January 19, 2023
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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“Forbidden Broadway” Just As Funny In London
One of the funniest shows in London this fall was not “Urinetown” or “The Book Of Mormon” or, god forbid, “Miss Saigon”, but the show that mocked them all. It was “Forbidden Broadway”, a revue that hilariously, terribly ridicules many of the shows currently playing the West End and had its audiences crying with laughter. Including me. Sadly, it closed yesterday, but its successful and critically beloved run promises the return of future incarnations here.
“Forbidden Broadway” is an NYC off-Broadway institution that has been skewering Broadway shows since 1982. That is before I was even born! Gerard Alessandrini started the riotous, biting revue to mock his beloved musical theatre as only a true fan could do. It’s like how the Comedy Central roasters were so mean (and so funny) the closer they were to the person being roasted. I mean back when they were funny, not in recent years when they roasted like James Franco.
“Forbidden Broadway” is an NYC off-Broadway institution that has been skewering Broadway shows since 1982. That is before I was even born! Gerard Alessandrini started the riotous, biting revue to mock his beloved musical theatre as only a true fan could do. It’s like how the Comedy Central roasters were so mean (and so funny) the closer they were to the person being roasted. I mean back when they were funny, not in recent years when they roasted like James Franco.
The first version of “Forbidden Broadway” ran for thousands of performances, which is sick amazing, and then nearly every single season Gerard retooled the songs to attack current offerings on the Great White Way. He constantly and consistently worked, changing season after season, for more than twenty years! He picked up a Tony and some Drama Desk Awards for his outstanding hilarity as he went. There was a short break that occurred from 2009 to 2012, which is when I first saw it, I think. And recently it was in London for the first time ever! I really had doubts about how it would translate to London, because British people are not funny. Well they aren’t funny in the same way as us chosen people. But I haven’t seen an audience laugh this hysterically in a long time.
My main reason for going, besides my usual ‘I just have to see everything’ reason, is that Christina Bianco joined the cast. You may have seen Bianco on Ellen or in Time or taking over the internet with her impersonations of musical theatre and pop divas. She is astounding, nabbing everyone from Chenoweth to Idina to Bernadette to, my favorites, Julie Andrews and Celine Dion, with unbelievable precision. Luckily, most of her best impressions are featured in the show. She is like the musical and female Bill Hader who can sing like the best of them. So, nothing like Bill Hader. While the other cast members weren’t as successful in their interpretations (Mandy Patinkin and Liza Minelli sounded nothing like them), they were still as talented and as entertaining in their mockeries. Across the board, the comedic timing was near perfection, with the staging of some numbers even funnier than the lines being sung.
And oh my, the lines. The first main number that had me literally convulsing attacked “Matilda”, starting with “My mummy says I’m a triple threat” instead of the opening line of the show “My mummy says I’m a miracle”, and it’s sung by the big child stars of London – Billy Elliot, Gavroche from Les Mis, and, of course, Matilda. Bianco plays Matilda here, and it’s amazing because she not only is actually child-sized, but she also has the famous Matilda arm movements (hands on hips, then blowing her fists and other random and stilted movements) down pat. Then, instead of the rocking power song “We are revolting children”, the cast sings “We are exploited children living in exploiting times, we sing exhausting songs, using explicit rhymes.” It was perfect!
Bianco’s spot-on Matilda was only topped by her Kristin Chenoweth. It helps that she’s the same size, but she can do her exact voice. And not just the squeaky talking and chest-voice voice, but the opera-trained super-soprano that Cheno does as well, in shows like “Candide”, where her big song as Cunegonde is the famous “Glitter and be Gay”. (You should really watch this clip, starting at about minute 3). Well, here, it’s a send-up of Chenoweth herself, so it’s “Glitter and be Glib”. As Bianco talks one moment in Cheno’s recognizable voice about how great and famous she is, she jumps in the next moment and sings the insanely difficult opera parts about how glib she is – while also throwing in bits from “Popular” (from “Wicked”) and “My New Philosophy” (from Cheno’s Tony-winning role in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”). It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve seen in a long time, ending of course with a note higher than you expected that sent the (obvious) theatre students sitting next to me into spirals of self-doubt.
The funniest part, and the most hilariously offensive, was the “Miss Saigon” section. Oh my god. Bianco was dressed as Kim but in a red Chinese dress and long black wig, and Damian Humbley and Ben Lewis were Chris and John in their Army fatigues. “Sun and Moon”, between Kim and Chris, one of the most beautiful songs, turned from “You are sunlight and I moon” to something like “I’ll sing clichés and you’ll sing haikus”. So mean and so funny. When Kim pops out (literally) her child, Ben Lewis as John storms onstage and sings accusingly, “Is that Bui Doi??” in a send-up of John’s song about his charity for orphans of Vietnam. It’s AWFUL. It’s so funny.
But it didn’t even touch the final “Miss Saigon” part. Damian Humbley came onstage dressed as The Engineer, ostensibly to do his big and best number “The American Dream”. But no, he announces “My name is Cameron Mackintosh”, legendary, ridiculously successful producer of Saigon, Les Mis, etc. The opening notes of “American Dream” begin…and Damian-as-Cameron sings something along the lines of “When I transfer shows to New York…the Americans cream…” Oh my god people were CRYING. It hurt it was so funny. And it didn’t get less funny the more that line was repeated as Cameron shared his producing secrets: “All these bright lights and loud noise!…the Americans cream…” I still can’t believe this one. It was the best.
The “Les Miserables” section was almost as enjoyable, if a little long. While “God It’s High” (a play on “Bring Him Home” and how freaking high that song is written), a “Forbidden Broadway” standard, was here again, the new staging of the famous Les Mis turntable and some new songs like “On My Phone” made up for it. If you aren’t familiar with 99% of Les Mis productions, they use a turntable a lot of the time so the cast is often rotating. They spoof that here, first with the cast shuffling in circles, then with Javert and Eponine repeatedly missing the microphone and just getting bits of their solos out, then with other characters readying themselves to jump onto the turntable and joining in the shuffling, all while Jean Valjean shuffles by in the background every so often. It’s so freaking hilarious. It ends with the cast, dressed as various Les Mis characters, singing “Ten Years More”, about how Les Mis’s run will never end. The songs didn’t have the most creative lyrics, but the staging more than made up for it, sending the audience into hysterics. Also, Damian Humbley played Valjean, and it gave him the chance to really show off his impressive talents.
Actually, a lot of the stuff wasn’t new, sadly, but most of it was still enjoyable for me, and definitely for the rest of the uninitiated audience. “Into The Words” is a wonderful, somewhat intellectual, satire of how difficult Sondheim’s scores are to sing. In one of my favorite and easiest ways to get audiences on your side, we joined in a sing-along to see just how hard his stuff is: “Into The Woods” became “Into the words that trip your lip and fry your brain and sprain your tongue…” It nails everything wonderful and irritating about Sondheim classics, “the metaphors the synonyms the perfect scan”. This is one that has been on the recordings for years, but it still holds up.
Other classics that are rehashed here include the “Jersey Boys” parody “Walk Like A Man, Sing Like A Girl”, which you can’t not love, but the other “Jersey Boys” song, “Scary”, instead of “Sherry”, doesn’t really make you laugh. Also unwelcome was the “Wicked”/Idina Menzel spoof “Defying Subtlety”, which I hated 4 years ago and groaned when they began again here. I also did not appreciate sitting through “The Circle Of Mice”, about Disney’s takeover of theatre, for the like 9th time.
A different Idina standard, “Let It Go”, got much better treatment, mostly because of Bianco’s ridiculous impression of Menzel. The “Frozen” song became “Let It Blow”, about how loud and crazy Idina sings, and ends with “My nodes never bothered me anyway.” Kind of trite, but the impression sold it.
“Frozen” was one of the few new things in the second act that really worked. Sadly, the most lackluster part was “The Book of Mormon” spoof called “The Book of Morons”. It was Trey Parker and Matt Stone dressed in BOM costume and singing about how they made a masterpiece because theatre should be dirty and stuff. I guess it’s hard to really make fun of the funniest show currently running anywhere. Like how do you make good jokes about jokes? So yeah it was a wasted opportunity I guess. The “Charlie & the Chocolate Factory” number was a little better, with Ben Lewis perfectly costumed as Willy Wonka and singing “Come with me and you’ll see there’s a show with no imagination.” That opening line was the funniest part, but the rest wasn’t bad.
Really, the best part of this show, and of revues like it, is that if you are a true theatre fanatic, it rewards you for being one. You can enjoy the show if you are a theatre novice, but you can’t really appreciate all of the little genius jokes and asides and even some movements that are all inside jokes. All of these jokes and hilarious songs are only funny because you know the base material. You know that Bernadette Peters has a raspy and odd voice (impersonated to perfection again by Bianco begging her audience to “See Me On A Monday”, please). You know that Liza Minnelli moves about manically (though why Bianco didn’t do this impression I’ll never understand). You know how the opening moves to “A Chorus Line” get chanted “step kick kick leap kick touch! Again! Step kick kick leap kick touch!” and laugh when they are here changed to mock the upcoming production of “Cats”, to “lick scratch scratch purr lick scratch! Again!” Even though it’s pretty mean a lot of the time, “Forbidden Broadway” is really a love letter, albeit a sick one, to its current season and really all of musical theatre. And since most of the best songs get recycled every year, you can plan to catch it next time and enjoy pretty much the same stuff I did.
On Bear Ridge: Sometimes Captivating, Often Confusing
This past weekend, the new play On Bear Ridge played its final performance at London’s Royal Court Theatre after a planned one-month run. Written by Ed Thomas and co-directed by him and Vicky Featherstone, On Bear Ridge was co-produced by National Theatre Wales and I believe was Wales-inspired, as it’s apparently a ‘semi-autobiographical’ work from Thomas about places we leave behind.
I’m talking a lot about background details and not the actual play because I have no idea what it was about.
Sure, I understood the general vibe it was going for, I think, of how forces greater than us can change our lives without our consent, maybe of what home is. I felt the fear of a violent, authoritarian government and all the chaotic terror it brings. The beginning of the play threw out an intensity that was often riveting, thanks to a powerful monologue from John Daniel, played by an actor I was thinking was an older, more grizzled version of Rhys Ifans, best known to me as Hugh Grant’s roommate in Notting Hill. I found out after the show that it was indeed Rhys Ifans, who apparently started growing the beard since that movie’s premiere in 1999. Not knowing anything about the play, I was moved by his passionate account of his wife’s difficult labor and his life on Bear Ridge, but the pull of this section didn’t last. Honestly, once his wife Noni (Rakie Ayola) appeared, their lack of chemistry to make me believe they lived their lives together or knew each other at all was a little distracting, even more so than when he and Hugh’s kooky sister were suddenly into each other.
So John Daniel and Noni (making me think of Bubble Guppies when I needed a break) are in their little butcher shop at the top of a mountain, in an area called Bear Ridge, an area that has long been abandoned by everyone else as an authoritarian regime destroys thinking and dissent and I guess electricity and mountains? I loved how the disappearing walls of their store and home reflected how they were losing everything and muddled the lines of what was real. I did not love why their slaughterman/adopted son sort, Ifan (Sion Daniel Young), who is living with them does a whole monologue about how much slaughtering suits him (vegan warning for future productions). When a soldier (Jason Hughes) comes to their door and threatens to shoot, the group somehow bonds? sometimes? Clearly driven mad by his traumatic experiences, the soldier careens between thinking of these new friends as friends and considering them the enemy. The stress of watching this powder keg of a man destined to explode was sometimes thrilling, but sometimes too stressful.
As the characters talked about their histories of trauma and what was going on with their society, it was…unclear what was going on with their society. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a vague play, where the fuzziness is just fuzzy enough to allow it to speak to each audience member in a different way, to take away from it what they need. And this play accomplished that sometimes. What struck me was the hint of a fascist regime that had destroyed their home and killed their loved ones and continues to destroy any hint of dissent. But beyond that, what was really happening? How had they survived this long? What was real? Why is it 90% monologues when there are four characters onstage? And more than anything, why weren’t they leaving? Were they not able to, or was it all to stand their ground against a regime they couldn’t fight? I understand the latter, but the steadfastness of that sort of opposition wasn’t apparent. More ‘eh we live here’ than ‘THIS IS OUR HOME.’
Despite my ever increasing desire to stand up and shout ‘wait what is really happening just fill me in rill quick’, there were aspects I appreciated. Rhys, especially in the beginning, used his words and shouting and ENDLESS words in a interesting way that showed his compulsion to prove there was still a life force in him, especially in light of the talk of ‘the old language’. Ifan, on the other hand, seemed like a steady, more true-to-life character than him or anyone else on stage, and his realism was almost like a breather.
However, there was a lot of filler, which is hard to do for a 90 minute show. For example, I didn’t think the revelation about Ifan’s relationship with John Daniel’s and Noni’s son added anything. And of course I didn’t, like, love all the talk about slaughtering. (When Noni chimes in that they always did it humanely, it was impossible for me not to have the standard argument in my head about how there’s no such thing as humane meat BUT I DIGRESS.) (Also when John Daniel says “a dog may look up at you, a cat may look down at you, but a pig will look you right in the eye and you have to respect that” I couldn’t help but begin another argument beginning with THEN HOW COULD YOU KILL HIM? But I digress.) Due to the monologue heavy script, it was exhausting to watch, and felt longer than its run time. Usually when I am exhausted watching a play, I immediately go ‘I can’t imagine how hard it is for these actors to do this every day.’ And while that is true here, I think it may have been more exhausting for us to try to a) keep up with all the subtle hints at filling in the plot gaps and try to make order out of an anarchic tonne of information thrown at us, and b) stay on track listening to endless monologues. Towards the end, it felt like walls of text thrown at us, and while they were well done and well performed, too many of them at once is, indeed, exhausting, especially when you are desperate for a solid fact.
INFORMATION
The Royal Court Theatre is wonderfully located RIGHT next to the Sloane Square tube station, which is appreciated when it rains all the time. The building itself feels less well considered since the only bathrooms are downstairs on the far side of a big busy bar area and to get there you have to push through crowds of people enjoying the bar and not even there for the show which is like WHAT NO.
Also as usual London audiences laugh at the strangest, most disturbing moments, like when the soldier admits he just saw his commander commit suicide and he is falling apart and…they laugh, and not in a nervous way, in a ‘why are London audiences so freaking weird with what they consider funny’ way. BUT I DIGRESS.
