We Return to Live Theatre! 'Adventures with the Painted People' at Pitlochry Festival Theatreby Randi / June 18, 2021It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the recent streaming production of ‘Mr. Burns’ from the Guidhall School of Music & Drama. It was live-streamed in late May and then reshared for pick-your-own-time-with-the-ability-to-pause-it viewing (unbeatable) this past month.
Mr. Burns, Anne Washburn’s lauded (and somewhat divisive) 2012 play, analyzes how culture evolves over time, with the help of The Simpsons. In Washburn’s dystopian society, an apocalyptic event has wiped out most people and all the power — the proper stylized title is actually Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. Overall, the play is fascinating in how it weaves details of a single episode of TV into markers of cultural importance over distinct time periods, in a fun (for Simpsons fans, not that the downer of a play is any fun) clever way of contemplating how history and culture are formed.
In this newest incarnation, I think it was hinted at that a virus did the people wiping part (gotta make shit relevant and more terrifying!), and the lack of sufficient people to attend to places like nuclear power plants did the rest. We meet a scraggly bunch of survivors around a campfire, where the zigzagging conversation intertwines stories of cities they’ve traveled to and what they found there, with a discussion about The Simpsons. The group tries to collectively share the play-by-play of the episode from memory – of course, as that’s all they have. It helps to be familiar with The Simpsons, especially the crucial episode Cape Feare – crucial for Simpsons fans, I believe (and musical theatre fans), and for appreciating this play.
This first act is filled with frustration and sadness — at the lack of knowledge about what’s going on in other parts of the country and who else has survived, as well as at their inability to ever truly find out what parts of the episode they are forgetting or misremembering. In this strongest part of the play, the emotional roller coaster from the excitement as the characters finally remember a line of dialogue, from the terror when someone new happens upon their location, from the grief and misery when they deliver their memorized lists of names of people they’re looking for, it’s a lot but it all feels earned.
But it’s the ensuing acts that show the cleverness of the play’s central concept. It jumps to 7 years later, when groups of survivors have become like traveling theatre troupes who perform — episodes of The Simpsons, especially Cape Feare. The way the seemingly casual campfire conversation has become one of the most fundamental parts of the society they’re forming is so interesting. It’s something that most people remember watching at some point, but they’ve latched onto it and given it enhanced importance in this new world, seemingly just to share something they can believe is important. The details have gotten messier, the lines a little paraphrased, as memories have faded and altered. Strangely, the survivors have given the same reverence to the inclusion of commercials in their productions. While it’s interesting to see what kinds of things they think would be advertised, there is way too much time spent on showing us their commercials, and even more time spent on a non-Simpsons non-commercial musical performance. Details from this performance make it into the third act in compelling ways that support the central idea, but the same result is achieved with the Simpsons details alone.
And that third act is wild. It’s now 75 years later, and the society has developed what seems like a serious religion and candle-filled religious ritual based on what has lasted from this episode of The Simpsons. Mr. Burns, earning the title placement, is now a murderer trying to kill the entire Simpsons family, and, well, doing so. The entire act is this religious ritual, a music-filled performance of what’s now their sacred stories. The once remembered details now have obviously been completely transformed, mutated into something unrecognizable but still with familiar aspects – the character names, the boat, the singing, the Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics. It’s an insane ride. I loved how all of these sections show how culture and history adapt over time, as certain things are remembered, misremembered, and reconstructed in human societies. It’s a reminder that the history we know and study all depends on a human’s retelling of an event, and humans are imperfect, biased historians. The way certain details hold fast through all three time periods in the play, and the way others morph into unrecognizable and surprising new cultural tenets, are a fascinating reflection of culture and how tenuous it is.
However. This third act is too long and overindulgent. It takes the unnecessary and overly long musical number of the second act and forking runs with it. This section is so long and chaotic and disconnected from the emotional beats the previous two sections had managed to achieve that I actually got annoyed. I may have audibly sighed. It didn’t help that the singing wasn’t great (I won’t say any more about the actors, who were all fine, because I think they’re students and like, they’re not done training). But even so this act was overall Too Much, nearly negating all the clever goodwill from before.
Information:
Run & running time: Mr. Burns runs about 2 1/2 hours. (It should run about 2 hours 10 minutes.) Hopefully Guildhall will release the stream again, or a new production (that makes cuts) will come, because it is such an interesting play.
Technicals: The stream froze every 5 minutes. For the amount of streaming theatre we’ve watched in the past year (it’s a shittonne), we’ve really only had issues when the stream is set up to defend a higher quality image instead of reducing the picture quality when necessary and focusing on continuous play and sound. I don’t know how to describe it I’m not a computer. But that’s the issue most of the time. Always choose continuous play over the image quality mes babies.
Toilets & Audience: Watched at home baby!!
What antisemitic thing did I notice this time*: The programme describes the ragtag group of characters as ‘schlocky’, which is a Yiddish-derived word used to describe cheap, junky goods, so it was very much not used properly. [*A new question I will probably need to ask more going forward! (Obvs I am joking about it being offensive…just to my history as an editor.)]
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“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” in London’s West End: Why Tho?
It’s important to have queer stories, but I don’t think you should get points just for ticking a box — they actually have to be good. With “Moonlight”, a film about not only gay characters but black characters winning the Oscar last year (despite the Academy being old white men) (and despite the incredible initial mixup), and with “Call Me By Your Name” up for awards this weekend, our entertainment culture has maybe? hopefully? finally reached the point where it’s not enough to have token minority characters or storylines; they also have to be interesting, imaginative, and worthwhile too. And done with respect. I don’t think any form of inclusivity that seems done just for brownie points should be lauded as the pinnacle of inclusivity. In London right now, however, you still get the points for a paint-by-numbers queer story even if it’s super thin and amateur. Because everybody is indeed talking about “Jamie”, the new London musical, and Brits are loving it, but it is…how do I say…not very good.
Like I said, literally everyone else adores it. And it has a lot of the kind of fun that mass crowds love in things like “Mamma Mia!” – you know, the bright, loud, danceable shows. No one is bothered if the dialogue is cringey or the songs are uninspired if everyone is bopping in their seat. But I am, because I am always waiting for a great British score and, well, I’m still waiting. With the exception of Tim Minchin’s scores (the superb “Matilda”, “Groundhog Day”), British musical theatre has been in trouble since, well, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s heyday. That’s a long time to go with nothing of true substance to show for it. Oh I’m sorry, I forgot that in that time frame of literal decades of dreck was Elton John’s “Billy Elliot” score. Okay so Tim Minchin, Webs, and Elton John. I guess all the promising writers went to Broadway. And to think people are surprised when I explain that Broadway is on a whole nother playing field to the West End when it comes to musical theatre. I know it sounds mean but tell me what British-born original musical of the last decade or two has been of the high quality you would expect from one of the greatest theatre cities in the entire world. Because of this draught, I was so pumped for “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” because all I saw were rave reviews and I REALLY wanted London to have a great original musical finally that wasn’t a Broadway transfer. I wanted to fall in love with a brand-new score and listen to it until I memorized it and wait eagerly for it to go to Broadway. But this score is not that.
While it is outwardly fun — like there are bright colors and happy tunes and people dancing so the masses will be more than satisfied — and it is great to have the representation like this on such a stage and scale, I was just so unimpressed with the actual bones of the show. I wish I loved it, because it’s such a great story and it’s so important to show to people, especially young boys who identify with Jamie. I just wish such a great opportunity for representation came with quality writing.
It’s impossible not to compare this show to “Kinky Boots”. “Jamie”, to me, is about a production team that saw the enormous success of “Kinky Boots” all over the world and thought, ‘Hey, it seems that people really love stories about boys that don’t fit the traditional mold of masculinity, and the psychology that informs their decisions and how it affects the NOPE WAIT IT’S JUST ABOUT BOYS DRESSING UP AS GIRLS THAT’S IT WE WILL DO THAT!’ There was such potential in developing stories inspired by such departures from traditional male roles, but instead they seemed to mine the most asinine humor from it with a sort of baseline effort.
“Jamie” is about a teenage boy named Jamie who is living in a small English town where the accents are such that everyone pronounces his name ‘Jeh-meh’ and he is wayyy toooo faaaabulous for it. He wants to be a drag queen, and his loving but one-dimensional mother supports him, and his classmates and friends seem to find it cool, except for one of the typical asshole boys who thinks he is macho but is really obviously fragile in his masculinity. And his absentee father doesn’t approve but he was never really in his life or wanting to be. Okay, cool, Jamie, go be a drag queen, you are beautiful so you will be great at it. This is all clear in the first five minutes, though, and it’s very formulaic. Even formulaic setups could make great shows if they are handled well, but the remaining hours of the show feel just like filler, and on an amateur level. They fill it with the local drag shop (I’m sorry, what towns in rural England have entire shops for drag queens?) run by a great drag queen from the past named Loco Chanelle, a really low-effort drag name, who sings a very, VERY unnecessary and cringe-worthy song about his past and how he killed his lover maybe??, and it gets a goddamn REPRISE??? They fill it with a stern, annoying teacher who has a serious problem with Jamie’s breaking out of the straight lines she wants boys and girls to stay inside. Her outdated beliefs are only a tiny bit easier to believe than the fact that a school teacher in a tiny town has Christian Louboutin heels, another thing that is mentioned ostensibly to help the writers reach their word limit. And they fill it with bad music.
I hate writing this, because I do like liking things, and I want to love everything musical theatre so badly. Even with a lackluster book, if a show has fun or lovely or even just original music, that’s a win. But this score is complete cringe. The trite, derivative lyrics stick in your head, so it has that going for it. There’s the title song, where everyone jumps around like they’re at a rave and yells “Everybody’s talking about Jamie! Everybody’s talking about Jamie! Everybody’s talking about Jamie!” The melody is exactly how you are imagining it. I don’t even know if that song had other lyrics. The opening number, the one that has to set the tone for the whole show, is called, “And You Don’t Even Know It”, and it just says a phrase and then repeats “And you don’t even know it” over and over and over. “You’re a star! And you don’t even know it! Mini bar! And you don’t even know it!” Okay I made that last lyric up but you get the picture. I LOVE loved (sarcasm) the big ‘I Want’ number of the show, called “Spotlight”, where Jamie’s classmates sang of him “Out of the darkness, into the spotlight, out of the darkness, into the spotlight.” In that one was the part when I realized ‘ohhh this is going to be terrrrible’ — when the female classmates were sitting at a table doing the cups thing from ‘Pitch Perfect’ to the melody, the stupid thing you learn at summer camp when you’re little and somehow Anna Kendrick made cool? Anyway, the girls were doing that as accompaniment and my eyes got stuck in the back of my head. Then, ohh man, my favorite, the big runway catwalk number called “Work of Art” where everyone sang of Jamie (I’m sensing a redundant theme) about how he’s a work of art: “Mona Lisa isn’t she sir, work of art” was one lyric that I almost screamed at. I just…listen, not everything has to have Sondheim-level lyrics, but at least some effort would be appreciated.
Oh my real favorite part was when the mother had one of her hackneyed ballads about how she would do things differently if she met herself again (title of song: “If I Met Myself Again” picture 1000 eye roll emojis) and I SHIT YOU NOT, two dancers were BREAKDANCING during it. DURING A SAD BALLAD. It wasn’t ballet-like emotional dancing to the slow music; it was literally breakdancing to a nonexistent rhythm as though someone somewhere were scratching a record and Jason Mendoza was patiently waiting for the beat to drop but it never would. I looked around me in the darkness for the Punk’d cameras. I have never been so flabbergasted at direction choices. Man alive.
The only real conflict is for Jamie to get enough nerve to go onstage in his dress and not let the stupidest kid in school or the father that abandoned him get to him. That this super-confident, quick-witted boy would waste a moment thinking about what the mean boy in school thought of him was hard to believe, but okay, everyone has bullies in high school and it’s hard to deal with. But is this so-tiny-it’s-hard-to-even-call-him-a-minor-character really the only source of external conflict? To make up for that, Jamie fights with his mother for no good reason, and his mother sings a song about how he’s her boy (called “He’s My Boy”) and the audience was supposed to cry but it was forcing drama onto a cotton candy cloud that vanished into thin air as soon as pressure was applied to it.
Almost every character was stereotyped and lacking any semblance of nuance. I couldn’t believe that this show got this far without people editing it to bring it into the best shape possible. Or at least shape enough to run around the block. Only one character wasn’t completely clichéd and stereotyped, because it is one of the first appearances of such a character in musical theatre. Jamie’s best friend is a Muslim girl named Pritti (played by Lucie Shorthouse) who wears a hijab. As far as I know this is new, and this is minority representation this show deserves to be commended for. Lucie is the only character that gets to shine, aside from Jamie. She gets the one song in the show that didn’t make me want to tear my hair out, called “It Means Beautiful”, about the Arabic equivalent of the name Jamie. It’s not a great melody and the lyrics don’t live up to the nice sentiment that gives rise to the song (i.e., Pritti telling Jamie that he is indeed beautiful and look Arabic proves it), but still, it was decent. Lucie unfortunately does annoying popstar styling with her voice throughout the song, where she kind of catches the sound during held notes (something the director, if he exists, should have stopped) but she is really talented.
And Jamie himself shines bright. John McCrea has real star quality shining through even this pile. He stands out physically, a lithe, otherworldly-blonde, pale young man who regularly shows off how incredibly flexible he is. He manages to imbue the dullness with pops of vigor here and there, usually by doing an impossibly high kick in heels. He delivers one of the only lines that made me laugh – a bit where he’s trying to climb out the bathroom window and the mean teacher asks what he thinks he’s doing and he says “…Parkour??” That actually cracked me up. I hope that John gets a role in the future that is actually worthy of his talent.
Although I’m pretty sure he’s happy with this one. Everyone seems to be loving it.
Aside from the horrendous, actively bad score, the book is a mess as well. There is way too much of everything (so much attention to the drag queen, the teacher, the father, the friends) and yet not enough of those things to make it worthwhile, no real sense of understanding what they are trying to accomplish. And as if this storyline didn’t feel straight out of 1992 enough, there are outdated jokes peppering the book scenes, like talk of how all Kim Kardashian does is wear heels. It’s so low-effort.
OH so part of the nonexistent conflict is that the mean boy calls Jamie a ‘minger’ and Jamie is destroyed by it. So I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it was bad because it was basically the only real drama. Non-British people will likely not understand that part when they see it, but they are going to hate it anyway so whatever. So after the show I text my English friend “hey what does minga mean” because see I heard it with the accent, and she pretty much died laughing. She explained that it’s a very British way of calling someone skanky, like so skanky that no one would ever want to sleep with them. I thanked her for explaining it and then threw a glass at the wall in my fury over a musical basing all of its conflict over something so trivial as a boy calling another boy this word, as if Jamie, our unstoppable protagonist, would actually care that this idiot football player called him that.
Luckily the end sucked, with redemption of the white male asshole because who doesn’t love forgiveness that isn’t deserved. At least I guess we should try to redeem asshole children, who still have a chance to do some good, but I’m pretty sure that kid is going to remain a jerk forever. I’m angry that this disappointing show dragged (no pun intended) for almost three freaking hours. This isn’t “Les Mis”, people! And I’m angry and uncomfortable that a show that is professing to fill the niche of queer and inclusive art can still manage to be so sexist. There’s very often that unspoken but obvious thought that ‘we can’t be sexist towards women; we’re gay!’ and it’s definitely happening here. Its treatment of gender says while men like Jamie can cross gender lines and break down barriers, women shall remain in their supporting positions of the men around them. You may be thinking that there’s not a lot of good they can do for the women when this is a story about this one boy, but they manage to do a whole lot of bad, so. The girls in his school face a constant barrage of sexism from the male classmates, from being shown dicks they don’t want to see from dicks they don’t want to bother with, to being harassed with talk about how the boys will ‘drill’ them (they say ‘drilling’ a lot) whenever they want. And it’s a total Law & Order: SVU situation: The treatment is obviously bad, but it’s there not to serve as an example of bad behavior, but to serve as an example of what is considered normal. That pisses me off and it’s dangerous to include it in the show’s world as unnecessary examples of normalcy.
When the last musical assault on my ears and brain ended, the entire audience shot up to their feet quicker than I’ve ever seen. I guess when all the modern original musical work in your country is kind of on this level, you don’t expect, or get, any better.
AUDIENCE
The two old ladies in front of me were brushing their hair. One fumbled around her purse during the opening number, brought out a big brush, and brushed her hair, probably 100 strokes. Then she gave it to her friend. I can’t with people.
The best part of this show was the bubble tea I got next door afterwards.
The Dumb Waiter at the Old Vic: I Try Pinter Again!
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the recent livestream of The Dumb Waiter from The Old Vic’s In Camera series.
Man, I feel like over the years I have seen every Pinter play (and piece of Mahler’s) and every time I’m like “…yeah okay.” Like I GET IT (do I?) he’s a genius and they’re all classics (really?) but it’s just…not my thing. The Dumb Waiter reinforced my whole ‘I mean sure’ vibe about Pinter.
The Dumb Waiter is widely considered one of Harry’s best shortypops, and I did appreciate that it was only about an hour long. The four-hander (that’s right) stars the very fine duo of Daniel Mays and Daniel Thewlis (who we enjoyed in Harry Potter and the Dude who Turns into a Werewolf) as two apparent hit men who wait in a prison cell-like room for instructions on their next target. I’m not the biggest fan of hit men, so at the start it’s an uphill battle for me to care about anything besides wondering if someone else in their universe could turn them in without using or glorifying the role of cops.
Instead of that, we had these two jackwagons sitting, reading the paper out loud, pacing, &c. And then they hear something in the wall and it’s a working dumbwaiter! Like for moving food between floors! Fun! Houses should have these! They start receiving messages – an envelope under the door, and then an order through the dumbwaiter. They’re like ‘well we don’t have any of these items’ so naturally they send back up whatever snacks they had on them. LIKE, WHY. I guess this humorous turn is kind of funny but the nonsense of it felt inconsistent. The men keep communicating with an unseen someone at the other end of the dumbwaiter, without really knowing who it is or what’s going on. Who is giving the instructions? Where are these messages coming from? These and more question will not be answered and will stand in for deep meaning!
I guess the whole twisty point of what, not knowing who you can trust? the destructiveness of power? everyone suffering under an unjust system? could have worth, but it had the emotional impact of a faux-motivational poster without supporting material helping any maxim feel earned. It kind of felt like Pinter trying to be Beckett. A loose plotline, slow pacing. a bit convoluted. As ever, I feel like Pinter plays are best appreciated by people who say ‘wow it really makes you think’ in a way that lets you know they have no idea what they are thinking.
