January 19, 2023
Questions I hope HEX answers before opening nightby Randi / December 14, 2021There are no excellent boiled potatoes, but the Ferrero Rocher tower will have to do.
It’s Theatre Thursday! (Well it was supposed to be but I forgot to publish so let’s just go with it!) Today’s show is the phenomenally fun Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) playing at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. As of publication it is one of the West End shows not closed due to Covid cases so go see it and have a laugh!
As a passionate devotee of Pride & Prejudice by way of the Colin Firth miniseries that gave way to the superior (will fight to defend) Keira/Macfadyen movie and all its subsequent instagram meme content, I am undoubtedly the target audience for this hilarious and goofy take on the classic, and yet I still was not prepared for how much fun I would have. I could spend 1000 words just saying “lol x was so funny….lol y was so funny…lol z was so funny” so to do that but in a less annoying way, I’ve made a list, I’m checking it twice*, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,** Santa Claus he doesn’tttt exiiiiist.
*lolz like I ever edit this blog
**nice people wear masks, naughty people who don’t wear masks should be getting a lump of coal shoved up their bums next week heyooo.
The Best Parts of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) (besides everything)
– The pre-show bits
Starting even from the pre-show bits as people were still going to the bar and finding their seats, I was cracking up. The cast desperately tried to get a cleaning glove down from the chandelier in wildly entertaining hijinks, all performed while they kept telling the audience “no we HAVE NOT started yet!” It made me giddy with hysterics. I was all in from the start.
– The use of modern music
At opportune moments throughout the play, the characters grabbed microphones and sang relevant, fun, and/or scathing overviews of the current situations. My favorite was probably Elizabeth grabbing the mic and singing “You’re So Vain” to Darcy at the Bingley Ball, a perfect theatrical moment. Does it count as a jukebox musical? Don’t worry about it.
– Literally everything Hannah Jarrett-Scott did
As Charles Bingley, Caroline Bingley, Charlotte Lucas, and other characters, HJS had me sobbing with laughter. She managed to embody a believable version of Bingley without being actually like him, instead choosing a kind of doltish pomposity by way of merely a jacket. Her Sister Bingley was my favorite, that bitch. And playing poor Charlotte as in love with Lizzie was clever and meaningful without being overly sad. The audience was in stitches whenever Hannah appeared, in whichever character’s hat. She was the gem of the show for me.
– Isobel McArthur’s Mrs. Bennet
Usually portrayed to infuriating you (well, me), Mrs. Bennet here was understandable and more agreeable if only because she was so damn funny. The only reason I didn’t love Isobel’s Darcy as much is merely because it wasn’t Matthew Macfadyen melting the screen. It was still a riot. I didn’t realize until after that this actress was Isobel McArthur as in the writer of this adaptation and co-director. People shouldn’t be so talented it’s just not right.
– Mary’s glasses
Poor fucking Mary.
– The lack of Kitty
Not having anyone even briefly don a cap as Kitty made me continuously cackle. She lifts right out!
– Every time Lydia appeared onstage
Tori Burgess’s portrayal of Lydia as an out of control twit of a party girl was too on the nose. Of course she’s be the one getting drunk first. She was played exactly like so many girls I see out and about in the city on the weekends and it was glorious.
– The props
The Ferrero Rocher tower. The chandelier. The horse (below). Everything was so funny. Darn I said I wouldn’t just keep saying it over and over but really what else can I say; also it’s been a few weeks and I forgot to take notes, so.
– Mr. Bennet
Absolute genius to have him ‘portrayed’ like that, and also a scathing critique of a character that usually gets a pass simply because he isn’t annoying like his loudmouth wife. At least the mother has a purpose to her behaviour, trying to get FIVE DAUGHTERS MARRIED. Can you imagine.
– The de Bourgh family values
Every time Christina Gordon’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh appeared in her insane and elaborate getup, it was a riot, but the best was the stupid/clever joke about the song “Lady in Red” by her relative, you know, Chris de Burgh. I love when I get stupid jokes and this was no exception. Ridiculous.
– Jane on the gd horse.
As Jane traveled on horseback to the Netherfield at her mother’s urging (you know the part, when it rains and she has to stay there for a few days because rain was a death sentence back then), Christina Gordon kicking her heels in time as she sang “At Last” atop that giant fake horse was one of the funniest bits of physical comedy on stage in years. I am cracking up here just thinking about it.
Do yourself a favor and go see this if you haven’t yet. It’s at the Criterion, the one right in the center of Piccadilly Circus. Sit house right (stage left) in the orchestra and you’ll be closest to the bathrooms by the bar. It’s a bit of a cave, this theatre, with all levels underground, and you can sometimes hear the tube, but this show is so much fun you (I) will (did) forget that you’re (I’m) claustrophobic.
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James McAvoy is Fine, but Cyrano is Bloated & Exhausting
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the return of Jimmy Mac in Cyrano de Bergerac, which was hiatused for the pandemic.
You know in season 2 of The Good Place (spoiler alert) when Eleanor is seated at a jazz club and her ‘soulmate’ Sebastian announces to her, his ‘sweet dewdrop’, that he has written her a three-hour spoken word jazz opera and Eleanor stands up and goes “okay no….no version of heaven for anyone would ever include three hours of this…we’re in the bad place, aren’t we?” I thought of that scene 11 times during this production of Cyrano de Bergerac. Except the glimpse we got of Sebastian’s jazz opera, like him scatting “my dewdrop/cream of the crop/top to the bop to the bop to the top” was super entertaining, while this play was not. It was a real trip for biscuits and now we’re all wet, daddy-o.
This version of the classic play is rewritten (by Martin Crimp; sorry Martin but it does seem that I’m alone in hating this, so, no worries for you) to be entirely in hard-rhyming ‘modern rap’, which could be cool but unfortunately it is incredibly cringeworthy. It is an interesting idea, I will give it that, and there are a good 15 minutes or so, but overall it is…annoying. While the first act does have some wonderful lines, mainly delivered by James McAvoy in the title role, the script largely loses its focus, cramming in endless words that don’t accomplish anything (and unnecessary beatboxing, omg, so unnecessary), and feels forking exhausting. James is fine, great even at times (especially in his accent work/impression of Christian, lolz), but underserved by the script. There’s a lot of heavy-handed emphasis of simple rhymes, geared in a way that clearly wanted to impress but wasn’t impressive, like assuming that the fact that it’s rapped or rhyming is enough in and of itself, when of course that cannot be the case. So so much of the endless hours in this theatre reminded me, actually, heavily, 100%, of Inigo and Fezzik’s whole schtick: “probably he means no…HARM’; ‘he’s very very short on…CHARM!” Except not adorable and funny. The skillful lines, few and far between, are entirely in McAvoy’s hands in the first section of the play. He performs them well, but it was not enough to lift the heavy fog sense of being tortured.
In addition, Roxanne is the worst. Not the actress, who from my nosebleed seat and bad eyes looked like Zendaya and is also fine. But how the character is written and presented. She makes a big fucking to do about how she needs her men to write her long love letters that prove their eloquence and elegance with words and she’s like ‘no, make it longer! more WORDS! GREAT WORDS! 18 PAGES, FRONT AND BACK’ but then when she speaks, she makes no sense. The writer uses her to shoehorn in bits about progressive issues like gender neutrality and womens rights when they have absolutely no shoring up, just like they wanted to tick the boxes of ‘oh did we mention this? let’s just mention it here’. It feels cheap that way, and completely undercuts a character who professes to care deeply about intelligence. Like when she enters the war camp and everyone is like ‘what tf are you doing here omg leave!’ and she is like ‘oh how dare you say that I shouldn’t be here because I’m a woman, and how dare you question how I made it here because I’m a woman’ and it’s like, jfc, they’re questioning you being there and getting in there because it’s A WAR ZONE. Her words continually fail any sensible character development. The most egregious example is at the end, when she has clearly been miserable for 15 years and pining over her husband and adrift, but in talking about him to Cyrano she says detached vulgarities about ‘fucking’ and stuff like ‘we didn’t even fuck!’ which was so jarring to hear in a scene that was supposed to be emotional, and so impossible to buy from this character at this point in her life. An absolute mess of writing. I do not understand the intent of using such ill-fitting language to try to represent a mourning, broken woman. It instead made her seem a still immature young person with no depth, not a woman 15 years later who has suffered so much. Again, this made NO SENSE.
I was a little confused by the portrayal of the famously good-looking Christian, who I thought was usually nice but dumb (Phoebe voice: “oh I’m sorry that’s ‘pretty dumb'”) but he was a full-on ass in most of this. Because Cyrano promised Roxanne he’d protect Christian for her, Cyrano responds to his assery like ‘hey you’re brave being a total shithead to me, let’s be best friends’ which I guess shows Cyrano can be the bigger person but whew. No thx. Other reviews liked to point out the homoeroticism in this version, which is a really generous interpretation of 5 seconds worth of play at the end when — the two men kiss, a shocking addition to this story but one that did NOTHING. By all means explore that relationship, please, that could be so interesting. But don’t just have them kiss for the hell of it (another box to tick off??) once and do nothing else with it. It was so random and was forgotten as quickly as it began. It’s such an unsophisticated way to do something different without actually committing to it having meaning.
The whole thing was so bloated, at least an hour too long. Act II is entirely long pauses. In fact, the second act is only one hour, but it felt like days. DAYS. So much indulgent and ineffective quiet and delay and I really almost screamed. Also, the blackouts – how is it legal to also blackout the emergency exit signs??? does this country have laws?
At times I truly thought I would scream. I almost left several times but I didn’t want husbo to worry/come after me if he wanted to stay (turns out: he was also flabbergasted). I mean, in theory this is an interesting idea for a modern rapping adaptation, but in execution and writing it was such a cringey disaster to such an extent that I would definitely believe you if y’all dropped the facade and some all-powerful being confirmed that I was indeed being tortured and my skin melted off without my noticing. Could you even believe that? Watch this: I BELIEVE IT.
INFORMATION
It runs 2 hours 50 minutes as stated on the website, but it feels longer, like maybe 9 hours and also you’re on fire.
There are signs asking audience members to wear masks but honestly, this was the worst showing YET for mask-wearing. Truly for shame. (At least they do check vaccine passports on entry.) Additionally, there were several groups of people talking throughout the show, and I don’t mean whispering. Honestly the worst audience I’ve experienced in a long time on all counts, which seems to be an upsetting trend.
The bar didn’t have pitchers of water out; you have to wait in the long line and ask for a cup of water, which is crap.
Sweet Charity at the Donmar: Can This Retroactively Win the Olivier?
The minute you walk in the joint, you can tell this was a show of distinctionnnn A REAL BIG SPENDER. Okay I’ll try to stop doing that (no promises), but man I’m not lying about the game being ON as soon as you enter the Donmar, all redone in the style of Andy Warhol’s 1950s factory. Sure the style redo doesn’t technically add anything for the story, but this specific anachronism doesn’t harm the story at all so I have no issue with their going for a cool look. And every other inch of this stunning, shocking, poignant revival is pitch perfect, not only serving the story but improving its meaning and deepening its emotional reach, in a way I never ever would have guessed was possible from knowing this show in previous incarnations.
As soon as the beat dropped (in my heart #jasonmendoza) and Anne-Marie Duff’s Charity started speaking to the pace of her quick-beating heart, jumping too quickly at any semblance of affection (as well as into a BUBBLE PIT LAKE, want) and latching onto it though it was always too slippery to grasp, I was in awe. No longer simply a good-hearted, down-on-her-luck heroine, we’re finally reminded after too many bland, uninspired revivals that Charity is a tragic character, in a fully heartbreaking tragic tale like the old school Greeks did. Charity is no simple sweet gal; she is a poor aging woman who life continues to beat like a piñata yet she always retains hope that the piñata is full of candy so she’s like ‘I guess the beating from life is okay because maybe candy?’ but it never is candy, poor sweet Charity, it never is. It’s always more and more unfair bullshit and she deserves better and NEVER GETS IT and finally, thanks to Anne-Marie Duff in a true masterclass of performance and character understanding, that’s the Charity portrayed in all her pitiful, tragic glory.
Josie Rourke’s meticulous, brilliant direction uses every inch of Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’ score and Neil Simon’s book to prove that this show is one of the great tragedies of musical theatre, exemplified by the super-slowed down version of “Big Spender” that, in its almost painstakingly slower meter, let the grit and devastation and more than anything desperation of the taxi dancers fill in all the slower gaps in the beat. You could tell the audience, recognizing the song, wanted to tap their feet and bop along in their seats, but Josie was like NO, SIT STILL, IT’S DEPRESSING. It was great. The other most well-known song in the show, though, was pure adorable joy, when Duff perfected, really, I mean, perfected, “If My Friends Could See Me Now”, when she finds herself in the apartment of a famous movie star (a fantastic Martin Marquez). With her scratchy voice that reminded me at times of Alice Ripley in Next to Normal (though with more optimism than Diana) in how it can use its jagged edges to cut directly to your core, Duff made this moment a delight, with nothing threatening to take it from her, like with all her future moments of happiness.
Another standout song, a song that I had forgotten about, was the determined number between Charity, ensemble standout Lizzy Connelly, and a great Debbie Kurup, “There’s Gotta be Something Better Than This”, a resolution among three pretty defeated women to ‘get up, get out’ and live a better life. Sharpening the emotional impact of what was already flawless was the painful reprise at the end, a knife through all our hearts that were already BROKEN ENOUGH from the preceding actions, jfc were Coleman and Simon and freaking Dorothy trying to kill us??
On top of all this, they also managed to include the most provocative version of Oscar (Arthur Darvill). Instead of just a one-note ‘nice’ guy who, like all ‘nice’ guys, ends up not being so nice, he was the epitome of toxic masculinity, representing in his averageness all the regular men who believe #notallmen yet still cannot condone women who live life on their own terms, women who don’t fit inside their controlling, oppressive box. Instead of feeling bad for Charity that Oscar isn’t what she’d hoped, you feel angry at Oscar for being such a weak man (and, though you hate to see her sad, glad that Charity found out before she devoted her life to him).
Honestly, if every revival brought half as much heart and inspiration to its reworking of classics, we would have endless amazing, transformative theatre. Rourke’s Sweet Charity sets a new benchmark that I hope future revivals can meet, but they’re gonna have a hard time trying.
