How to Make "Treason" into a Full-Fledged Musicalby Randi / April 1, 2021Today’s show is ‘An Elephant in the Garden’ presented by the Barn Theatre in association with Exeter Northcott Theatre. It streams from tonight until the 18th.
I found it kind of hilarious that I got the press night info for ‘An Elephant in the Garden’ on the same day as I discovered dozens upon dozens of Nazi apologists in a seemingly benign Reddit post. What a day for sympathizing with Germans during World War II! Of course regular German citizens were victims of their government and suffered terribly, but what fun timing. ‘An Elephant in the Garden’ is the stage version of Michael Mortugo’s book inspired by stories of zookeepers during the war, who tried to save animals destined for death in the event of bombings (they couldn’t have animals roaming the streets if their enclosures and caretakers were harmed – animals moving about freely, perish the thought). In this tale, teenage Lizzie and her mother flee on foot from Dresden after it’s destroyed, and they take Marlene, a baby elephant, with them.
Alison Reid in this two-hander (she has two hands) does a good job of keeping her energy up and keeping the story alive. Some cringey lines had us doing Chrissy Teigen’s Golden Globes face, but altogether it’s decent. The tone felt 60% for adults and 40% clearly for kids, so it’s a bit uneven. Reid’s handling of the handful of characters is nicely done. Yet the story as a whole felt a little unearned. Like the only thing I could say in response was “okay, and…” It feels like so much modern theatre and other art is focusing on Germans during the war in a purposeful attempt to not do more ‘obvious victim’ stories, but often without good reasons, trying to rely on the whole ‘we don’t think enough about these victims!’ idea but without sufficient justification for it being a play in the first place. Why am I supposed to care about this person, this family? I care about the elephant, for sure, but the reviews talking about how the elephant becomes the hero of the story, the main focus, are full of crap.
This play exists in a weird political limbo, alluding to bad German behavior but nothing tooo bad, never sharing any real political views and then all of a sudden calling Hitler an enemy towards the end just to make sure they made that clear in a CYA move that felt super obvious. There’s a bit with a horribly racist aunt and uncle, but their evilness is still kind of kid-friendly, as is the narrator’s happy obliviousness at the end, where she says ‘I like to believe my aunt and uncle changed for the good’ after the war. What, by staying silent about their bigotry? I do not like the implied message of this part. I feeeeel liiiiiike you should need to do more to prove goodness, especially if you wanted this war and loved ya boy Adolf. Do not like the message this sends to audiences, kids and the veryyyy problematic general British adult public alike. So, although this was fine, I’m a little peeved about its purpose in general.
Regardless of how much I would like a second, stronger draft that answers my questions, you have to hand it to the Barn Theatre for their content this year. They’ve been putting out so much theatre for home viewing, seemingly nonstop, and that is something to be commended. Also – they seem to acknowledge and respect that our attention spans are absolutely shot. The vast majority of their content has been around an hour – perfect for the home viewer who struggles to spend even thirty minutes watching something without simultaneously scrolling on their phone. I’m sure I could handle a longer thing – I have been watching serious movies and mostly concentrating, but it’s still a mental hurdle to even begin watching something when you know you have to concentrate for a long time. (It probably goes without saying that I am very very behind on work.) Anyway, thanks to the Barn, even though I didn’t love this one (but again, that could be in part because of all the Nazi sympathizers running rampant nowadays! Don’t let them get away with it!)
Photo credit: Farrows Creative
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Thoughts on: Far From Heaven, Off-Broadway
The sold-out run of Far From Heaven at Playwrights Horizons promised a more epic experience that the one I actually had. It starred the magnificent Kelli O’Hara, was written by the musical team from Grey Gardens, was based on the 2002 Oscar-nominated movie starring Julianne Moore. I paid more than I ever have for a Broadway ticket, and I expected to be astonished. Aside from getting to listen to O’Hara’s beautiful voice live, I was actually disappointed.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
I would love for this show to move to Broadway, but only if it undergoes serious reworking. Several new songs that better fit O’Hara’s talents are necessary. Although she always manages to be good, even in things like Nice Work If You Can Get It, her voice is not one that you let sit there on run-of-the-mill, generic, straightforward songs. Let her shine! Christine Ebersole’s performance of “Another Winter In A Summer Town”, from Grey Gardens, gives me chills just thinking about. O’Hara, just as capable of producing such a performance, was given no such opportunity.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
The Lehman Trilogy on the West End: Incredible Acting in an Early Draft Play
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is The Lehman Trilogy, currently playing in London’s West End at the Piccadilly Theatre until August 31.
When you walk away from a 3+ hour play thinking, “why didn’t they accomplish anything with that amount of time?”, you know something’s wrong. With The Lehman Trilogy, ostensibly about the Lehman Brothers global financial services firm but mostly about the family dynamics of the previous generations, you learn zero about what this company did in the modern age. You learn tons, tons about the three founding brothers and their marriages and their interactions with their kids (fictionalized of course) and how the kids acted in school and who their kids married and why…but literally nothing about why this behemoth financial company failed in the 2008 market crash. And so this shockingly well-received play feels like an early draft that needs work. If you wanted to write a family drama, why frame it as being about the Lehman Brothers? Why not just write a family drama instead of suggesting it’ll have to do with the financial world at all? They could have easily swapped this family for any other family’s story and had the same effect.
Perhaps that was the goal of Italian writer Stefano Massini: to show the inner workings of the Lehman family’s personal lives and struggles instead of sharing any substance about their infamous company. But then I ask with even more urgency, why?! What do we care why billionaires had to divorce their wives, or why one billionaire spent a lot of time betting on horses? Were we supposed to relate to their troubles, because I don’t. Why choose the Lehmans if not to talk about the last incarnation of the company and its 2008 collapse? The huge financial crash we all lived through felt like the elephant in the room for Acts II and III, like ‘um, guys, why aren’t we talking about that, or seeing what’s going to cause it?’ It’s such a strange choice, to focus the play on what the various Lehman generations were personally like yet to skip over everything relevant to our lives.
I discuss play length frequently, because it’s so interesting to see what different people can do with different amounts of time. Despite what you’d assume from the writing on this site, in my regular life I cherish efficiency. With more than 3 hours, you assume a play can make its point, yet here it was so much wasted time. We had endless jokes about the youngest brother being a potato; we had too much time wasted on one of the descendant’s annoying wife; we had a long, slow list of names of bankers (unrelated to the characters) who committed suicide; we had literally 10 minutes of Adam Godley doing the twist through the 20th century, instead of telling us what the company was doing to bring about its downfall. This play feels like the second draft, a work in progress that needs a dramaturge to help find its purpose.
Clearly the play wanted to be about the family, especially the three founding brothers – and the part that was about them, the first act, was the most compelling part. In the beginning, they managed to successfully portray the brothers’ dynamics while also showing what the actual company was like at the start, what kinds of financial decisions they made and why. So it can be done. (And as we’ve seen in superior plays like Enron, you can have interesting characters (who actually interact and don’t just narrate to the audience, a wearying trend) while simultaneously teaching about the financial industry, the company’s role in it, and how it all went to shit. Enron even had dinosaurs help us learn.)
But then the following two acts feel like a battle between the playwright’s objective – wanting to stick with the family biography – and everyone else’s expectation that the action was ‘supposed to’ get to the later incarnations of the company as a financial giant and, of course, the 2008 crash. I kept thinking ‘surely now they will get to the relevant part? Surely…now?’ By the time it did, it was too late to do anything worthwhile, and so they simply didn’t. They didn’t really mention what the work was even like in modern times. In fact, the last 5 minutes of the show felt like a mad dash of the entire creative team to the finish line, like everyone was shouting “OH SHIT WE ONLY HAVE A FEW MINUTES LEFT AND WE’RE IN 1980 QUICK LET’S SAY DECADES ARE PASSING AND THEN OH NO IT’S 2008 WE CRASH THE END.” I’m pretty sure that’s the ending verbatim. It felt that sudden, that unplanned. The surprise of a dozen otherwise unused actors standing in a boardroom sadly at the end felt equally misguided.
I have to believe that other critics are raving about this play entirely because of the acting. With the stellar trio of Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley, the acting is absolutely top-notch. Sam Mendes inventively directs them not just as the three founding Lehmans, but as their wives, their kids, their grandkids, as they seemingly effortlessly weave in and out of various personas with the bat of an eye, a slight change in voice. Their acting skills were as impressive as it gets, but they deserve a play that delivers too.
INFORMATION
The Lehman Trilogy runs just under 3 hours and 20 minutes, with two 20-minute intervals (which is the best way to do long shows). As is the despicable trend among London theatres these days, they held the curtain for latecomers to arrive. MY DUDES. Stop holding the g-d curtain for latecomers. If they’re late, let them wait till the late seating time. If there is no late seating, then actually respect your own policy and don’t forking let the latecomers dictate the schedule for everyone else. It’s so rampant now, this issue, that we all may as well take our sweet ass time getting to the theatre 5-10 minutes late because it doesn’t matter anymore, there are no rules, they will hold it for you. APPARENTLY. SMDH.
It was also one of the smokiest rooms I’ve ever been in, and I was seated in the stalls. This is because the main lobby’s entrance doors were open and there’s a bar next door and no staff gives a good g-d that people were smoking literally in the doorways, to such an extent that the smoke traveled through all the stairs and hallways and into the stalls at full strength. That is inexcusable. Aren’t there RULES?!
