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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Condensed, Silly Fun at Opera Undone: Tosca & La Boheme
How 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.
An Electric, Exuberant Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre
It’s Theatre Tuesday! Today’s show is A Midsummer Night’s Dream at London’s Bridge Theatre, playing until August 31.
If there are any doubters that Shakespeare’s comedies can be just as hilarious as anything modern (and yeah I mean Mike Schur television shows too! I KNOW!), send them to the Bridge Theatre. Their (what’s appearing to be) annual immersive Billy Shakes production (after last year’s crowd-storming Julius Caesar) this summer is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of my two favorites (prize for whoever guesses the other one!) but one that often gets dismissed for not being as substantial as the others. Well fork off to anyone who says that, because it’s the greatest. Sure it has a few flaws, as does Nicholas Hytner’s forking hilarious production, but I defy anyone not to have a jolly good time.
A big part of the cheer and party atmosphere is the immersive nature of it. Giving its version of the groundlings standing area at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Bridge has taken out the stalls seats and replaced it with a pit (OF DESPAIR no) where audience members who are able can stand the whole time among the action and the actors. Well-directed staff usher the pit-standers around the space as needed, to avoid being in the way of actors or set pieces (lots of moving platforms coming up from the ground and bedframes hanging from the ceiling!). Standing tickets are cheaper (as they should be), yet it’s the best spot in the house for experiencing this incredibly entertaining show. (I assume it’s weird for people in the seats above to be forced to stare at tons of civilians milling about too, so you definitely want to be in the pit (I FELL IN THE PITTTTT, YOU FELL IN THE PITTTTT, WE ALL FELL IN THAT PITTTTT)). At first glance, with the cast beginning preshow by singing hymns in the drabbest costumes and all looking like farm witches (“um, they were MENNONITES?”), you can’t begin to predict how uproarious shit’s gonna get.
The main draw of this production, besides the immersive nature and the crowd of civilians in the pit, is Gwendoline Christie, from TV’s (yay TV!) Game of Thrones, which you people can STILL NOT SPOIL, OKAY? She plays Titania, Queen of the Fairies, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The doubling up (Oliver Chris (excellent) plays Oberon, King of the Fairies, and Theseus, the Duke of Athens) of these smaller roles added a great deal of mystery and mysticism to these characters, who have not-huge roles otherwise. They clearly wanted the big name draw to have more to do (does Hippolyta have more than two lines? Discuss) while also clearly wanting her to play the queen of the Amazons because helloooo she tall as hell. Anyway, I loved the move, but that wasn’t even the most important or my favorite move concerning these characters. If you know your Billy Shakes, you know that Titania has a changeling boy (so weird guys) that Oberon wants, so they’re in a fight, and Oberon sends Puck, the best little fairy elf and mischief-maker in all of fairyville, to cast a spell on Titania so she falls in love with the first thing she sees – which happens to be the ridiculous goofball Athenian ‘actor’ named Bottom, whom Puck has transformed into a donkey. IT’S ALL VERY GOOD. Well, instead of having men trick a woman into a love affair with an animal and having us think that’s all fun and games and fine, they switched it up so Oberon has the changeling and Titania orders the spell on him, and HE falls in love with Bottom and IT’S THE FUNNIEST THING EVER. It’s a good change, it’s a gooood chaaaange. It’s so much better to have two men tricked and avoid the power imbalance and ickiness that would come with a male-female relationship. Oliver Chris as Oberon and Hammed Animashaun as Bottom are given the best scenes and most hysterical direction, and they are worth the admission price alone. I’m still laughing thinking about them, how the other fairies react to them, and the modern music choices used to augment their scenes. Usually I’m like “ugh can we just cut the acting troupe and all the Bottom crap and get back to the four lovers” but Hammed convinced me that Bottom is probably the best, and definitely the funniest, role in the play. Perfection.
I might have been biased before anyway, because AMND was the first Shakes I ever read and then performed, and I was Helena, so I’ve always been partial to the scenes (and the incredible verse!) with Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, and all their magicked and regular troubles. This production made me realize I still remember ALL her forking lines and most of everyone else’s too, which is like a fun party trick but I need room in there for other stuff. The foursome was wonderful, but for the first time they didn’t feel like the main characters to me. It definitely felt more of an ensemble piece, with everyone getting a chance to shine (but really Oberon and Bottom stealing the forking show (and that one ensemble member who did a forking human flag)). And Puck (David Moorst), the glue that often holds the show together, was goddamn fabulous. God I remembered all his lines too WTF I can’t remember what I was supposed to do at work but ENDLESS IAMBIC PENTAMETER sticks.
Apparently there’s a production of AMND happening concurrently at the actual Globe just down the road from the Bridge, but I’ve heard honestly terrible things! I’d be sad, but when there’s a production this fun and funny and wonderful happening, you can’t be too sad. The final scene, with the acting troupe’s performance, goes on for way too long (and if you read this blog, you know I’m the expert at things that go on too long, like this!), but each and everyone one of those actors does such a great job that I imagine Hytner just didn’t want to stop anyone from shining. It’s too bad to end such a fabulous experience thinking that it should have ended 15 minutes ago, but overall it’s a gem.
INFORMATION
The production is running at the Bridge Theatre (just on the south bank side of Tower Bridge (which is the one you probably think is London Bridge but isn’t)) until August 31. If you can’t make it, NT Live will broadcast it in theatres on October 17, throwing a bit of a wrench into their whole ‘live’ conceit. If you go and you’re in the pit (WE ALL WERE IN THE PITTTT), you must check all coats and bags (for free) so they don’t get in the way. Fun fact, they let pitgoers have drinks (of course they do this is London), so they let me keep my reusable water bottle with me, which is bigger than most people’s pocketbooks. Flouting that system y’all! The crowd in the pit wasn’t great – lottttts of talking with their friends, at full volume, I guess because they thought since they were standing that no one could hear them??!! I don’t know how idiots think – but the best part is that you can just WALK AWAY FROM THEM!
STAGE DOOR
The stage door for the Bridge is around the corner (turn right and right again when you exit the theatre), past The Ivy restaurant and down the block on the right till you see the red STAGE DOOR lighted sign. Fun fact, it’s next to the restaurant we learned last week not to patronage so you can do what I did and stare at everyone inside while you wait and shout “SHAAAAAME! SHAAAAAME! SHAAAAAME!” like from the show you probably watch if you’re a fan of Gwendoline.
For a weekend night, the stage door was quite tame (especially considering the one we tried the following night (more on that bullshirt on the next THEATRE THURSDAY)), less than a dozen people. Because most people are there for Gwendoline to talk about GoT, the rest of the cast bounced like FAST, without looking at the crowd. That was a shame because I was there for everyone and they didn’t even know it! But Gwendoline came out after only a short while, maybe 15 minutes tops, and signed programmes and took pictures with whoever wanted. Most people mentioned GoT and she seemed to expect that, so when I told her how well I thought the swaps worked for Oberon and Titania she seemed genuinely pleased. ONE POINT FOR ME.
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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