A Wondrous Place For Me & Yucatan: Valladolid, Chichen Itza, & Our Fave Cenotesby Randi / August 28, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Blues in the Night, playing at London’s Kiln Theatre in Kilburn until September 7.
Before we get into specifics about this revue-style show, I need to share two things. First, Husbo & I went to a cheeky weekday matinee so we were ready for the old-white-people chatterboxing that comes with the territory. But the show opens with a single musician in spotlight playing the saxophone, and as soon as he blared out one strong note, an old lady not close to me said at full volume “oh you know I love the sax”. I mean. We were not ready for that. We were in for quite an experience. Old biddies LOVE THEM SOME TALKING.
The second thing is that whenever I say/think/type this title, my head goes “blues is in the niiiii-iii-ii-ii-ight, blues is in the niiiii-iii-ii-ii-ight” like “Groove is in the heart” you get it. Okay I guess I didn’t *need* to share that.
Blues in the Night is a 1980s revue of bluesy standards from well before then (mostly Bessie Smith, like at least half). It “takes place” in 1938 in a run-down Chicago hotel, and it’s “about” three down-on-their-luck women – one older, one middle I guess, and one younger – and one man. The previous phrases suggesting there’s a story are in quotes because this is a revue, like Ain’t Misbehavin, that does not have a story. But unlike the enjoyable Ain’t Misbehavin, in which they were cool just putting on a killer fun show and accepting that there was no story or characters, Blues does attempt to establish characters and a whisper-thin outline of a background story, but that makes it even more obvious that there is none and kind of awkwardly cringey when they do weird ‘character things’.
I looked on the wikipedia page for some info and it says Blues is actually about these three women and the one “snake of a man” who has screwed them all over. I did NOT get that. The one man, Clive Rowe, seemed more to just be filling a role of ‘man’ in each song when needed, not that he was actually the man involved with these three women. It doesn’t make sense to me that he would have a sexual history with the three of them because, I don’t know how to say this nicely but he doesn’t exactly scream ‘womanizer’. I think we can chalk him up to being miscast if that’s what they were trying to go for (his singing was fine), along with the youngest woman, Gemma Sutton, who I loved in The Rink but is wrong here since her character’s songs simply do not fit her voice.
As for the other half of the cast, they acquit themselves more successfully but are also given weird things to do to establish some semblance of a character instead of just being allowed to sing the damn songs. Debbie Kurup, who we last saw in Sweet Charity, plays the middle woman who apparently has a fancy past but is now struggling living in this hotel and sings various songs about her fancy past and current troubles, as they all do. But like, I think at one point she was in the background doing heroin??? I mean, why? There’s no story! That is very unnecessary! And then she sells her fur coat to a waiter? Just why.
And that brings us to the fourth member of this cast, the great Sharon D. Clarke, probably the greatest West End musical theatre actress right now. The show is worth seeing just to hear her sing a super long depressing version of Bessie Smith’s “Wasted Life Blues”, so incredibly moving and fantastic that I could easily have murdered the two old men whose obnoxious ringtones blasted out during it (one even got up from the front to take his call I CANNOT). While Clarke seems to be enjoying herself and is, as always, killing it, they also have her do some ridiculous,unnecessary ‘character-building’ stuff like singing an entire song with food-based double entendres (does it count as a double entendre if it’s as obvious and unsophisticated as repeatedly joking about a man’s sausage?) and fanning her hoo-ha that it made me uncomfortable to look directly at her. I wish this show was either an actual story or just a straightforward review of good songs instead of being in some weird nether region.
This show, awkward as it is, was actually nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical – but it was a weak year. I mean Cats won.
Although it was pretty slow at times and pretty heavy on the fremdschamen, Blues has some good musical moments, namely whenever Clarke gets a non-sausagey solo (that “Wasted Life Blues” deserves its own show, with a real story and a real character for her to play, it was that good) and whether the four cast members join together in a number, like in the exciting title song. Fun fact, that song, “Blues in the Night”, was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar in 1942, along with “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. People expected one of those two to win, but Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammy Dos surprised everyone with a win for “The Last Time I Saw Paris”. Even funner fact, Kern was kinda pissed that he won an Oscar for a song that wasn’t written specifically for the movie it was in so he had the rules changed! He changed the Academy Award rules for original songs (they must be written specifically for the movie) because he was so mad he won one. I mean. That’s more interesting than anything in this show, I hate to say.
INFORMATION
Blues in the Night is playing at the Kiln Theatre until September 7. It’s a two-act, of 50 minutes each, 20 minute interval. I think there are enough clunkers that could be cut that it could be a one-act 80 minute show if they had the power to change it. Or just have a Sharon concert, really. But it’s worth catching her if you’re a fan before Broadway steals and keeps her.
AUDIENCE
I can’t even describe how much they were all talking and at full volume. Man alive they love to talk. One guy around us was humming along to the songs and man I get that these are your jams from childhood but the least you could do is hum in the right key.
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Rose at the Park Theatre is moving, heartbreaking, and overly ambitious
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show just feels right to talk about during the High Holidays.
The first act of Rose is riveting theatre. Martin Sherman’s two-hander (that’s one actor) doesn’t feel like theatre at all; it feels like you are listening to your (probably not your your, statistically speaking) Jewish grandmother (but decades ago) recount her harrowing life of persecution. It’s written well, so that it keeps moving forward at the right pace and keeps interest up, and it’s performed exceptionally, by Dame Maureen Lipman who if she wasn’t already a dame would be made a dame for how dame good she is in this.
Telling her story, the Dame’s Rose starts in the 1920s as a little Ukrainian girl growing up with a dying dad and a severe mom as pogroms hit her shtetl. She moves to the big city of Warsaw to help her brother and his new wife and to flee the violence, but then of course violence starts there and they get moved into the infamous ghetto, and then it’s the Holocaust big time and it’s heartbreak after heartbreak and you’re like how much shit can one single woman face and you realize how many single people experienced all this suffering and it is A. LOT.
And yet, it’s not done in a way that’s just a sadness dump, which is so easily could be. Or as a ‘look how bad we’ve had it’ dump (though holy hell it’s true). In telling her history, she exemplifies all the great things about Jewishness: the humor, the darker humor, the argumentativeness, the love of playing devil’s advocate (it’s called something different in Jewish obviously but not sure what), the physical communication styles (not just Italians!), the strength, the community, and of course the importance of memories and how memory shapes us. This tale is meaningful for having us remember the history, and also for being so unapologetically Jewish.
All in the first hour plus, we cover the pogroms of the 1920s, the Holocaust, the post-Holocaust camps that many countries were responsible for – like the British, stop lying about how great they were – and then the struggle for war refugees to get to the promised land, Israel, and all the forces – like the British – that forcibly, often fatally, stopped them. I’m sure there are many people in each audience that don’t realize just how insanely awful good-seeming nations were to the Jews after the war ended, and that British soldiers eagerly killed survivors rather than let them step onto the land they were indigenous to because of the British Mandate and their complicity in the massacres of the Jewish minority population (if you don’t know all about this history but say things like ‘the current situation is not complicated!’ then I don’t know how to help you). But Rose survives all this, barely, losing everyone she knows and loves to be the one who makes it. Her recounting of what happened to her daughter is so raw yet so subtle, it feels intrusive to listen to. She builds a new family, she finds success, she grows older, all in the first act. Honestly, when the first act ended I thought it was the end of the 2 and 1/2 hour show and I did amazingly at holding my bladder. But no, all of that happens in just one act somehow. It’s the kind of interval where a lot of people just sit silently (while I climb over them to get to the toilet).
Man I’m going on about the first act, huh. It’s because it was special. It would have been something if that was the whole show, this tale of one woman’s strength through persecution and suffering to represent so many similar tales that it’s an amalgam of. The second act, though, tries to do too much. For a show that starts with the pogroms of the 1920s, it is insane that it also tries to cover the modern crisis in the Middle East. This attempt feels like one meant to appease – who, I have no idea – by saying ‘we realize that in talking about Jews all night we better share the other side!’, the other side of what being the important question, but I got that feeling, like they felt the need to both-sides the topic of Jewish oppression. Of course, a full and honest (and well-informed) look at the crisis would be important, but it felt tacked on, a weird addition to this particular show, and like a sort of apology for taking up all this time making a fuss about Jewish suffering. Also, on a dramatic level, it was a strange turnabout from being all about Rose’s journey from her perspective, being directly in all this terrible action and direct suffering, to then have her tell us thirdhand about what’s happening to other people via people related to her. It would be nearly impossible for what feels like a weirdly intentioned CYA addendum to have the same emotional impact or the same integrity as the personal part that came before, and so of course it doesn’t.
INFORMATION
The show runs 2 1/2 hours.
The Park Theatre is an absolute shit show. The circle/mezz level uses those terrible seats, I don’t know what it’s called, where you don’t have your own seat but squeeze onto a longer row kind of jawn with strangers and your ENTIRE ROW has to stand up and lift the seat for anyone to walk by because there’s no legroom. Also, the Park’s website seat map is a travesty because it shows aisles at the far ends but there’s no actual exit over there, and if I worked for the ADA I would sue them for that. ALSO what kind of theatre has a bar space as its only entry/exit and PUTS A BIG LONG TABLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THAT SPACE? a fire hazard omfg anyway thank god the show was good because I am probably not going to be invited back after this rant.
Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter: Boy those Russians Know From Debilitating Depression
It’s Theatre Thursday during a pandemic, which means I’m going to rave about a show that you can no longer see because THIS! WORLD! IS ON FIIIIIIIRE.
Man alive, Chekhov needed a friend, am I right? Christopher Durang could have easily made a less-funny Chekhovian play called Vanya & Sonya & Depression & Sadness and we’d all get it. Actually, it should still be funny, because Chekhov, the master, infused his gloomy, depressing (if you drink every time I use this word in this piece you will get through quarantine like a champ) classic Uncle Vanya with just as much humor as sadness, and just as much heart as melancholy, just as much humanity and sad beauty as grief. The current London production of Uncle Vanya is a fantastic, nearly flawless revival, one of the many heartbreaking casualties of this strange time of isolation. Toby Jones in the titular role redefines how fully felt this unforgettable character can be, and he leads a pretty great cast in this magnificent production.
If you don’t know Chekhov’s classic of countryside despair, Uncle Vanya tells about a man named Vanya who lives with his niece Sonya in a crumbling country estate where every day looks the same and their future looks bleak but they just go through each day doing their paperwork and drinking their vodka and, like, sighing, I guess. But excitement enters with the unwelcome arrival of Vanya’s brother/Sonya’s father Aleksandr (played by the wonderful Ciaran Hinds), a famous professor who is lauded as a genius but is really just an annoying and ignorant blowhard and my favorite part was when Vanya tried to shoot him and my least favorite part was when he missed. Aleksandr has a hot new young wife Yelena (played by understudy Afia Abusham when I saw it, who was decent but didn’t seem to quite get her footing enough to make an impression among this stellar cast) and Vanya is like OH DIP A HOT WOMAN AND ONE I’M NOT RELATED TO I HAVEN’T SEEN ONE IN YEARS! And he falls in love with her but Yelena is like mmm pass and falls instead for the hot town doctor who pays ever increasing visits since her arrival. Sadly, Sonya, who is good (and Natasha’s young and Andrei isn’t heeere) but plain is like SUPES in love with hot doctor (Richard Armitage, magnetic) but he is not attracted to her in the least even though he is as lonely as everyone else and it would be nice if he and Sonya saved each other from a life of dreary solitude but hey he just doesn’t love her you can’t force it so instead he ALSO falls for Yelena (who is MARRIED, my dudes) (okay to an old buffoon but STILL). So everyone is super unhappy and lonely and depressed because they know this is their lot in life and it will never change. Russians, man.
Toby Jones’s Vanya is, well, everything. He so completely and perfectly inhabits Vanya’s despair with every joke and gesture and gaze, a despair that informs everything Vanya says or does though he tries to keep it bubbling under the surface, at least part of the time. It’s heartbreaking that he has lived a life so barren and knows that there’s nothing he can do to change it (I mean, I’m optimistic that if he really wanted to, he could change his life, but Russians man). Jones also infuses his Vanya with a sad but incredible humor, because I admit nothing is funnier than self-hate, it’s true. His seemingly nonstop movement, even at rest, and elastic facial expressions added to the creation of a dynamic Vanya for the ages.
In a cast this starry, it’s surprising and impressive that despite Toby’s complete encompassing of his character, the standout is young Aimee Lou Wood as Sonya. I can’t think of a more efficient performance in recent times, with so much done with comparatively little. With only a few lines at the end of the first act, she broke my heart, and continued breaking it throughout the rest of the show. Her sad monologue that ends the show had me riveted. Husbo thought the delivery was painfully labored and it took him out, but for me, I needed all that time to breathe in between words because I was still so shaken by her final interaction with the doctor, an interaction so subtle and so exquisitely performed that I wanted to gasp but instead cried. She’s an incredible young actor that I can’t wait to see more of. Her performance is a huge part of what makes this production so beautiful, so heartbreaking, and so – one more for the road – depressing.
INFORMATION
After a 7:30pm start (probably 7:33 or so, happily not as late as most shows), Act I ended at 8:44pm and Act II at 10:12, so note that it is 12 minutes longer than it says on the official show website which might not seem like a lot to you but it’s enough to be wrong.
Vanya’s annoying mother is extra annoying because they have her smoke a lot. She has like 4 lines but it was important to establish that her character smokes?? MISS ME WITH THIS UNNECESSARY LUNG DAMAGE PLEASE.
This was supposed to run until May 2 but the world is on a break from life so I suggest reading the play and perhaps acting out all the parts with the people you are locked down with. If you are locked down alone, do all the parts yourself like when I sing “Moscow” from The Great Comet it doesn’t make you look or feel crazy no sirree I promise totally a normal thing to do.
