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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Lungs but Socially Distanced: The Perfect Play for a Pandemic, Though Not a Perfect Play
Recently, the Old Vic held pandemic-safe performances of last year’s hit production of Lungs, starring Claire Foy and Matt I-always-want-to-say-Lucas-but-it’s-definitely-not-Matt-Lucas Smith. Since I missed the regular run of this modern four-hander (yes correct), I was super excited to catch this version – which was performed live at the Old Vic, but to an empty auditorium and streamed to a virtual audience. The two actors also stayed six feet apart on the stage, with two different cameras on them at all times. Honestly, it was the perfect play to test this sort of format. Since it’s about a distressed couple, it worked well to see both characters the entire time separated by space and camera angles, and since it’s a one-act it worked well for me to be closer to a bathroom break without disrupting anyone (I love an interval).
The livestream situation was better considered and executed than the play itself. Duncan Macmillan’s present-day look at a couple deciding whether it’s morally wrong to have children was, shall we say, relevant to our interests. We were really excited to see a deep-dive into the ethical considerations that millennials discuss as part of this decision, and to see how they grapple with these considerations, how they make this extremely difficult decision. And we got the first part. The two famously talented actors have the early parts of the conversations that we’ve all had, with the same comments about carbon footprints, but then…then they just decide they want a kid, without applying the conversation to that decision at all. Then that aspect of the play – the aspect that it was billed as being entirely about – was finished.
Instead, it became a look at this couple’s particular dysfunctions from then on, like any other play about a couple. And it was compelling, but I found it too disjointed. It was like two separate plays morphed into one. The first part, about the ethics of procreating while the world is on fire, ended just when it would have been the most compelling: once they actually decided to have a baby, once they had to actually own their decision and defend it, the part that would have been novel.
On its own, the second half was an interesting look at this couple that I was not rooting for (but maybe I’m biased against them because the glaring, grimacing Matt Smith at times looked like a goddamn bare-hands murderer (i.e. a man who doesn’t need a weapon; he will kill you with his bare hands), while Foy looked like a sweet lil bunny rabbit (not helped by her juvenile overalls, which I LOVED)), but it felt like a completely different show, seen through a lens that wasn’t in play at the start and with some hella shocking time jumps. The only common thread throughout was that they always wondered if they were good people – they said the phrase ‘good people’ about themselves so many times that it’s a shame that was already taken as a play title. But they never actually tried to, or wanted to, answer that question.
Still, it was wonderful to see a live play even though I wasn’t there. Knowing they were performing right then was definitely on improvement on these past recordings we’ve been watching, although nothing like being in a theatre. Also, I can’t see this working for anything other than two- or four-handers, which means the big shows (and musicals) won’t be coming in live to my living room.
INFORMATION
The Old Vic’s In Camera series continues on their website with rehearsed play readings.
The stream occurred over Zoom, which is annoying, because Zoom sucks. Also, it’s kind of ridonk that even shows where the whole audience is home still start 10 minutes late.
And because I can’t go a day without finding a mistake in a leading paper, I have to point out that The Guardian’s piece on this livestream event said “although all audience members will have the same view, tickets will be priced from £10–65 with virtual theatre-goers asked to give what they can to help support the theatre.” Erm, no, theatre-goers weren’t ‘asked to give’ shit; we bought tickets from the website just as we normally would and were stuck with whatever price point we could get (the 10 pounders were gone quick and we weren’t ‘asked’ to give more) for whatever date they showed us first. Luckily we didn’t get stuck with the £65 tickets but man alive I can’t imagine paying that much to look at my computer, no matter how good the show.
Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic
It’s Theatre Tuesday! Today’s show is Death of a Salesman, playing at London’s Young Vic until July 13.
We’ve had quite the run of Arthur Miller plays lately. After this year’s decent The American Clock and meh All My Sons, it’s time for the most famous of them all, Death of a Salesman. DOAS was never my favorite play, maybe because I don’t like death, maybe because it’s so depressing, maybe because being forced to dissect it as a teenager and having my critique of ‘how can Arthur write all these plays and never once mention that he was married to Marilyn Monroe?’ dismissed was fairly annoying, but it is a classic. I guess I’m supposed to say ‘it’s a classic for a reason’, even though that’s such a clichéd line, but it’s true. More than Miller’s other plays, and more than most plays, DOAS pays attention to an ordinary man, Willy Loman, and thereby ‘the’ ordinary man, with all his frustratingly relatable problems and failures and bad luck. Willy’s wife Linda famously states at one point that her husband is not a great man or the finest character, but he’s a human being. And that’s why “attention must finally be paid to such a person.” Her line states the reason for this play’s longevity, and why it’s still worthwhile.
In this riveting and heartbreaking production from Marianne Elliott (responsible for the gender-swapped Company) and Miranda Cromwell, the Loman family is now black, which adds a deeper sense of suffering to the already sympathetic family’s troubles. Instead of seeing all of Willy’s tribulations and failures as the result of unfair, terrible luck, there’s the hint that it’s also the result of racist treatment, which today feels a lot more compelling than feeling sorry for yet another white man. But the universal nature of his collapse remains prominent, with this story of an average man’s average problems continuing to engross audiences. Few other plays more successfully show that you don’t need magical plots or far-fetched characters to achieve magic in the theatre, as the longevity of DOAS shows it’s enough to pay due attention to real life.
Those of you more familiar with the play are probably like “average problems, what?” and yes, he is losing his mind and he does die (spoiler) (in the title) because of this not-very-hum-drum problem, but that’s not the most striking aspect of Willy’s plight. His daily shortcomings and his ordinary mediocrity and his unremarkable disappointments are what have kept his story at the pinnacle of theatre for so many decades. And in Wendell Pierce’s shattering performance, that’s what hits hardest, how Willy is a pitiable but common man, one that everyone probably knows in real life. This is a huge feat from Pierce considering how impressive his portrayal of the mental breakdown was throughout the show. His ticks and losses of concentration build subtly, making you more and more uncomfortable and more and more anxious about this poor man. Pierce gives an incredible performance, the kind where you really can’t understand how he can put himself through all that 8 times a week.
Equally great is Sharon D. Clarke as his wife Linda, which is no surprise since Sharon D. Clarke is great in everything. Her delivery of the aforementioned famous summary of the play reverberated through the room with its significance. She made a relatively small role feel much larger, and any excuse to hear her sing or even hum, as she does a few times, is welcome. As for Biff and Happy, who usually bother me to no end, Arinze Kene and Martins Imhangbe made them come alive. The family’s story was best told through Willy’s flashbacks, shown brilliantly here with slideshow clicks and flashes to represent Willy’s memories taking over the forefront of his mind. This bit of directing was genius.
The only time the show fell really flat (an accomplishment in its 3 hour length) was in the Act II bar scene, when the Loman men meet a few women and flirt with them. Everything about this scene felt kind of amateur and off, mainly because there’s only so far that basic slinking around with an ‘ooh aren’t I gorgeous’ gaze can take you. Aside from that, the rest of the cast and really the rest of the show makes for probably the best production of this classic play you can see.
INFORMATION
The Young Vic run is sold-out, but you can try for rush tickets or cancellations. As is the annoying as all get-out Young Vic tradition, the shows start late as they fill all the empty seats with people from the cancellation line. Otherwise, the play is transferring to the Piccadilly Theatre (current home to The Lehman Trilogy) on October 24, 2019 until January 4, 2020 so you can buy tickets for that run, although I fear the power of the intimate, small theatre will be missed there.
