The Haystack at the Hampstead Theatre: What Modern Theatre Wants to Beby Randi / February 11, 2020How fun does it sound to see two of Puccini’s best operas performed in the same night? Okay it sounds long. But this new production of Opera Undone does just that – generally speaking. This new joint ticket of Tosca and La Boheme gives each classic work an hour max, sharing the gist and the highlights, and while that’s not the ideal way to enjoy classic opera, it is a whole lot of fun.
Perfect for short attention spans and newcomers to opera, this show was also hugely enjoyable for someone like me, who wrote a thesis on La Boheme and knows almost every word. Not that the words mattered here: both reimagined and reformed operas are performed in English, and especially in one case lots of liberties are taken with the ‘translation.’ Purists and those with sticks up their butts about opera might not appreciate it, but it’s a joy to see opera used in a flexible, fun way.
Tosca is performed first, so you know the warnings about loud gun shots are coming in this half, unless they seriously rewrote La Boheme (which they did but not in a murdery way). I’ve seen a traditional production of Tosca before but I don’t know it well enough to notice how much the story was changed here, if it was, aside from setting the scene during like a mob boss’s reign? I think? It was definitely not during Napoleon’s time, I know that much. Tosca is about an artist named Mario, who is keeping quiet the hiding place of his political prisoner friend Angelotti, and Mario’s girlfriend Tosca, a singer and a typical nagging annoying WOMAN that men in history have written thinking they’re being funny. Obviously, this means Tosca gets jealous easily too, because that’s how the women do. When she sees Mario’s latest painting, of a woman, she’s all WHO’S THAT WHY IS SHE SO PRETTY and you’re like girl, it’s a painting. I mean he’s an Italian man living in Rome you probably have realer problems to worry about. But the evil Scarpia, the chief of police, goads her to be jealous of the painting so you know he’s the bad guy straight away. He wants to bang Tosca and kill Mario, since he’s pretty sure the latter knows where Angelotti is hiding (it’s true though), so he has Mario arrested. Tosca goes to Scarpia to beg for Mario’s life and some shit goes down from there.
In this well-reduced version, the action begins with Mario painting, and oh my god, since there’s really no set (it’s in the tiny Studio 2 at Trafalgar Studios which is a tiny dark room) and this is in the round, he puts a painting’s frame around the neck of an AUDIENCE MEMBER. This chosen audience member is then pretty involved in the action for the next 20 minutes or so as Mario and Tosca and Scarpia examine and discuss the painting. IF YOU DO NOT WANT THIS TO BE YOU, do not sit in the front rows and be a woman. Our participant didn’t seem to mind but my god my face would have burnt off from mortification-induced redness.
My Tosca this evening (it’s a rotating cast like a proper opera does), Honey Rouhani, was superb, so it’s a shame she didn’t have as much as usual to do. It seemed like Scarpia had an aria too many, and while strong, his voice began to feel grating. Maybe because he’s the bad guy and I was itching for him to get all murdered. Okay so Mario gets arrested, and Tosca goes to Scarpia and he’s like ‘I’ll let him go if we do the no-pants dance’ and Tosca’s all ughhh really ugh I mean I guess okay I gotta save Mario. Scarpia shows her a gun that he says has blanks in it, so she will have to pretend to shoot Mario and he will have to pretend to die, and then the guards will let her escape (with the body?? mmkay). I mean OBVIOUSLY YOU SHOULD TEST THE GUN FIRST, TOSCA, like shoot someone in the foot or something. Or the hand so you can run if it’s real? Shit what’s the best thing to shoot to test a gun? I mean Scarpia clearly! But she doesn’t. Once Scarpia tells her his plan for saving Mario, he then is all ‘okay it’s party time’ and she pretends to be letting him enter the bone zone but then she STABS HIM IN THE HEAD and it’s the MOST SATISFYING murder maybe of all time.
After killing a guy nbd she then goes to save Mario and tells him the plan of ‘blanks in the gun’ and OBVIOUSLY that was a lie and she kills him and then realizes it and kills herself. Yeah so Tosca is a full on murder-sui sitch. I love a good murder-sui but I’ve never seen one happen literally at my feet before – Studio 2 is a tiny little living room of a theatre and it was eek I was like ‘call the cops!’ ‘no not the regular cops!’ Anyway I enjoyed this condensed version a whole lot. There’s a lot of filler in the standard version that gets boring so I’m all in for this one.
It helps that Tosca isn’t one of my most beloved things like La Boheme is. I was nervous that they’d cut my favorite parts, which was undeniable and unavoidable because the whole thing is my favorite part. Luckily, they decided to change the story so much that it was like a whole different work, making me feel much less precious about it but still enjoying all the familiar melodies. I loved being able to compare this version to the original and noticing what clever little changes they made to allude to the original (not surprising considering how much work I’ve done comparing it to Rent). So La Boheme is about two friends, Rodolfo and Marcello, who are both poor artists. Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi, a poor young lady who has TB and is dying. Marcello has a complicated relationship with his ex-girlfriend Musetta. Just think Rent and you get the story.
Here, it was rewritten to be present day London, and Rod hears the famous knock on his door not from a girl who needs a light for her candle but from a guy who is answering Rod’s GRINDR invitation! I mean, it’s forking hilarious. The lyrics had the audience in stitches. It’s not all funny because this guy, who calls himself Mimi to keep it simple, is a drug addict whose eventual demise is from that addiction, but man do they cram in the humor. My favorite little quirk was having Marcello and Musetta (now Melissa because nobody modern is named Musetta, which is a shame, it just means little baby muse) struggle with polyamory. That’s so good. Again, Rouhani’s Melissa was the standout (luckily they included Musetta’s Waltz in this short version). The rewrites made it a lot of fun, and it was a clever modernization. Rewritten for a tenor, Mimi’s music doesn’t scratch the full itch of familiarity you (I) expect from her parts, so I was looking forward to listening to my recordings to hear the Rodolfo-Mimi sections in all their soprano-having glory. But even so, it’s a fun, cheeky version that even the old men who didn’t know what they were getting into with this show seemed to fully enjoy. I definitely recommend Opera Undone both for newbies and opera aficionados.
INFORMATION
Each act/opera is one hour and there’s a 15-minute interval. With a 19:45 (NB!) curtain, Act 1 ended at 20:48. The show ended at 22:00 EXACTLY which deserves a medal. Studio 2 is tiny and on the same floor as the Trafalgar Studios bar, which means the ladies room is very convenient.
Related Posts
Six the Musical: Divorced! Beheaded! Live! And Here to Save British Musical Theatre
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the new musical Six, playing at London’s Arts Theatre.
Longtime Laughfrodisiac readers (or people who have spoken to me in real life for more than five minutes) have heard me bitch and moan about the sorry state of British musical theatre before, and often. The only great shows for literally decades came courtesy of Andrew Lloyd Webber (and he wasn’t immune to some straight-up horseshit), and a random few from Elton John (Billy Elliot) and Tim Minchin (Matilda). Matilda premiered in 2010, so that’s almost a decade without a great new British musical. And people wonder why I always say musical theatre is better on Broadway. While that’s still true, finally, forking g-d FINALLY, a new, original, fantastic musical written by Brits has arrived. It seems what the world of British musicals needed wasn’t another old white man (honestly when has that ever been the answer), but two young Cambridge students ready to make their mark before even graduating (I know, I hate them too). Six the Musical is a girl-power retelling of the stories of Henry VIII’s six wives, a concert-style show that is fast and furious in its remarkable ability to share history through modern pop music that is funny, inspired, and absurdly catchy.
From just the tagline – “Divorced, Beheaded, Live!” playing on the famous rhyme for remembering how the wives died – I knew this was going to be fun, but I was not ready to be blown away by the brilliant music. The six wives, onstage with their all-female band, are outfitted in the coolest of costumes, a shiny modern slant on medieval garb, kind of like it’s Halloween and they decided on ‘sexy Tudor.’ They’ve gathered now to have a sort of contest, to see which of them suffered the most and ‘wins’ that dubious title of most unfortunate of the six wives, kind of like how Monica won the title of giving the best bad massages. As soon as they begin singing “Welcome to the show, to the histor-remix” I was like OH DIP (because I speak like Jason Mendoza as a rule now), WORDPLAY, this is going to be spectacular. And from that opening number, “Ex-Wives”, I was enthralled and honestly elated at how good the music was.
From the opening onward, the lyrics are clever and the music is fun and memorable. Throughout all of it, there are amazing nerdy history jokes peppered in, which, as nerds, we adored, and straight up historical lessons on things we never knew. Since English people are super nerdy about knowing and loving their history (would be cool, America!), there’s an immediate sense that everyone is sharing inside jokes, which is a surefire way to solidify audience engagement and enjoyment, and guarantee positive word of mouth. In fact, this is the first show in a while where the audience was so engaged that there wasn’t much extraneous chatter or phone use, which is a g-d miracle.
Pretty much every musical number – and since it is a concert-style show, it’s a series of musical numbers with limited dialogue in between – delivers, with the badass energy of “Ex-Wives” continuing into the first solo, Catherine of Aragon’s (Jarneia Richard-Noel) “No Way”, about how she was not about to give this jackass the annulment he wanted. “No Way” is one of the catchier songs, one I could see being played on the radio (it’s even on my running playlist). It is a forking great time and Richard-Noel has a blast with it. The girl-power vibe remains into the second wife’s solo, but in a much different way. If you know your history, you know that second wife is the most famous one, Anne Boleyn. Where Catherine #1 had self-assurance, Anne goes for cheeky and trades in on innocent-seeming adorableness to gloss over anything she may have done wrong in the funny “Don’t Lose UR Head”. Definitely the millennial character of the bunch, Boleyn (Millie O’Connell) sings how she’s “sorry not sorry bout what I said…I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, lol.” It’s a bold move to show Boleyn as a naughty young girl trying to make her actions seem cute, and I liked that even though she’s the most famous wife, she doesn’t get the most attention or development. We have more interesting wives to learn about.
Like Wife #3, Jane Seymour, or as the other wives mock her, “the only one he really loved.” To have a needed break from all the loud fast songs so far, Jane gets the slow Adele-like power ballad about her “Heart of Stone”. Natalie Paris does a fantastic job with this well-placed song and gets to really show off, while selling a convincing and honestly heartbreaking take on why she wasn’t lucky just because Henry loved her. I love that this show makes you reconsider all of your assumptions about these women. Like Wife #4, Anna of Cleves. First of all, I always thought it was Anne. Second of all, obviously liberties were taken, but I adore thinking of her as having made out like a g-d bandit after Henry divorced her. In her hilarious song, “Get Down”, Anna (a great Alexia McIntosh) says since Henry divorced her rather quickly because she wasn’t actually as hot as she looked in her profile pic (erm, oil painting), she put up with a few months of his crap until he divorced her and then she got to live like a queen for the rest of her life. Not a bad deal at all, she admits, taking herself out of the competition with her proud acknowledgement that her life post-Henry was theeee shit. And nothing is funnier and more perfect than the group number introducing Anna – “Haus Of Holbein”. In it, we learn how Henry turned to Germany for his next wife, and what better way to tell us than in a spot-on spoof of a German club anthem, absolutely hysterical and perfect.
Of course, Anna was the lucky one, and after he divorced her he was right back to treating his wives horribly. Next came Katherine Howard, my favorite of the bunch, with her incredible number “All You Wanna Do”, which has her channeling Ariana Grande while bragging about her promiscuous past in the beginning and then turning it into a devastating post-mortem on how her whole life was about being used and abused by men. Aimee Atkinson, with this show since the beginning, was the standout for me, and in one song she achieved the kind of character development most shows dream about. It doesn’t hurt that this song has some of the cleverest lyrics, and the greatest use of the phrase ‘birds and the bees’ maybe ever.
With all these truly amazing songs, it was inevitable that there would be a slight dip in quality, and that happened when we got to the sixth wife, Catherine Parr (Courtney Stapleton, on as alternate). She didn’t get to really shine as the others did, because her song is the weakest. It also ends abruptly as she decides to change their focus, so it’s not as crucial to have strengthened since it segues into a group number. And that group number is pretty moving, as the wives decide to change their perspective, and ours. Maybe instead of regarding them as being famous just because they were married to Henry, they say, maybe we should consider that hewas only famous because he was married to them. Whenever you have a show that sets out to be ‘girl-power’, it runs the risk of pandering for applause, and while they came close to that line, the way they presented this discussion saved it.
The downsides are few: For one, the sound in the Arts Theatre isn’t great. It’s a tiny almost-black box of a theatre, with acoustics that do not measure up to what a West End theatre should have. It was often hard to make out the extraordinarily clever lyrics, which is a shame, because they are extraordinarily clever. Whether it was solely due to the sound engineering or a mix of sound issues plus enunciation needs, I don’t know, but it would be wise to shore up the clarity on either front. My only other issue is that, because it is so strong, it’s a shame it’s not a full-fledged book musical. With equal focus on six different characters, you’d think they would have had trouble cutting it to a suitable length for modern audience’s attention spans. Instead, it presents the opposite situation, with an adoring audience eager for more. At 75 minutes, it’s great that it never overstays its welcome – always leave them wanting more, I guess – but it could easily take another 15 minutes, flesh out a few of the more superficial characters, and still be a breezy show. But I guess it’s best to count our lucky stars that there is nary a weak moment in this show, and that the audience was fully rapt (and off their phones, praise be) the whole time, so who am I to dare risk all that magic? Six is a joyous, provocative, inspired show and I will gladly see it again and again, which is something I have never said about a British musical.
INFORMATION
The Arts Theatre is tiny, so it is a madhouse in the lobby. The bathrooms are tiny so get in line early. This is one show where it’s fun to be super close.
The View Upstairs at the Soho: Heartfelt Yet Uneven Tribute with Potential
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is The View Upstairs, playing at London’s Soho Theatre until August 24.
The best kinds of theatre tell a story somehow relevant to today, regardless of the time period or subject matter of the show, and get the message across in nuanced, powerful ways. In The View Upstairs, Max Vernon’s 2017 musical about the LGBTQ+ community, they’re getting a lot right, but there’s room for improvement. They’ve got the emotion, the politics, the lofty goals of what they want the end product to do, and a game and talented cast, but the nuance and art of it need work to make the show as a whole sing. With all that emotional honesty at the ready, the show has the potential to be great with some focus on fixing the weak spots.
Going into this production, the European premiere of Vernon’s musical that played off-Broadway in 2017, I didn’t know what it was about. I didn’t even know it was a musical (best kind of surprise you could ever gift me, universe), and I definitely didn’t know it was about the 1973 New Orleans arson attack on a gay bar called the UpStairs, the biggest, deadliest attack on the queer community until Pulse. If you read that and thought ‘they made that horrible depressing story a musical?’ then you don’t know the power of musical theatre to tell any and every kind of story. The musical treatment feels right for this intimate, heartfelt play, with it becoming overall a lovely tribute to the victims. However, it wasn’t cohesive enough as a whole to be truly great theatre just yet. I feel like if they were willing to make some changes at this stage (preview period baby!), it can be.
Roughly, the story is about a 2019 fab-u-lous young influencer named Wes (a fabulous Tyrone Huntley, like wow you are a star and must be exhausted) who is trying to redefine and grow his brand by buying an abandoned building in New Orleans, the future home to his clothing line/influencing products I don’t know I don’t understand instagram. The realtor explains that some of the damage is the result of a fire, obviously the Chekhov’s gun of realtor comments even if you didn’t know what the show was about. I was like OH SHIT OH SHIT WE’RE GONNA SEE THE FIRE I HATE FIRE AHHH WHERE ARE THE EXITS. Wes sings the best song in the show, “#HouseholdName (I’m sorry the # is in the name I have to do it), does some drogas, and suddenly is in 1973, his building now (/then) a fun semi-secret gay bar filled with all sorts of characters. He’s a little confused – is he tripping? is he time-travelling? (Mantzoukas voice:) what’s going ON?! – but quickly rolls with whatever’s happening. His rolling with the punches/homies is uneven, because he doesn’t seem to ask any questions or do a ‘wait, what?’ moment, which is fine I guess, but then later in the show Wes begins a song with a lyric about how he’s been freaking out all night trying to figure out what’s happening and I was like, um no you haven’t? you were just kind of immediately cool with this?
The cast of characters Wes drops in on in 1973 are enjoying the UpStairs bar, a place where they can be themselves without worrying (too much) about the outside world. There’s Buddy (John Partridge), the lounge’s piano player (who reminded me so much of some old-timey musician but also of Jack Skellington), a closeted gay man with a wife and family whose resentment comes out to hurt everyone and not just himself, but for some reason no one seems to mind what an asshole he is. They mind that Dale (Declan Bennett), a clearly troubled man who needs help, is an asshole, but is he that much more of an asshole than Buddy? His song was really moving; I just wish it (and others) weren’t set up so clunkily.
The talented cast all get some moments to shine, some more than others, but some are miscast or mistreated. A standout for me was Cedric Neal’s Willie, who gets the perfect balanced role of making both funny and poignant comments while showing off his ridiculous voice. I loved Carly Mercedes Dyer as Henri, always reliable for belting her face off, but it was strange that she didn’t get a solo but Freddy’s mother had two?? I mean wtf. I loved Victoria Hamilton-Barritt in In the Heights, but her Puerto Rican accent did not work here, and the Ines character, mother of Freddy, has two too many songs. They bring the action to a screeching halt. Also, she looks at oldest in her early 30s, so casting her as the mother of someone who looks…also in his early 30s is beyond ridiculous. Yes yes actors should be able to play whoever and whatever they want (just ask ScarJo) but if you want to portray the emotional beats of a mother and son, they shouldn’t look like man + little sister who just came from church.
But the most disappointing part is how the pivotal role of Patrick is treated. Andy Mientus has come over from the great broad way to teach us how it’s done over here, and while he himself is fantastic as always, Patrick is not fleshed out as much as the role should be. First of all, Andy, one of the best musical theatre performers of his type right now, is given the two worst songs to sing. They do nothing to show off his voice; they kind of feel like first drafts. The second song was so close to being strong but it was clearly in the wrong key, and like, minor? Make it major and it would improve exponentially without hurting the song’s message. As for his character, Patrick seems like all the other ‘70s people, living their normal lives when Wes just drops in on them. But at the end, he acts like he’s been some sort of narrator or leader to Wes like forking Cuba Gooding Jr. in What Dreams May Come. But he wasn’t! But make him one! It would be so interesting (and really help with cohesiveness) if there was this constant thread of Patrick as narrator or guide. His talking to Wes at the end makes no sense (especially his big joke line about being ‘f-ing magical’, though funny) unless the character is retooled throughout the body of the show to actually be f-ing magical, some sort of guide through this memory.
Although I wanted to ignore any problems and focus on how important this story was, the problems are too obvious. The transitions between dialogue and songs feel very amateur and clunky, with a lot of spoken moments between characters that might as well have set up the next song like, “here, let me sing about what I mean.” It diminishes the flow of the story and the character development to set it up that way. It kind of felt like Working. It shouldn’t.
One more problem I had was the contrast they kept trying to force between the community in the ‘70s versus today. There are sooo many compelling differences to discuss, yet the focus seemed to be on how people today are vapid attention whores who just want influence online and strong branding, at the expense of real relationships and love, and that the gay community is purely and coldly transactional. That’s true for Wes, clearly, but I don’t see that as true for many people today. Yes, many spend lots of time forging internet presences, but most of them also have real lives, so that’s not a universal problem and shouldn’t be treated as one. I mean maybe the message of the importance of community is just meant for like YouTube stars who go to see it but I doubt that. It would be stronger if it focused more on Wes’s personal struggle instead of trying to blame an entire generation for the bad parts of the internet.
This feels like an opportune time to point out one of Laughfrodisiac’s favorite – and defining – movie quotes:
I’ve shared a lot of not-nice thoughts about this new musical but only because it’s all there, all the groundwork, all the emotion, all the heart they need to make it magical. (Now I need to quote Cuba: ‘I’M ALL HEART MUFUCKA!’) With a bit of work it can be great.
INFORMATION
During early previews, the show ran 2 hours straight through, no interval. There were several moments were it would have been fine to break the show and have an interval, which is highly recommended so other people don’t get UTIs. Also, not worrying about keeping it to one act could let more transitions be fleshed out fully.
STAGE DOOR
The Soho doesn’t really allow for regular stage-dooring, so you just wait outside the main entrance (as of now) for actors who want to come out from the lobby bar to come out. Cedric Neal came out first and was incredibly lovely and amazing, followed by Mientus who was also really nice. I left before anyone else came out. I think they were all hanging in the bar so if you are cool and at ease in bars you could just stick around in there.
