Voting with Your Dollar: Things Making Me Mad Againby Randi / September 27, 2019Appropriate at the Donmar: So Much to Work With, So Much that Doesn’t Work
Today’s show is Appropriate, playing at the Donmar Warehouse until October 5.
In the week leading up to our performance of Appropriate, husbo and I were debating the pronunciation of the title: Was it “appropriate” like when something is or is not proper? Or was it “appropri-ATE”, like what white people with dreadlocks do to a culture that isn’t theirs? Is it both?! Both would be amazing. We were pumped. Sadly, our intrigue over the title was more exciting than the actual play.
While the show does somewhat engage both meanings of the word, Appropriate puts a lot of interesting feelers out there regarding racism and prejudice and how modern-day Americans deal with their history and their present relationships with bigotry and what’s proper and what’s not – but fails to deliver real meaningful conversation about any of it. We have a family drama (a very classic-feeling one in many ways, largely because the playwright ‘stole’ (his words!) bits from all the classic American plays) of a pretty shittastic family convening at their deceased patriarch’s plantation home before it goes to auction, and, as expected, ghosts (and ghost-like hoods) from the family’s history are dug up, as are interpersonal issues between the remaining relatives and their own prejudices.
The plot centers on the three grown children of the patriarch, Franz (a total fuck-up former child rapist??) ( played by Edward Hogg), Bo (who seems semi normal) (played by Steven Mackintosh), and Toni (Jean-Ralphio was really singing about her and not his sister – she is THE WORST) (played by Monica Dolan), and their families. When a book of horrifying old photographs – of black people being lynched – are found, reactions vary. Most want to sell the photos to pay off the father’s lingering debts. Some characters just want to hide them from their kids. The struggle over what to do with the pictures reflects the larger struggle among the family of whether they trust each other (they do not) and of what these pictures mean for them, for their memories of their father, and whether they care.
Toni, she doesn’t care. Toni sucks. I can’t BELIEVE that they got the character of Toni to suck even more than the character who literally was a child rapist. Dolan starts off the show pitched at an 11 on a scale of 1-10 so she has nowhere to go and no choice but to stay at an 11, just screaming at the same level of intensity so you never really care about anything she says and can too easily ignore her. You wait and wait for this main character to explain in an impassioned climactic reveal the reason why she is such a g-d bitch to everyone and why she doesn’t care that her father was a klan member, or why she’s cool with her teenage son using racist language, or why she hates everyone in her family especially her brother’s Jew wife (this is a phrase that is used), aside from the obvious reason of ‘she’s also a bigot’, but instead, her big climactic reveal is that she’s sad (but in a loud way) because there’s no one left in the world who held her as a baby. Fuck you, lady. That’s most people. And that’s not a good enough excuse to be a racist piece of shit. In fact, nothing in the play helped give the characters enough reason to act as they do, in all their variously bigoted ways.
And that might be the most brilliant part of the play – how realistically shitty it made its characters, how realistic it is that Toni would be racist like her father and that her teenage son would be too, and that when they use racist language no one would be around to hear them and Toni wouldn’t think anything of it. But there’s so much that feels close to powerful that stops short. There’s so much that could be said about dealing with the father’s racist history, but instead there’s a lot of bickering among siblings. Which is again, realistic, but the less interesting choice.
The playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is relatively young man whose works are already regarded as modern American classics. He’s African-American, so we know that his decisions about how to discuss racism were carefully and precisely made. But, I honestly think that more than any other show I’ve ever seen in London, this one can be too heavily influenced by its audience. During the entire last third, the elephant in the room, at least for me, is that no one in the all-white family at any point says ‘maybe we shouldn’t be profiting off of black suffering again,’ off of black people’s trauma that their family caused. It seems like the family fails to say this precisely because they are so terrible and because their whiteness blinds them from this realization. And I believe that’s kind of what BJJ was going for, the power of what he doesn’t show or tell, but I think the mostly-white London audience would have to be in on the joke for that to work here, and they are really, really not. It seems like a vital point that he left unsaid, assuming that decent people would find the omission flagrant, but maybe there aren’t as many decent people as he thinks.
And along the same lines, I hope, I really hope, that he wanted audiences to find the same problems with how the play and the characters treat Jews, but I fear that I’m misplacing this hope. AS USUAL, London audiences react in really troubling ways to anything about Jewishness. Bo’s wife, Rachael (played by Jaimi Barbakoff) – a character that Ben Brantley called “defensively Jewish” in 2014 even though a) that’s not apparent and b) that’s not a thing? would you say that about a black person? (Brantley is such an ass) – tells Toni the father did not like her because she was Jewish. Although this sheds more light on the father’s definite racism, our audience dismisses it, agreeing with Toni that this Jew doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say, instead of realizing for themselves that this is A Bad Take. I’ve shared frequently over the years how troublingly London audiences react to anything Jewish in plays – like when they laughed really hard in Caroline, or Change, when Caroline tells her young Jewish charge that he will burn in hell (they did not laugh like that in NYC (because it’s…not funny)) – and this was another doozy. When Toni calls Rachael a slur, when Toni dismisses Rachael’s valid concerns about her father, saying he didn’t like her not because she’s a Jew but because she’s an annoying person – all of this made our audience side with Toni, who is the wrong person to side with. I doubt BJJ expected this, or at least I hope he didn’t mean for it. When Toni and Rachael fight, the audience’s hate of Rachael was palpable. In fact, in other reviews I’ve seen, most are calling Rachael the most unlikable character, which blows my mind. Did they SEE the others? If BJJ was trying to get the audience to realize for themselves how the family should be refusing to profit off of black suffering again, and if he similarly wanted the audience to identify on their own that the anti-Semitism of the characters was wrong, it did not work.
I was truly disturbed for most of this play, and not in the good way that drama should disturb your comfort. I was mostly unsettled by the people around me, who seemed to be getting a way different message from the play than I was, one that was super troubling especially in today’s very racist times. And then I was troubled that maybe they were getting exactly what was intended after all, and that I maybe expected equality that wasn’t there.
The best parts were Isabella Pappas’s performance as Rachael’s young daughter, since she is an astoundingly natural performer, and at the end when Bo and Franz awkwardly say goodbye and then don’t know what to do so they shake hands, and immediately in my head I heard Chris Farley’s Tommy Boy say “Brothers don’t shake hands! Brothers hug!!!” and laughed hysterically.
INFORMATION
Appropriate plays the Donmar Warehouse in London until October 5.
The first act is only 50 minutes so the second act is way too long, about an hour and a quarter.
You’ve already heard how forked up our audience was and judging from my entire theatre-going experience in London, it was not a fluke. But what’s more, five phones went off during the final scenes.
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West End’s Cabaret Revival Pretty Wonderful, Though Not As Life-Changing As They Say
It’s Theatre Thursday! I lost track of days again! What is time! Today’s show is the new production of Cabaret at London’s Playhouse Theatre, which marketing and publicity says has been renamed The Kit Kat Club, but unless that name lasts beyond this production it doesn’t really count. You know the Playhouse, it’s the one just past the Enbankment arches where there’s a Subway I actually ate at once.
London’s latest version of Cabaret is the hottest ticket in town, and with dern good reason. With Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, the star power is out the wazoo and ticket prices have reflected that. It’s the most expensive show the West End has seen in a while, with little way around it. And while it is indeed a wonderful production with some great performances, it is not as life-changing or once-in-a-generation or sell-your-soul-to-see-this as some critics have fallen over themselves to proclaim. If you’ve seen a strong production of Cabaret in your life (which is likely, considering how prolific productions have been for so many decades and how strong the bones of the show are to lend itself to strong productions even without this star power), this one won’t be much different, so do not sell your soul. If you do have a ticket though, well, splendid.
Cabaret, as you know, tells the story of Sally Bowles, an unsteady but effervescent English cabaret performer in a seedy Berlin nightclub just as the Nazis rise to power. Threaded through the story of Sally and her new American writer beau and the world they’re in are scenes from the cabaret, led by an unsettling-sexy-scary-phantasm type jawn whose scenes when well-directed (which they are here) can Mean More than They Seem.
Although no one is talking about it, I was extra curious/anxious to see this show again after the recent controversy over Rare Earth Mettle, Jewish casting, and general treatment of Jewishness in London theatre. Cabaret was written by Jews and is literally about Nazis taking over and German Jews getting a glimpse of what’s to come, but some productions feel like they are taking that into account more than others in a certain ineffable way. The last Broadway revival had a vibe running through it like it acknowledged it was by and somewhat about Jews, even though it’s About an English gentile girl. This one does not, although the performance of Schultz (Elliot Levey) is very good. I think this comes back down to the difference between theatre in New York vs. London which I’ve written about a lot and don’t feel like doing today.
There are three big selling points of this production: First, the theatre itself. Yes, it has been transformed from the minute you walk in the door, which is about 20 minutes later than you thought you would because it takes motherforking forever to be let in. This is because, fortunately, staff is checking for negative LFTs (and haven’t even half the swiftness of Broadway staffers in checking patron by patron) and also, unfortunately, they are clearly slowing down the inflow of people because it’s super crowded inside, and also, fortunately, everyone who enters gets a free drink from one single bartender per route of entry (just like who designed this system guys) (oh you get either a beer, a tiny thimble of Schnapps, or a bottle of water. pretty cool). The frustration of waiting out in the cold for so long despite your ticketed ‘entry time’ being 39 minutes ago quickly fades when you enter the completely reimagined space, which has shadowy figures hither and yon playing instruments, ‘dancing’, and generally creating the vibe of a seedy old German club, I mean, I’m guessing. While it’s fun to look around and become immersed in the experience before the show begins, I’m not a huuuge fan of seedy underground clubs, or clubs in general, and I’m really not a fan of milling about with hundos of unmasked jackwagons. So, while it was cool, this whole shibang wasn’t as mind-blowingly amaaaz as everyone says. That’s just me that’s just me; everyone else was totally oohing and ahhing at the scantily clad writhers scattered about.
More importantly: the second and third selling points of this show, the two stars. Eddie Redmayne is as good as they say. He’s doing this weird hunchback-of-Notre-Dame meets sickly-Victorian-boy meets haunted-marionette thing that really works for the Emcee. His approach was different enough from the legendary Alan Cumming performance I feel like I just saw on Broadway, so there weren’t many reasons to compare the two, I think fortunately. Cumming does have that unabashed unhindered and almost uncomfortably high awareness of sexuality though, like oozing out his pores, and Eddie does not, so that makes the sessual bits (like “Two Ladies”) feel a bit awks, a bit mismatched. But he sounds great and he’s so fully committed to this pretty insane role.
The real star for me is Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. At first I was left a little wanting when her opening number, “Don’t Tell Mama”, was more spoken than sung, which is a peeve of mine, but with every minute she keeps leveling up. Her first scene with Cliff, with all the Britishisms about what ‘one does’ and all was pitch perfect and reached new levels of hilarity that I never really got before. Her instability and her sense of self are clear without being annoying. She keeps building this character and its anxieties and fears throughout the show so that her final swansong of “Cabaret” was shockingly strong and completely untethered. Husbo thought it was a little too unhinged, but I loved it. Buckley wholly nails that vibe of Sally being a manic pixie girl but in a nightmare instead of a dream. She is wonderful.
The supporting cast is strong too, with the side plot between Fraulein Schneider (Liza Sadovy) and Herr Schultz carrying the day, in large part due to the power of Sadovy’s numbers. I like Omari Douglas but felt he was miscast as Cliff here, perhaps because he was the one onstage I could tell was capital-A Acting. But my criticisms are small, really. This production is so well directed that there are still parts that are creeping up on me, like how Eddie is dressed up as a Halloween-ish depiction of death conducting the cast during the Act I closer ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, get it, because it did? you get it. It’s always interesting to see how they can make yet another production of this oft-performed classic feel warranted, and this one was. More than anything though, it cemented that these two stars are motherforking Stars that I hope continue in theatre for a long time.
INFORMATION
Strongly recommend sitting up the dress circle. It’s cheaper (somewhat) and easier to get to the bathrooms. The first act is LONG, like an hour 40? The second is an hour.
No one wears masks because they are drinking the whole time. The assholes next to us had bottles of wine and whenever they would refill their glasses, they would cheers and clink their glasses. We were close to screaming but they always chose their moments to prevent this, like doing it at the emotional climax of ‘Maybe This Time’. I FORKING HATE YOU. A lot of people in the cabaret tables up front were obviously there to be seen, in a pathetic but unavoidable in the social media age way. There was this girl sitting right in front in like a silver and white Sexy Baby costume who was gasping and clutching her throat the whole time in wonderment so fake and performative, it was plainly a 2 1/2 hour audition for her. I hope she gets the attention she so badly craves. Anyway what I’m saying is it was a bad audience but WHATEVER.
I Can’t Believe Back to the Future Won the Olivier
The omission of Einstein isn’t even the worst part.
A good musical justifies the use of music — it should be an important component of the show that helps to tell the story better. And the creators’ answer to the necessary question of ‘what purpose does the music serve?’ cannot be simply ‘to make the show a musical’. I feel like this fact is why UK musical theatre is not taken as seriously as it is in NYC – because if you’re adding music just for the sake of adding music, which seems to be sooo ofteeennn theee caaaase, and not so the music actually serves a purpose, it’s not going to be good, it’s not respecting the art form.
To justify musicalizing a movie, you need to answer the above AND be able to offer something to the question of ‘why don’t I just watch the movie instead?’ Even with ‘Mean Girls’ on Broadway, which was heavily not great and obviously unedited and needed at least 20 minutes cut from each act which were chock full of similar sounding songs…okay I’ll stop since this isn’t about Mean Girls but anyway, even there, it was able to justify its stage existence through some great characterizations (everything Kate Rockwell did, Taylor Louderman’s existence) and hilarious lines (everything Grey Henson said), and it justified being a musical with some actually good songs that served the story and characters well (World Burn, Meet the Plastics, a few more). Even though 7 songs were carbon copies that served no purpose, overall it justified its existence as a separate entity from the movie.
Why am I talking about ‘Mean Girls’? Because despite its flaws, it was able to answer the two questions above. ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’, which somehow (f-ing London) won the OLIVIER, was not. With its lackluster score full of cliched lyrics, it reminded me more of the stage adaptation of ‘Pretty Woman‘, and we all remember how that trainwreck was.
I really wanted to love this, and I waited so long, throughout many months away, to see Roger Bart, who I adore, as Doc. But I thought it was quite obviously unedited for a supposedly finished product. The score comprises hackneyed lyrics and no original melodies. And Roger is – I’m sure directed to be – going way too overboard in going overbroad. It’s the kind of performance that breaks the 4th wall for no good reason, where he’ll stick his tongue out to the audience and the drunk of their ass audience CHEERS for it, where he stops a song and asks the ensemble dancers who they are and tells them to get out of his house. I guess I just don’t get that kind of unearned hackneyed comedy. It feels very British and despite my passport that’s not me! He had some good moments but it’s all TOO MUCH. In that regard, most of the humor felt very lowest common denominator, which British audiences seem to always adore, possibly stemming from their expectations of panto-vibes at regular musicals.
While the rest of the audience was going gaga for it and everyone seems to absolutely ADORE it and that’s wonderful for y’all and so who cares what I think, I was disappointed. I felt BTTF really needed a run-through with a dramaturg, as so many shows do but for some reason never get. (As always, I volunteer as tribute to do this, as well as to catch things like when people say ‘asbest-TOSS’ when trying to do American accents. (We use a schwa on the ‘tos’.)) I’m sure that someone watching with a critical eye would have, on the very first run-through, cut Jennifer’s first song (did absolutely nothing and with only platitudes for lyrics) and the painful “my myopia is my utopia” song that George sings in the tree. Also it’s weird that George has more songs than Doc! Maybe if Doc had more genuine work to do, they wouldn’t have had to pad his part with super strange hamming for cheap audience laughs. The new thread of him feeling sad and emo about his dreams felt unearned and unnecessary. Guy KNOWS that he built a WORKING TIME MACHINE.
I’ll give it this: it looked amazing. The special effects and projections are great, as is the all-important car — indeed the best part is the car’s special little ending. Actually, the best part is that Olly Dobson sounds EXACTLY like Michael J. Fox. It’s truly uncanny. The cast is working hard and largely charming, led by Olly. The energy of the group numbers is great, and that energy lifts this show out of its drecky basement for a short bit, like in the hey mama welcome to the ’50s song. (We had the short-lived hope that that this song would commence a flip of the tone of the show to be more sardonic commentary in line with the lyrics, but alas, it was not to be. That would have been interesting!) The ’50s girl-group sounding songs Lorraine sings, and even Biff’s song, were decent, reflecting the sound of the era, which could have been a great way to steer and coalesce the score in general. Mayor Wilson’s song and Bart’s opening number for Act II were also fine, totally made by the performers’ energy, but still sounded like early drafts of songs that could/should have been better.
The rest of the songs were either full of hackneyed lines that made me cringe or were simply unnecessary to build the characters or propel the story. The book was equally painful, and that’s after you account for the fact that the source material is essentially about a “17-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist (“and they never explain it! and this guy’s either 40 or 80, even we don’t know how old this guy’s supposed to be!”) who goes back in time and (“and he stops the Kennedy assassination?” “oh that would have been a good idea!”) and tries to f*ck his mom. We thought that’d be fun for people! But he doesn’t get to, he doesn’t get to, because this family friend Biff tries to rape the mom in front of the son, then the dad’s gotta beat the rapist off of her, and also we’re gonna imply that a white man wrote Johnny Be Good so we’re gonna take that away from them!” Even aside from all that, and the idea of time travel, the musical book manages to do its own damage and show the awkwardness of the base story even more starkly, mostly via LCD humor and about 20 minutes of extraneous bloat in each act. (Seriously, it should not be this long.) And the placement of “Power of Love” vs. in the movie doesn’t work.
Overall, the only evident answer to the question of ‘why is this a musical?’ seems to be ‘to make a big spectacle musical that rakes in cash’ (seriously, the tickets are insanely priced, like Broadway-style insanity). With such a trite score and scene after scene that doesn’t pass the smell test and the best part being that Olly sounds just like Michael J. Fox, the answer to ‘why shouldn’t I just watch the movie instead?’ is, actually you should.
OH! I almost forgot the ‘best’ part, but never can because it’s seared into my memory along with the endless list of London shows with unnecessary Jewish jokes that had nothing to do with the story and where the audience laughed in a way that felt predatory: When Lorraine thought Marty’s name was Calvin Klein, one of her girlfriends said “is that Jewish?” as they walked offstage, and the audience laughed! Because that’s a funny joke! I honestly thought that maybe ONE show in this town wouldn’t have a discomfiting Jewish joke and even more discomfiting audience reaction but serves me right for thinking that.
INFORMATION
Start; 19:35
Act I ends: 20:46
Act II ends: 22:12
Actually that’s when the curtain call ended and I left to pee, but they sing more songs so that everyone is up and dancing and leaves happy, so who knows how long that went on for.
Literally the worst, drunkest, most on-their-phones-and-talking-to-each-other audience I’ve maybe ever encountered.
1 Comment
They sound like Trump supporters!
Funny that this blog is about racism because today at synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, our Rabbi was going to give a sermon about the movie Yesterday, posing the question “what if you woke up and there wasn’t Judaism?’ Or He was bringing back his Hamilton service which is having its Philly run.. cause more people would have seen it. But, he felt he had to go with “anti-semitism” and rightly so.
WHAT A WORLD
Great blog! ❤️