals, Jerry Robbins named every ensemble character and treated them all as integral parts of this show. So there’s a good chance I was actually playing Anya or Rivka, to name two I saw when they showed his original sketches, which is prettay prettay cool.
Jerry Bock says ‘ambience’ so amazingly
Not really a thing just wanted to remember how cute it is for him.
Yiddish Fiddler includes the best line ever
Currently in New York there is a Joel-Grey directed production of Fiddler being performed entirely in Yiddish, and receiving critical acclaim. The doc shows a snippet of the recording session for its album, in which Steven Skybell sings the Yiddish version of “If I Were a Rich Man”. The subtitles show us that these lyrics include just the best thing ever to exclaim probably at any point in your life: “Jews, I laid an egg!”
Marc Chagall’s work inspired the title and thematic elements of Fiddler
You know the Chagall painting with the violinist in a purple coat floating between two rooftops? Well helloooo, that’s the fiddler on the roof! Chagall’s work inspired the creators in establishing that central thematic element of the difficulty of finding balance between tradition and progress in a changing world, balancing like a fiddler on the roof. The Fiddler in the movie version is even wearing a purple coat. After learning more about Chagall in the show The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, I imagine Chagall would have loved this show and the homage it pays to the plight of Jews in Russia during this era.
There’s so much information and emotion jam-packed into this beautiful film and I want to rave about all of it (like, did you know The Temptations covered “Rich Man”? It’s so fun) but definitely go see for yourself. And if you have to wait longer until it comes to your town or for it to be available for purchase, spend that time listening to one of the many great cast recordings. Or better yet, go see a local production. Chances are you’re near one, whether a regional theatre or a middle school, because the most heartwarming, unbelievable fact shared in the film is that, since debuting in 1964, a production of Fiddler has been performed somewhere in the world every single day, a fact that proves just how incredible and indelible this musical’s mark is on the world.
Related Posts
LIES at the Almeida: Like ‘The Big Short’ But I’m Christian Bale
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about Ontroerend Goed’s interactive theatrical play LIES, which played London’s Almeida Theatre this summer.
Capitalism is the devil, right? Down with capitalism? And down with big too-big-to-fail banks and fake money scams that don’t make any sense but that our entire global economy depends on, right? Yes, right, unless you’re the one making that money. Then your clear moral vision gets a little cloudy and it gets harder to say ‘no stop all of these terrible things that are destroying the world!’ because you’re too busy making like Mona Lisa Saperstein and saying “MONEY, PLEEEEEASE”. At least this is the moral of the story at LIES, the interactive theatre experience that ran at London’s Almeida Theatre until last Saturday (sorriessss all that cash has destroyed my ability to care that y’all missed it).
You can’t really call it a play, but LIES (which is stylized with currency symbols as you can see in the photo but I can’t really do on my computer without taking a few minutes of effort, which I don’t want to do anymore because again moneycashdontcare) is a powerful, intense, truly immersive theatrical event like nothing has ever been immersive before. The latest work from Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed (and no I don’t know how to pronounce that but I’m going to say it’s…phonetically?) to play in London, LIES attempts to show how volatile the financial world is, yes, but also how artificial it all is. Alexander Devriendt, the artistic director of the OG collective (it’s just easier), explains in his programme note that his journey into the financial world revealed endless ‘magic tricks’, an entire global system of functioning that relies on absolutely nothing of substance. It’s all pixels on screens, he said, all the money we use and trade and owe, and nothing refers to anything real like the pile of gold of the past or something. Devriendt cites a philosopher who once said that “if everybody would know what money is, a revolution would break out.”
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
Beckett’s Endgame at the Old Vic Successfully Captures the Yearning for the Sweet Release of Death
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Endgame by Samuel Beckett, playing a double bill with his short piece Rough for Theatre II, now at the Old Vic if you like torture.
To sort something straight off the bat: this is NOT about the last Avengers movie (which, amazingly enough, I still have not seen. I really do not care anymore about those superheroes. It’s too much). Endgame is a famous play by Samuel Beckett, the playwright of ‘theatre of the absurd’, famed for his dreary, bleak look at the human existence. He did not seem happy. People say his work is ‘tragi-comic’ but I did not get the comic part. He famously said that nothing is funnier than unhappiness…which after seeing this production, I promise you is false: I was very unhappy, and very much not amused. I have never been so close to being sure that a piece of theatre was pranking me as I was during this evening at the Old Vic, nearly shouting “oh THIS is the bad place” despite the beloved talent onstage (Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming). I’ve also never seen so many people walk out of a show, unable to wait till an interval or the end, and I’ve seen some shit.
Let’s start with Rough for Theatre II, since it’s a little nothing of a show. This production serves a double bill with Beckett’s little one-act that’s about two like, afterlife accountants but not in the brilliant Good Place way, who show up when someone is about to commit suicide and they go through his life and see whether he should or not? At least I think that’s what it’s about. It was odd and vague and incredibly short. Daniel Radcliffe gets to do a lot of box jumps which is fun for him but not for me when watching because I was like I wanna do box jumps instead of watch this. I honestly have to give Beckett props for naming it what it is.
Endgame, the main course, is one of the most unreasonable pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Remember how Alex Borstein did that episode of Friends where she had a one-woman show about why men don’t like her and talked about getting her first period, and Chandler made everyone go see it as punishment? I didn’t know Sammy Beckett but I feel like he really hated theatergoers. He’s the playwright equivalent of Lewis Black’s joke about how airplane seats in economy were created by a guy with scoliosis who is really f-ing pissed. This piece is about an invalid (Alan) and his servant (Daniel) and Alan is mean to Daniel and Daniel has a limp but Alan can’t walk or stand at all and they just are like, waiting for death? It’s considered a sort of sequel to Waiting for Godot and I guess they just replaced Godot with Death. Alan’s parents live in trashcans at the foot of the stage and sometimes they pop up and say nonsense things that are weird and not funny and he replies in ways that are absurd because I guess this is Theatre of the Absurd but just because it has an official title doesn’t make it worthwhile.
Daniel is fine, but there’s only so much you can do performance-wise with the material you are given, especially when most of your requirements are carrying a ladder to and fro and climbing up and shimmying down, over and over and over in an act that serves no purpose except to delight people who find delight in incongruous slapstick, a cheap laugh ploy that, of course, works because people love cheap laughs that don’t have anything to do with anything. Alan Cumming is fine, though overly hammy much of the time. But I don’t know what we can ask of them when they are forced to do this absolute nonsense show. Why, why is this considered a great piece of theatre? The only thing I can think of is, it’s about people waiting for the sweet release of death and when you watch it, it’s such torture that the audience feels the yearning for death along with the characters. Is that it, that the show so successfully makes the audience feel what the characters feel so that they too anticipate sweet release from the torment of this show? Is that what he was going for, because if so, man, well done Sammy, what a gottamn masterpiece of pain you’ve created. It’s a f-ing triumph. If he didn’t want us to feel that death was preferable to watching this show for much longer, then I, along with everyone who left, missed something.
INFORMATION
Rough for Theatre II was just under a half hour, which means your interval bathroom break comes when you don’t need it, adding to the whole torture vibe of the evening. Endgame is then an hour and half, which is the exact amount of time it’s safe to watch this show for before one loses one’s mind.
The Old Vic renovation is fine – there’s still not enough room in the lobby (what a mess) but the bathrooms in the basement (where you go if you sit in the stalls, so get an aisle towards the back if you need) are better and bigger. Also, they are not defined by gender, just by whether they contain stalls or urinals, which is how every bathroom should be since it’s great for everyone (except men who need to go #2) (hey that’s what Beckett is with this show!).
STAGE DOOR
Like all Danny Rad shows, people were SPRINTING to the stage door in droves, so I skipped out on adding ‘trampled by horrible crowds’ to the night’s list of agonies. (Also what was I gonna say to them, yeesh.)
