My Mixed Day at MTFest: The Assassination of Katie Hopkins & Soapdishby Randi / February 20, 2020The Wedding Singer & London Theatre’s Jewish Problem
London theatre has a Jewish problem. Whether the fault of creative teams, prejudice in the community and thus audiences, or a mix of both (it’s both), there’s an obvious ‘othering’ happening that feels offensive and demoralizing. Suffice it to say, I’m tired. Ain’t you tired Miss Hilly? I recently saw The Wedding Singer – a show I loved when I saw it on Broadway – and had to leave at the interval. I NEVER do that. (Okay, once.) (I mean one other time; this isn’t a Simpsons thing.) I felt ridiculed and ridiculous, with everyone around me in on a joke that is not funny. And I realized that this problem that I’ve been noticing in tiny bits and pieces is larger than I wanted to believe.
As we saw with last season’s Falsettos debacle, many productions fail to make a concerted effort to ensure that Jewish voices are involved with Jewish content. Not to start playing an unwinnable battle of the minorities, but you would never see a production of e.g. The Normal Heart without gay men involved, or The Inheritance. Or Falsettos! And this isn’t only about the acting talent, because yes, it’s the job of actors to play other identities, like Scarlett Johansson and her tree. It’s about having representation in the creative process, whether onstage or off, someone in the room to speak up, to ensure that representation onstage isn’t problematic or insulting. I didn’t support last season’s Falsettos by seeing it, but according to some people who did go, it was indeed insulting.
If it was anything like the Bar Mitzvah scene of The Wedding Singer, I’m glad I didn’t go. In this show, based on the great Adam Sandler movie, the lead needs a break from singing at weddings, and the scene changes to a Bar Mitzvah. It’s semi-funny in the movie because of Sandler and the content of the scene. But here, presenting the scene of a Bar Mitzvah was the joke in itself. As soon as men dressed in traditional Hasidic black suits and vests and hats come out, the audience roars. It doesn’t matter whether it’s funny that Robbie now has to change his act or do things he’s not used to doing – the joke was clearly Judaism. You could barely hear the lines or music because the audience was laughing at the pure visuals of Jewish men in their suits and payot (yes, they wore fake payot). That was the punch line. I felt my entire body burning with anger, as well as shame. And it got worse: the feature of this new act was Robbie’s queer keyboardist (I could write a whole nother piece on how offensively homophobic the direction around this character and everything else slightly queer was and how it was used for weird cheap laughs (and this was hundo p a right-wing crowd laughing at not with)) singing Hebrew prayers to the tune of an ’80s song.
I don’t remember whether this is done in the movie or the original production, but even if it was, it does not go over well here. Comedy has different effects on different crowds and communities, and you can tell when it’s good natured. Here, it is pure mockery of the sound of the Hebrew language and prayers, amid the sheer look of Jewish people as a punch line. In the movie, Sandler is a known Jewish performer whose comedy has the ability to poke good-natured fun at his culture. Here, it wasn’t good-natured, it was ridicule, and the laughter around me was based in contempt, which is why I left. (The production isn’t very good so I wasn’t heartbroken to leave – the pacing is about twice as slow as it should be, like the directorial metronome is broken, which makes all the actually good parts of the show fail.) Also, just because something plays appropriately in New York does not mean it will here. You have to be cognizant of the differences in the communities. In a Broadway theatre, you’re surrounded by Jews, and Jewishness is part of New York culture, especially in the theatre. In the UK, Jews are still considered rare, outsiders, and blamed for all sorts of things (like Labour losing). And there aren’t that many. In London, I was for sure the only Jewish person in the audience at my performance of Wedding Singer, and I wasn’t even surprised. Productions have to be aware of how something will play in different places and think about whether it works or not.
Falsettos wasn’t the start to the problem, and clearly not the end. I’ve noticed this in many shows over the past few years, and I’m new. The last production of Caroline, or Change was my first shocking moment. There’s a line in the show where Caroline says to her young Jewish charge that his people burn in hell. On Broadway, this line was met with a kind of hushed “oh shit” reaction, like wow that was dark, and cruel. In London, it was met with a hearty chuckle. Not a nervous laugh, a real laugh. If that doesn’t show how differently the same thing can play in the two cities and how important it is to make sure you have someone in the room (Caroline had no Jews) to account for potential offensive representation, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Recent (and great) productions like Rags at the Park Theatre and Leopoldstadt (review next week) at Wyndham’s are promising in their inclusivity and representation, although the latter still had a few very strange moments of laughter when I saw it. I am still continually surprised at what London audiences will laugh at. And yesI have a different sense of humor as an American, but sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes the laughter is quite troubling (like in Caroline and parts of Appropriate). We know that anti-Semitism is just as strong as ever in this country (and around the world), and that’s something to be aware of when you are creating art that involved Jews or Jewishness. My horror at The Wedding Singer may seem misplaced or overblown to you, but that show’s missteps are symptoms of a much larger problem in British theatre and the country itself.
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LIES at the Almeida: Like ‘The Big Short’ But I’m Christian Bale
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about Ontroerend Goed’s interactive theatrical play LIES, which played London’s Almeida Theatre this summer.
Capitalism is the devil, right? Down with capitalism? And down with big too-big-to-fail banks and fake money scams that don’t make any sense but that our entire global economy depends on, right? Yes, right, unless you’re the one making that money. Then your clear moral vision gets a little cloudy and it gets harder to say ‘no stop all of these terrible things that are destroying the world!’ because you’re too busy making like Mona Lisa Saperstein and saying “MONEY, PLEEEEEASE”. At least this is the moral of the story at LIES, the interactive theatre experience that ran at London’s Almeida Theatre until last Saturday (sorriessss all that cash has destroyed my ability to care that y’all missed it).
You can’t really call it a play, but LIES (which is stylized with currency symbols as you can see in the photo but I can’t really do on my computer without taking a few minutes of effort, which I don’t want to do anymore because again moneycashdontcare) is a powerful, intense, truly immersive theatrical event like nothing has ever been immersive before. The latest work from Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed (and no I don’t know how to pronounce that but I’m going to say it’s…phonetically?) to play in London, LIES attempts to show how volatile the financial world is, yes, but also how artificial it all is. Alexander Devriendt, the artistic director of the OG collective (it’s just easier), explains in his programme note that his journey into the financial world revealed endless ‘magic tricks’, an entire global system of functioning that relies on absolutely nothing of substance. It’s all pixels on screens, he said, all the money we use and trade and owe, and nothing refers to anything real like the pile of gold of the past or something. Devriendt cites a philosopher who once said that “if everybody would know what money is, a revolution would break out.”
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
“Peter Pan Live!”: Could Have Fooled Me, NBC
Watch this instead
This may be totally over as a conversation by now but a) I am not in America and b) I couldn’t get through this in one sitting.
Big takeaway: Peter Pan is a weird ass show. If people came into the NBC musical broadcast without having a background in the story, they would deem it the stuff of nightmares. Mostly the nightmares of people who are against problematic gender norms, pedophilia, kidnapping, and weird sexual relationships. Considering that these live musicals are chosen to appeal to families – i.e. children – I’m sure that this production was indeed the first exposure to Pan for a big portion of the audience. This realization isn’t so much sad as f-ing nuts. Can you imagine seeing this broadcast without having a foundation in the story to protect your soul? Nightmares.
Big takeaway: Peter Pan is a weird ass show. If people came into the NBC musical broadcast without having a background in the story, they would deem it the stuff of nightmares. Mostly the nightmares of people who are against problematic gender norms, pedophilia, kidnapping, and weird sexual relationships. Considering that these live musicals are chosen to appeal to families – i.e. children – I’m sure that this production was indeed the first exposure to Pan for a big portion of the audience. This realization isn’t so much sad as f-ing nuts. Can you imagine seeing this broadcast without having a foundation in the story to protect your soul? Nightmares.
Peter Pan, based on this travesty from NBC, is about a rebellious girl who can fly between worlds. You know she is rebellious because she has short hair, ugly clothing, and a lack of emotion despite a constant smile. This rebel kidnaps two little boys and their inappropriately dressed older aunt and takes them to a modern version of the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka. Although the little boys have a lovely mother with the most beautiful voice ever (and I guess the aunt has such a sister?), their dad is a jackwagon so you’re okay with them getting some air for a while.
One of the boys wears a top hat. All the time. Even at bedtime. Even while flying. The other boy, no doubt scarred by his emotionally unavailable father, can’t think of any happy thoughts except for candy, setting him up for serious dental problems later in life, if not the ‘betus itself.
These three Darling people are tended to by Nana, a big fluffy dog who is smart enough to sense danger and protect her human siblings. Whyyy is the musical not about Nana? One of life’s unanswered questions. That dog is wicked smaht.
Peter Pan and his twinkling ball of light, which we are supposed to accept as a fairy even though we’ve seen full-bodied fairies like Stanley Tucci in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and all over New York, teach dear old aunt Wendy and the two boys how to fly, or really how to jerk around panicked and gracelessly when hoisted by very visible wires. Seeing the wires doesn’t bother me as much as everyone’s inability to fly without appearing to have constipation-induced seizures. Why are they so awkward? Did anyone teach them how to do the flying bits? Did they even have a chance to practice flying around before the live show? It doesn’t seem like it. They should have just done all CGI flying if it was going to be this bad.
In very little time at all, thanks to dear old Aunt Wendy’s breathlessness and fluttery eyes, we realize that this is actually a love story between Peter and Wendy, making J. M. Barrie’s tale perhaps the first lesbian fairy tale. But why does Peter, ostensibly a 25-year-old girl, need a 28-year-old girl to tuck her and her male followers in at night? It’s very creepy. But the story is quite progressive: Not only are Peter and Wendy lesbian lovers, but they are in an interspecies love triangle with a jealous ball of light. Wow. Much progress.
So the littlest boy, Michael, starts out as adorable before gradually getting more and more annoying. During the adorable phase, he grabs his teddy bear before flying off to Neverland. That is cute. What’s not cute is what would actually happen to the humans if they flew unprotected by spacesuits between freaking realms. Skin melting and stuff. That might be more entertaining though. This shit be dull. Peter/Allison Williams seems too embarrassed to fully commit to the role as lead lesbian lover. Gotta get over that before the second show.
Commercial break: Cool, a Wal-mart commercial with Melissa Joan Hart and I’m guessing her actual family of husband and three boy children who are playing with a toy fairy. It’s cute until the husband person says “I’m pretending it’s a helicopter.” That’s a cool message to send to all young boys, Wal-Mart, that to be male you can’t play with pretty colored toys or fairies unless you pretend it’s something MACHINE and MANLY. Cool. Outdated gender roles are the coolest. This is a good place to share one of my favorite infographics:
One of the boys wears a top hat. All the time. Even at bedtime. Even while flying. The other boy, no doubt scarred by his emotionally unavailable father, can’t think of any happy thoughts except for candy, setting him up for serious dental problems later in life, if not the ‘betus itself.
These three Darling people are tended to by Nana, a big fluffy dog who is smart enough to sense danger and protect her human siblings. Whyyy is the musical not about Nana? One of life’s unanswered questions. That dog is wicked smaht.
Peter Pan and his twinkling ball of light, which we are supposed to accept as a fairy even though we’ve seen full-bodied fairies like Stanley Tucci in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and all over New York, teach dear old aunt Wendy and the two boys how to fly, or really how to jerk around panicked and gracelessly when hoisted by very visible wires. Seeing the wires doesn’t bother me as much as everyone’s inability to fly without appearing to have constipation-induced seizures. Why are they so awkward? Did anyone teach them how to do the flying bits? Did they even have a chance to practice flying around before the live show? It doesn’t seem like it. They should have just done all CGI flying if it was going to be this bad.
In very little time at all, thanks to dear old Aunt Wendy’s breathlessness and fluttery eyes, we realize that this is actually a love story between Peter and Wendy, making J. M. Barrie’s tale perhaps the first lesbian fairy tale. But why does Peter, ostensibly a 25-year-old girl, need a 28-year-old girl to tuck her and her male followers in at night? It’s very creepy. But the story is quite progressive: Not only are Peter and Wendy lesbian lovers, but they are in an interspecies love triangle with a jealous ball of light. Wow. Much progress.
So the littlest boy, Michael, starts out as adorable before gradually getting more and more annoying. During the adorable phase, he grabs his teddy bear before flying off to Neverland. That is cute. What’s not cute is what would actually happen to the humans if they flew unprotected by spacesuits between freaking realms. Skin melting and stuff. That might be more entertaining though. This shit be dull. Peter/Allison Williams seems too embarrassed to fully commit to the role as lead lesbian lover. Gotta get over that before the second show.
Commercial break: Cool, a Wal-mart commercial with Melissa Joan Hart and I’m guessing her actual family of husband and three boy children who are playing with a toy fairy. It’s cute until the husband person says “I’m pretending it’s a helicopter.” That’s a cool message to send to all young boys, Wal-Mart, that to be male you can’t play with pretty colored toys or fairies unless you pretend it’s something MACHINE and MANLY. Cool. Outdated gender roles are the coolest. This is a good place to share one of my favorite infographics:
Back to the show: This narrator sounds like that English tart Lorraine Finster!!!
Once Peter, his new lover, and the boys get to Neverland – an impressively technicolored set – we get to meet our Captain Hook. No, not Christian Borle (Smee and Mr. Darling), who actually won a TONY for playing Captain Hook (at least a variation), but Christopher Walken, that singular adjuster of all rhythms of language that we thought were okay to accept as unchanging. Christopher Walken is on many drugs here but none of the ones that give energy, so that doesn’t bode well for the next too many hours.
Side note, when did Christian Borle DOUBLE his arm size?
Once Peter, his new lover, and the boys get to Neverland – an impressively technicolored set – we get to meet our Captain Hook. No, not Christian Borle (Smee and Mr. Darling), who actually won a TONY for playing Captain Hook (at least a variation), but Christopher Walken, that singular adjuster of all rhythms of language that we thought were okay to accept as unchanging. Christopher Walken is on many drugs here but none of the ones that give energy, so that doesn’t bode well for the next too many hours.
Side note, when did Christian Borle DOUBLE his arm size?
As we watch Christopher Walken stare at the cue cards next to the camera, we learn that pirates are these long-haired hot people who dance well. Why are people scared of pirates? They seem awesome. They probably have good tips for detangling hair after swimming in the ocean.
Although the story keeps telling us that we are supposed to be scared of Hook, a notorious pirate ship captain, it seems he’s really a Lower East Side drag queen with general malaise and a too-light shade of pancake makeup.
So distracted by Smee’s arms! I guess the camera does add 10 pounds, and it all goes to Christian Borle’s arms? Maybe he’s wearing fake arms?
The pirates’ carrying Hook on a sedan chair as his face betrays zero emotion is a metaphor for this show.
Christian Borle deserves a freaking Emmy for trying to breathe life into Walken. Seriously, he just blew into Walken’s arse. He literally tried to breathe life into him. He is not holding anything back. Gotta try everything.
Now we meet the Lost Boys. Given their costumes and homoerotic physicality, the Lost Boys are just Chilton drop-outs? Duke lacrosse players? Ah! Aside from giving us the progressive lesbian relationship, “Peter Pan” also tells important lessons about white male privilege. The whole Lost Boys aspect, it seems, is a precautionary tale about the current state of our society and its persistent, ignorant condoning of bad male behavior, continually excused as ‘just boys being boys’ or rewritten as a slam on irrelevant female behavior. These preppy prepschool boys in their striped rugby shirts and popped collars and colorful caps represent the Duke lacrosse players, the Steubenville football players, and all the other masses of men who are ‘lost’ because they don’t face necessary punishment and therefore never learn responsibility or proper ways to behave as respectable members of our society. So that’s what Peter Pan is about? Interesting. Is that why he’s played by a woman always? For feminism? Is that why they are singing this awful song about how Wendy will be their mother? “We have a mother at last we have a mother”, because their mothers are the only women they are able to recognize as deserving respect and the only ones who probably believe that they are decent at heart? I find the basic premise of rooting for the Lost Boys to defeat the Pirates as flawed. I want the pirates to win. These boys are trouble, if my hypothesis is correct. They will just inflict lots of pain and torture throughout their lives and get away with it. At least the pirates are honest about their intentions. Wow, Barrie was pretty prescient.
Moving on from sexism and misogyny to racism, within these enormous wedding bouquet trees, the Lost Boys are surrounded by the natives but they don’t know it. The natives (at least they are no longer calling them the Indians? I think?) literally have their feet on the Lost Boys’s asses but the Boys have no idea what’s going on. Is this a metaphor for American history, that the white Lost Boys can’t see the Indians right next to them? Or that they are blinded by their disregard of them?
Commercial break: F-ing A but “Into the Woods” looks AMAZING. I am so eager to see this movie instead of finish watching “Peter Pan” that I don’t think I can form full paragraphs for a while.
The Lost Boys KILL Wendy? What in the actual hell is this show? See, preppy prepschool white boys are TROUBLE TO WOMEN. And Tinkerbell is legit evil! Why is that ball of light not being extinguished? Why do people care if people don’t believe in her? She is EVIL.
Peter is actually singing about ‘Oh the pleasure she’ll bring to us’ about Wendy. This is so lesbians love story!
Omg MASS GROUP SHOWER SCENE this is vulgar. Why are all the Newsies in one small bathtub together? Do I have to rewatch Newsies to understand all the homoerotic subtext is that as well? Are all musicals this batshit? No.
“I Won’t Grow Up” really drives home my newly realized theory about this show being a scathing indictment of masculinity in modern society. These boys refuse to learn how to be better citizens! Refuse to mature and take responsibility! This show is deep. Neverland represents their mental state of everlasting “youth and joy and liberty”, their escape from being better members of actual society and living in a fantasy world of privilege and ignorance instead. Whoa.
Back to Peter and Wendy. They are going on a moonlight canoe ride on the lagoon. It’s pretty much the same setting as “Kiss The Girl” but without that amazing song. Or any song at all! Why can’t these two lovebirds have a beautiful duet on the water at this point? Nonetheless, this is pretty special. We don’t really get a lot of legit lesbian romance on television. There’s a lot of gay male relationships on TV, and thanks primarily to “How To Get Away With Murder” a lot of gay sex, but TV doesn’t give equal airtime to gay women. So this is nice.
Yet the story is making the common ignorant assumption that all women are jealous of each other over the menfolk or some shit like that. Why does every single female character need to be jealous of the others because they all love Peter? That look Wendy gave to Tiger Lily was a ‘bitch stay away’ if I ever saw one. And Even Older Aunt Wendy (who is ACTUALLY that English tart Lorraine Finster) lets her daughter run away with Peter? And they all wish that ALL the female descendants of Wendy will forever be taken away by Peter when they come of age? What is THAT creepy shit about! That’s a level of disgusting not even seen in Greek tragedies.
I’m focusing on the gay lovers and the Lost Boys’ metaphor because the rest of this is too dull to bother with. In the big climax sword fight between Hook and Pan, the pirates either fell asleep or sacrificed themselves to the sea witch to avoid having to watch any more. It was the slowest, most painfully uneventful sword fight OF ALL TIME. Who choreographed this? Kids do a better job playfighting with swords cut out of construction paper.
And as much as I love the Newsies, they are too old to be Lost Boys if the little Darling boys are meant to be their peers. They are actually old enough to be their fathers, and so the whole ‘Wendy be our mother!’ thing is just gross. That’s just gross.
I don’t have the energy to think any more about how dull this production was. I’m too disappointed in such a wasted opportunity. All I can say is thank god for Kelli O’Hara. And next year they better do “Hair”. Something worth watching.
1 Comment
And a problem it is . Damn what a world we live in.
I guess love is love is love has no meaning in London theater .
Well written 😍
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