Chichester's Current Production of 'South Pacific' is a Decent Timeby Randi / August 12, 2021It’s a special Theatre Tuesday! because last week’s Theatre Thursday was actually Yom Kippur so we were offline because as this show teaches you Judaism is important and deserves respect!
I’ve been complaining about how Jewishness is treated on London stages for as long as I can remember, and I know some of you are sick of it. Thankfully for you clowns, this week’s show, the new UK production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent at the Menier Chocolate Factory, tells its heart-breaking, full-bodied Jewish tale with respect for its subject matter and the people represented. Not that one show solves an endemic problem, but I cried through the whole thing and not just at the sad parts. At the fact that a Jewish story was being treated lovingly, and with actual Jewish people involved, onstage and offstage, (Joey Tribbiani voice:) IN LONDON! This beautiful production of the Tony-winning Broadway hit is nearly two hours long with no intermission — which as you know means I had to pee horribly for half the show (and true to form I got a UTI in post) — and I still loved it. That’s as much love I can send a show, truly.
Indecent treats a narrowly defined and unassuming subject — the lifespan of a Yiddish play from inception through celebration and on to suppression — on an epic scale. Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance is the (real) work, and we see a troupe of actors (well, various troupes, in various plays-within-plays, don’t think about it too hard too too hard) tell the story of Asch’s writing of the play, the first reading of it, the first production, and onto worldwide fame…and then censorship of it on Broadway, of all places. Asch’s play tells of a young Jewish girl whose father runs a brothel, and the girl falls in love with one of the prostitutes, and the girls’ father gets like, so mad. Likewise, people in the real world were equally displeased, Jews and goys alike. Two women in love! Jewish people treated as complicated living breathing beings and not paragons of perfection! The horror!
God of Vengeance was ahead of its time, but luckily a few people believed in it, recognizing its art and beauty and how tenderly it treated the central love story, and they helped make it happen. (Believing in art is necessary!) People like my man Lemmel (Finbar Lynch), a man who was at the very first reading of the play in someone’s living room, and was with it all the way through its Euro tour, to NYC, and back to Europe just in time to perform it in a ghetto attic in hushed tones. Yeah, this play gets to the Holocaust, and you might be like ‘ugh we get it the Holocaust’ but the Holocaust was a really big deal (“remember that we suffered!”)! Going in, I was most excited to see American queen Alexandra Silber and Molly Osbourne (double Tzeitels!) playing various actresses playing the lovers, and they were as great as I expected, but Lemmel was the one who really grabbed our hearts and broke them. His love for God of Vengeance and for the love story in that play is the real heart of this play. Like I thought the love story in GOV might be the central emotional core of Indecent but it’s really Lemmel’s love for the GOV love story that was the real one all along. The real good place was the friends we made along the way. Finbar was so good, and not just because you know how I feel about small old Jewish men (I don’t think he is Jewish but he is now on the official list of goyim who are allowed to play Jews) who make me sad, like Eli Wallach in The Holiday, oh man. So good. Right at those heartstrings.
Several times during the show, I thought hmm maybe this bit isn’t totally necessary, maybe like 10-15 minutes could be cut, like the Berlin cabaret scene that makes you feel like when you watch R-rated movies with your parents. But this is hundo p one of those shows that upon reflection you realize were masterfully set. Rebecca Taichman’s compassionate and thoughtful direction treats the piece so kindly and with such care that that’s its own piece of art. (And I’m not just saying that because I especially enjoyed all the Yiddish projected on the backdrop, proving you can learn from using Duolingo (I was so proud of how much I could read and understand.)) All the moving parts, all the various characters the actors portray prove to be necessary to show GOV’s trajectory as a parallel to the history of Jews during this time period. They’re all the puzzle pieces necessary to put the story of this underlying play together, and you know like not all puzzle pieces are the dogs’ faces but you still need the ones that make the grass and trees and stuff to make it all complete. Yes I have done one puzzle in the past 20 years and it was of a dog. No I don’t enjoy puzzles.
From the Lodz section onwards, my crying was real bad. The audience was so quiet, and I was so nervous that I would do my choking-hiccupping crying loud enough to disrupt the theatre so I had to do the Joey-thinking-about-Chandler thing and distract myself a little bit and the only thing that I could think of (because it was still relevant subject matter, at least) was the Crazy Ex Girlfriend song I quoted above, ‘Remember that we Suffered”, so while I was crying outwardly at Lemmel my dude, in my head I was going “The sweet and the bitter/Remember that we suffered/Streisand and Hitler/Remember that we suffered/Spielberg and Hitler/Remember that we suffered/Have we mentioned Hitler? I’m just saying that we suffered!” It’s the best song. Anyway. The impact of seeing the words ‘an impossibly long line’ projected again towards the end broke me, absolutely broke me. It was brilliant and powerful writing and also so mean, because I was wearing two masks and it’s really hard to cry with two masks.
I knew from friends who had seen it on Bway that ‘the rain scene’, when you finally get to see what everyone had been talking about the whole time, was the most beautiful and emotional part, but I didn’t even imagine what the context would be. That aspect — who is imagining that scene and why — is something that I will both treasure and be haunted by.
Above all, it was glorious to see (during the high holidays no less) a play about Jewish people and Jewish subject matter actually performed and created by Jewish people. And in London! It’s a 5782 miracle! I hope it’s a sign of permanent change, although the fact that the Guardian review of this play felt it at all appropriate to say ‘hey you know who else is a Jew, Philip Roth!” as a way to shoehorn in yet another message about their view of the Israel conversation (that’s def what they were doing, btw) shows how much work this place still has to do.
But I digress, like the Guardian writer. This play will stick with me, and I’m sure many other audience members, as a paradigm of caring, protected, heartfelt, authentic theatre-making. I’m so grateful that this was well done, so grateful to the people involved for giving Jews one little corner of respite in a year filled with disrespect and other shit.
INFORMATION
Indecent plays at the Menier Chocolate Factory (not a chocolate factory) until November 27. I recommend you get tickets and if you’d like to get me one too I would go again (the NHS loves giving me antibx).
The Menier asks audience members to wear masks, but like every other theatre, it doesn’t have a mandate. So other people don’t have wear one and many won’t, although this crowd was better about it than at any other theatre we’ve been to recently.
Toilets are down the stairs in the restaurant part of the cafe, so if you will have to run at the end, you want to sit near the aisles, because the rows are suuuuper long, all the way across the theatre jawns.
I don’t know if any of the cast are stage-dooring because I didn’t try, because we are in a pandemic.
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Dave Malloy’s Preludes at the Southwark: Challenging, Wild, Brilliant
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Preludes at the Southwark Playhouse until October 12.
If you hear that a play is a “musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds forking bonkers. It is forking bonkers. But it’s also at times brilliant, and like other work from creator Dave Malloy, it’s challenging in a fantastic way. Beginning what we are calling our Autumn of Dave Malloy here on laughfrodisiac (we have lots of his shows lined up!), the new production of Preludes at the Southwark Playhouse tests the bounds of musical theatre’s abilities. If anyone still wrongly assumed that musical theatre could only or does only tell certain kinds of stories in certain kinds of ways, Preludes will show them that this spectacular art form has no limits.
Now, yes, it does take place in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer famous for his unbelievably difficult and intricate piano pieces, including the stark raving genius of the title piece. The brilliance of that piece haunts the composer as portrayed in this show, as like every artist he fears his creative output peaked with that, the glorious piece he banged out at 19 years old. In fact, ‘Serg’ hasn’t been able to write for three years when we meet him and his supportive fiancee/first cousin (eeeeek) Natalya, after the disastrous performance of his first concerto thanks to a drunk conductor (why the composer has to suffer and not the conductor is a shame of the universe).
In order to get his shit together, Serg starts seeing a hypnotherapist. Then the line between what is happening in Serg’s life and what he and his doctor are working through in his hypnotized brain starts to blur, just as the distinction between what music is original Rachmaninoff and what is Dave Malloy’s starts to blur, in a fantastic method of musical storytelling. The most powerful and successful parts of the show combine the inner workings of Serg’s mental processes with his anguish and with the genius of the music, like when Serg explains in a growing ranting monologue how he wrote Preludes, as his pianist counterpart (a separate actor/pianist, not only a necessary choice but a brilliant one, showing how Serg feels divorced from his own self) plays a mesmerizing almost violent rendition of Preludes. This scene, using Rachmaninoff’s own music to tell his story, best captures what this show aims to achieve and best shows what Malloy is capable of.
As with Malloy’s other work, the risk of being the composer/lyricist/book writer/all around creator/we love you and falling into moments of over-indulgence is high, and not avoided here. As usual, Malloy makes those moments of genius count because they stand out, but also because they come against a backdrop of imperfection. His work is challenging, weird, strikingly different, and that makes him such an exciting composer. But there are a few moments that feel unedited, like the 2x too long Act II opener “Loop” performed by Serg’s opera singer friend Chaliapin (a great performance and a perfectly Malloyesque scene, but just 2x too long) and the 3x too long hypnotherapist’s walk through the mountains towards the end. Malloy’s work shines in its imperfections and its challenging nature, but these moments could have had more impact if they were more efficient.
The performances are mostly great though, with Keith Ramsay giving a gripping star turn, all nervous energy and anxiety and physical tics and uneasy laughter (though a little too much of that) to become an all-consuming embodiment of the composer’s neuroses and self-doubt. It’s a remarkable performance. Georgia Louise’s Natalya shines as one of the best vocalists heard on stage in recent months, and it helps that she’s given the chance to show off in the Act I closer “Natalya”, the only classic musical theatre song in the score (and very reminiscent of “No One Else” from Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which full disclosure is one of my Best Show Evers). The only questionable performance issue came from the portrayal of the Czar – it was funny to give him a Tony Soprano accent but aside from the initial laughter there wasn’t actually a compelling reason for it.
Overall, Preludes is an exciting new-to-London show (it premiered off-Broadway in 2015) that tests the bounds of the genre and should inspire other creators to do the same, something London’s musical theatre scene needs. Malloy has built a fantastical, strange, wild rhapsody of the creative process using music old and new and showing that the struggle is timeless, which seems fitting as this composer of fantastical, strange, wild works finally starts to get the acclaim he deserves.
The Minutes on Broadway: You Wish Your Local Council Was This Bonkerballs (you really don’t)
It’s Theatre Thursday! We’re still doing those when we remember!
Okay yes The Minutes, Tracy Letts’ latest Broadway play, has recently closed, and I was just too busy to write about it in time for you to read the review and still be able to go ‘oh I want to see this, I will go to Telecharge.com right now and be able to magically use that shithole of a website from 1991 and actually successfully checkout before the show closes and/or I die from frustration.’ Sorry, but hey, what a weird show! If it was still open, I would have recommended checking it out but not paying too much.
The Minutes is a real-time-plus-flashback-also-in-real-time local council meeting (omg I’m forgetting what they are called in USA, what’s happened to me…borough meeting? it’s a small baby government of people who think they have a lot of power and honestly have more than they should) where the new guy is trying to play catch-up with WTAF is going on with this group. Noah Reid – Patrick from Schitt’s Creek – is beyond perfectly cast as the earnest newbie who you can tell makes dad jokes and is friendly, committed to doing his job well, and eager to correct people’s grammar (‘sometimes it’s who!!’).
Right from the start, you get a bad feeling about the council head Tracy Letts, who is just as incredible an actor as he is a writer. Even without the ominous thunderstorm, you’d know from his first scene where he’s kibbutzing politely over the refreshments with the new guy not to trust him, and when he asks the new guy what his baby daughter’s name is, you get the urge to yell “don’t tell him!!” It’s so subtle but he conveys that sinister sense that things aren’t what they seem.
Noah’s commitment to doing his job means not letting Tracy (we are screwing character names) and the rest of the council skirt past the whole ‘incident’ that happened the week before, the one that drove a fellow member to not show up tonight. Someone mentions it in passing, and Noah’s like ‘well what happened last week, remember, this is my first meeting?’ and everyone’s like ‘FORGET IT LA LA LA WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING’. So Noah has Jessie Mueller (NOT SINGING AT ALL) read the minutes (drink!) of the meeting from the week before, which is his right. She reads them and when it gets to the key part, apparently there’s a transcript she made that’s attached as an appendix. Guys, there’s a whole lot of talk about the technicalities of minutes and appendices and transcripts that the Tony-winner likes to do just for completeness sake, and it sounds like it would be a long sigh of a boring mess, but it’s actually gripping. You’re like YES READ THE F-ING TRANSCRIPT, THE APPENDIX IS PART OF THE MINUTES, OF COURSE IT’S PART OF IT!
What comes to light about the conflict the week before focuses on the man who isn’t at the present meeting, the council member with the conscience. Turns out he wanted the council to officially recognize the town’s terrible racist history, the truth that everyone ignores, that’s the opposite of what’s in the popular founding mythology and the town song. The real story is, as we guessed, full of slaughter of the Native population. All of this sounds very believable and without a doubt is the same story for many American towns. But taking this play’s treatment of this subject beyond the recognizable and into the symbolic is the strength of the connection this town, and this council, has to their fake history. Their unwillingness to give up their fake history is treated more like a necessity, a powerful all-encompassing metaphorical spirit that goes beyond what you’d expect in real life, but reflects the strength these false histories have over us. People like this cling to them when letting go would mean also losing a sense of balance in the world, the world they/we created where we benefit from the lies.
So they WILL NOT let them go! The play ends super weird, like war paint and hooting weird, and it’s a little unbelievable that Noah would fold so easily, but maybe I’m projecting. And sure it’s not (hopefully) representative of what happens at your average council meeting, but the sentiment at play is pretty much what’s going on in every town in America. We love a Tracy Letts joint to make us feel bad about the world!
