January 19, 2023
Anyone Can Whistle at the Southwark: A Star Turn, A Weird Showby Randi / May 4, 2022Today’s show is Zorro, playing at the Charing Cross Theatre (under the arches) until May 28.
Zorro the Musical, has a lot going for it: some great musical numbers, a few powerful scenes, an energy and excitement that runs through the theatre and audience. So, the experience as a whole is not bad; this is the rare experience where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — and the parts could so easily be improved. But they do need to be. The show needs a good editing rinse-through, possibly with the services of a dramaturg (as always, I volunteer as tribute). Overall, it’s entertaining, and the audience has a blast, but the story does not pass the smell test, and all aspects could benefit from some more work.
The familiar story of Zorro (which I kind of didn’t know; I actually didn’t see the CZJ movie even though I grew up with the poster in my basement) starts with an important man in a Los Angeles pueblo sometime in the 1800s sending his young son Diego to Spain to get an education (opposite expected direction) so he will learn to take over command or kingship or whatever kind of leader he is. The older son Ramon is pisssssed because who has ever heard of bloodline succession that doesn’t go to the eldest male? Ramon calls bullshit! Come on Ramon, take off your shirt and tell us more! Diego goes to Spain, falls in with a group of gypsies, and has a gay old time drinking and dancing and performing and above all having a lottttt of hhhhhrrromantic times. (That’s my Spanish accent in print.) Meanwhile, Ramon takes over control of the pueblo after all because TURNS OUT, if the only person who can stop you is send to another continent, you can apparently fork up your dad and then take shit over willy nilly.
Interrupting Diego’s Spanish funtimes is Luisa, his childhood friend who we saw as a wee puppet and honestly I assumed was the boys’ sister until it came out that adult Luisa was in love with Diego even though she only knew him as a child. She boated over to Spain to drag his ass back to California to stop his brother’s authoritarian rule, because no one else had the courage to do so, which actually is highly believable. Diego goes with her but so does his entire gypsy gang! Alright sure! What fun! The portrayal of the gypsies feeeeels problematic, as does the whole ‘this rich Californian made us gypsies who we are, he’s our savior!’ feel, but I guess I don’t know enough to say more.
Here’s where we start needing more to the story. We see the three baby puppets play together for like, 10 seconds. We need more of this origin story for anything that follows to hold up. Nothing is established to make it clear that a) Luisa is in love with Diego and is not in fact his little sister, b) Diego cares about the pueblo enough to forge a lifelong connection to the land despite his words, and mostly c) Ramon is a psychopathic villain who doesn’t feel like his father loves him, even though the father seems fine and is as nice as someone can be while saying ‘I just don’t think you’re the right person to rule this land’, which is fair. It’s hard to believe that this kid would become pure evil just because his father says he’d be perfect for a DIFFERENT enormously powerful position.
As for b), Diego initially has no desire to return to Los Angeles with Luisa. He’s happy as can be partying and living freely with his friends in Spain. I mean yeah, IT SOUNDS GREAT. So then what changes for him to suddenly feel a connection to the pueblo, a responsibility to save it, and the courage to go full Pimpernel as the masked savior El Zorro? SHORE IT UP FOR ME, BABIES.
As for a), I need the character of Luisa to be developed…at all. She is a complete Cosette, where we are told that she’s so great and brave and amazing but we never see her do literally anything to merit her reputation. Show us, please, I’m begging. Why should we care about her, or want her to end up with our hero, when the Eponine of the show (the gypsy Inez) is the coolest fucking person for MILES? It’s also not clear (or understandable) why Diego and Inez who were happy little FBs in Spain are instantly no longer a couple as soon as their feet touch American soil, all ‘what happens in Spain stays in Spain’, when they seemed to have a pretty good thing going and, like I said, she’s the coolest person around.
Musically, I would love for the differences between Luisa and Inez to be highlighted just as they were for Cosette and Eponine, meaning Luisa should be changed from a belting role to a soprano. With both of the female leads belting (or trying to belt) pretty much 100% of the time, it’s too much of the same sound and it doesn’t help to differentiate them. Also, belting should be used sparingly and not as a sub for character definition.
The story is buoyed with well-fitting Spanish-style music from the Gipsy Kings, who give some of their most famous songs to the show….is this a jukebox musical? I think some of the songs are (must be) written for this, so it’s like a half juke, weird! I recognized several songs from, of all things, the ‘Bedazzled’ soundtrack (amazing movie btw). The highlights by far include the big cantina number led by Inez, ‘Bamboleo’, so fun, and the quintet of Spanish women wailing in the beginning which I just forking loved. The individual numbers don’t achieve as much and could use another pass.
The second act is a little slower and has a bunch ready to be cut. But it includes the most powerful dramatic scene of the show and the best book scene — the cave scene when the truth about the father is revealed, which is done masterfully as it builds to a climax as the energy and drama build and build and thennnnnnnnnn all forward momentum comes screeching to a halt for a random ten minute+ scene out of Stomp with the chorus doing meh choreo and losing all dramatic motion in the plot. It was nigh infuriating to finally have the book achieve its potential, all for what it established to dissipate for no good reason. Le sigh!
While we are talking about Act II book improvements, I think it’s a cop-out for Ramon to pull a Jud Fry. Someone just do a murder, it’s justified.
It’s also hard to believe that Ramon would NEVER notice that his brother is only not right at his side when the mysterious Zorro appears. I think it would be SO funny if they treated that humorously. Would def lighten the mood and help the show settle on the right tone between lighthearted romp or serious drama.
The highlights of the show include Marc Pickering (always great and hilarious) as Sergeant Garcia, our comic relief, and Phoebe Panaretos as Inez. We saw Diego’s understudy (I believe Maxwell Griffin), who did a fine job and it was lovely to see how much the cast supported him. A highlight that wasn’t meant to be was hearing all these white British people attempt Spanish accents (grathias for that). With more work on character development, making the book make more sense (and cutting prob 15-20 mins), improving some of the songs, and figuring out the buttons (no one knew when to clap), this could be a great show.
INFORMATION
Mask total: 14
Best seat in the house: M1, mine, the aisle in the second row (it’s a traverse stage) right by the exit.
It gets HOT in this place, they really need better ventilation and not just because of the mask count.
Start time: 19:30 (19:35ish as usual)
Act I ended: 20:44 (long!)
Act II ended: 22:12
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London’s “Caroline, or Change”: I BELIEVED IN YOU! WE ALL BELIEVED IN YOU!
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we’re talking about the Hampstead Theatre’s production of “Caroline, or Change” playing until April 21. It transfers to the West End in November.
I was always obsessed with musical theatre, and in 2004 I could finally travel alone to NYC whenever I wanted/whenever my college schedule allowed and see Broadway shows more often. It was a big year – that was the year of ‘Wicked’, ‘Avenue Q’, ‘The Boy From Oz’, Alfred Molina’s ‘Fiddler’, Donna Murphy’s ‘Wonderful Town’, Audra in ‘Raisin in the Sun’. Such a busy season! I got to see Idina in ‘Wicked’, but another new show with a supposedly killer leading lady role slipped under my radar. That was ‘Caroline, or Change’, starring Tonya Pinkins as Caroline, a Tony-winning Anika Noni Rose as her daughter Emmie, and a score by Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner. It seemed pretty beloved, an interesting civil rights-age drama taking place in Louisiana, about a black maid working for a Jewish family but also with singing electrical appliances. How did that work, I wondered? It remained high on my list of shows I wanted to see someday, and so when the current English revival moved closer to the West End – to the Hampstead Theatre up north of the city – I did a little jig and said halleluyer, because I would finally see it.
It was not good.
I feel terrible saying it, because I know so many theatre fans like myself really love it, but I do not understand why. I wanted to love this show SO BADLY and no matter how much I was putting out there, hoping that it would offer me just the eeniest bit of love back, it gave me nothing. The book was a mess. How can you mess up the drama and complexities of relationships between black people and their white bosses, during the ‘60s, in the American south, right when JFK gets assassinated? I mean come on, that setting is PRIME for dramatic mining. Well, you mess it up by trying to shoehorn into a single show the stories about the relationship between the black maid and the white child of the family she works for, AND how the white boy’s mother had recently died, AND how the boy’s musician father remarried his wife’s best friend so they would have a wife/mother, AND how the white boy is handling the new mother, AND how the maid is handling the new boss, AND how the maid is dealing with raising her kids alone, AND how the maid’s kids are growing up, AND how the white boy’s grandparents from each side clash with each other over politics, AND how those grandparents conflict with the maid’s daughter over politics, AND how the maid has to deal with her pride, AND how the maid is a real B word to her fellow maids that she sees at the bus stop and refuses to be civil toward, AND how the other maid that we see like maybe twice is going to night school and wearing bobby socks, AND how the moon is an actual character AND how the electrical appliances in the basement where the maid spends most of her time SING AND DANCE and it’s all supposed to mean something? Oh and how the one thing that bonds the maid and the white boy is that she lets him light her daily cigarette.
That’s a lot of story threads that instead of braiding together and forming a solid yarn, they diminish into little wisps and amount to nothing. All these little nothing wisps mashed together mean that there’s simultaneously wayyy too much going on and yet there’s zero emotional heft, zero connection with the material when there should be loads. I know ‘Angels in America’ is a masterpiece but I’m a little wary of seeing it now, Tony Toni Tone. It was like this was going for ‘Love, Actually’ with that many threads but instead it gave us ‘Valentine’s Day’. And like the stories in that movie, you end up not being satisfied with any thread and walking out thinking it was pedestrian at best. If they focused on the relationship between Caroline and Noah, and how Noah imagined his maid’s family life versus what it was actually like (the one minute where they do that is the most compelling part), then we’d have a worthwhile story. Oh, and if Caroline were anything close to being sympathetic or even a little kind. But she’s not. She’s been through a lot of hardship, and as a black woman in the ‘60s south her hardships will never end, but that’s not enough of a reason to accept her being a vessel of pure hatred towards everyone around her. I get that anti-heroes are popular nowadays, but they usually have an appealing trait of some sort, or the whisper of charm or a sense of humor or something. Caroline gives us nothing, and maybe the point is that she doesn’t have to, and in real life she wouldn’t have to, she wouldn’t owe anyone anything, but if you want me to care about this character in a play she’s going to have to be worth caring about. If we’re supposed to feel something besides revulsion, there’s no opportunity or reason for doing so.
The main story is: Caroline is the maid working for the Gellmans, a jewish family with a little boy named Noah, who is dealing with his mother’s loss and his new stepmother, Rose. You think at first that Caroline and Noah might have a sweet relationship, bonding in the basement after school as Caroline does her work, but she’s pretty mean to him all the time. Their one thing, like I said above, is that she lets Noah light her cigarette and he’s like ‘oh boy oh boy!’ and she’s like ‘hurry up I need a smoke then get out of my face’ and we’re like this is neither cute nor sweet nor appropriate for this kid, also his mother died from smoking. The stepmother, Rose, is upset with Noah because he always leaves his money in his pockets, which Caroline finds every day as she does the laundry, and she fills the bleach cup with it and returns it to the Gellmans, every penny of it. Rose tells Caroline, you know what, to teach Noah to value his money, let’s say that everything he leaves in his pockets, everything in the bleach cup at the end of the week, is yours to keep. This is difficult for Caroline to accept because it makes her seem like a beggar, scrounging for pennies, while Rose doesn’t see the problem with it. The extra money would help Caroline so much, but taking it is a huge blow to her pride. And so the ‘change’ of the title is both the change in the times and the literal change in the bleach cup. It’s kind of trite. Caroline has it hard, with four kids, one at war, and an ex-husband who was abusive. She’s understandably mean to everyone – her employers, Noah, the other maids in the neighborhood – but just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s forgivable. She kind of sucks, and then at the end, as she gets meaner and meaner and for some reason unleashes her rage on Noah, she’s reprehensible.
Tony Kushner also wrote the lyrics, and they had me cringing in my seat. There were so many clunkers. I remember in the opening one of the grandfather’s sings about his deceased daughter’s smoking: “It killed her. She died. It killed her. She’s dead.” JESUS. Every other song mentioned how in Louisiana, the dead – and Caroline as she’s always in the basement – aren’t underground, but underwater. It’s kind of poetic and sets a certain mood, right? Yeah, the first 4 times. When you’re getting to the 20th, 30th mention of how we aren’t underground but underwater, it’s no longer profound or elegant or anything other than repetitive and annoying. We also hear a lot about how Noah’s mother played the bassoon. That’s an interesting fact, I guess. They talk about it a lot. Like a lot a lot. It does not seem that important the 15th time.
I wish that I could say Jeanine Tesori’s score was great despite Tony Kushner’s abysmal lyrics, but it wasn’t. Everything sounded the same and that same was pretty dull. It’s a real shame because I love Tesori’s other works – ‘Fun Home’ is a masterpiece, a true masterpiece, but I guess partnering with Lisa Kron was required for that one to shine. She wrote the great ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, with lyricist Dick Scanlon. And she wrote ‘Violet’, which I adore, with Brian Crawley, and ‘Shrek’, which is surprisingly magical, with David Lindsay-Abaire. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t have a steady writing partner, and she needed one for ‘Caroline’. She’s such a legendary, wonderful musician and I just don’t get what she was doing here. The only song that I remembered when I left was the one when Noah sings, revolving round and round the stage, ‘On the first day day day Caroline stayed away way way and she didn’t come back back back and she didn’t come back back back.’ Repeat 5 times. And yes the melody is just as you think, like just a childhood rhyme. Omg it was painful. Now it’s in my head again dammit.
When I first realized I was trying incredibly hard, too hard, to enjoy this show, I figured it’s because the book and score, the bones of the show, are weak and inadequate. I assumed this production did the best it could with what meager bones it was working with, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Directing this show is a huge challenge, and as I’ve only seen it once I can’t say what is this production’s doing differently. But I can say that the tone was all over the place, impossible to pin down. We have all the troubled relationships, all the misery and despair of the south, and then we have the bubbly singing washing machine, the terrifying singing dryer, the singing trio of girls (with ever-changing matching outfits that were impressive) representing the radio. At first I thought that was cute, and I assumed that the show would be the sort that could handle such bizarre portrayals of home goods, but it isn’t. Things only fell apart more when the moon arrived – the actress sits in a moon-shaped seat and floats through the rafters for a good chunk of the show – and still refuses to make any sense when paired with the dismal realism of the rest of the show. Nothing ever really gels, and yes a huge reason for that is because of the material, but the direction doesn’t help at all, nor do the performances, and I really hate saying that because this show has a great cast. But while Abiona Omonua’s Emmie was winning and adorable, Anika Noni Rose has that incredible voice that could really rip into her songs and make more out of them. I didn’t even realize until I looked at the programme after the fact that Rose was played by Lauren Ward, as in Miss Honey from the original West End and Broadway “Matilda” cast. Just had no idea. It’s hard to shine in that role. The Noah we saw was Aaron Gelkoff, a really talented kid who successfully made us feel for Noah even though he’s super annoying. And I always like Ako Mitchell but playing the dryer is just weird; there’s not much he can do with it even though it’s somehow one of the biggest parts.
But the biggest issue is with Caroline. She’s played by one of the few West End actors I actually really like, Sharon D. Clarke, who has been exceptional in everything I’ve seen her in. I thought she was fine here, making do with an unrewarding role, playing a woman who hates everyone and so we hate her back. But since seeing it, I’ve fallen down the youtube rabbit hole (fun fact: ‘Rabbit Hole’ was written by Tesori’s ‘Shrek’ writing partner Lindsay-Abaire) to watch videos of the original Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Sharon was very one-note the entire time, but Pinkins adds layers that made it just a little easier to not hate her the entire time. Pinkins’s rendition of the one big song, “Lot’s Wife”, the 11 o’clock number, shows so much more emotion. Instead of just seething with anger and resentment, Pinkins’s performance shows anguish and hope and regret and a wish with her entire being that she could be better. Sharon’s Caroline was just stone-cold anger and hate; I got nothing else from her, and I think that’s a huge reason why it didn’t work for me.
Of course, Caroline isn’t a likable character, as written, and so there’s not much the actress can do with her anyway. She has no positive attributes to make an audience root for her. And instead of coming around at the end, maybe giving Noah a hug or even an encouraging word to show that their relationship is warmer than it seems, she unleashes all her venom onto him, all the hate that bubbles within her, and tells him that “Hell is where Jews go when they die.” I choked a little bit on the pure hatred that fills this statement — and the rest of the audience laughed. And I don’t mean nervous, tense laughter; I mean they belly laughed like this was a funny joke. I ran this by my Broadway people to see if it happens usually in other productions and, except for one person who said that a few people laughed when she saw it but it was really disturbing and most people gasped, everyone was like, ‘what, no that’s not a laugh line, that is so fucked up.’ It really is. Is Europe so awash in anti-Semitism again that London audiences are laughing at stuff like this? I’m horrified, as a NORMAL person would be, FFS. Anyway, after Caroline says a line that that to a little child, you lose whatever care you had for her and since she never makes amends for it or any of her bad behavior, it just loses you completely.
Even though this is all prettayyy prettayyy negative, it’s not entirely painful to watch. The cast is good, the vocals are all good. The story, or hodgepodge of potential stories, just really didn’t work for me, no matter how badly I wanted it to. I wonder if it will change at all before the West End transfer, but I don’t know how much of what’s problematic they actually could improve.
AUDIENCE
Clearly fucked up and terrifying.
HAMPSTEAD THEATRE
Whoever designed the Hampstead Theatre is batshit crazy. The only bathrooms are by the entrance, behind the box office. That’s REAL DUMB. God people are paid to do jobs like this, I can’t even believe it.
The bathrooms are cool though, with each stall featuring a full-length portrait of a famous actress from a role played at this theatre. Well, all famous actresses save for Simon Russell Beale, who is pictured from a show where he played a woman. Fun times.
I feel terrible saying it, because I know so many theatre fans like myself really love it, but I do not understand why. I wanted to love this show SO BADLY and no matter how much I was putting out there, hoping that it would offer me just the eeniest bit of love back, it gave me nothing. The book was a mess. How can you mess up the drama and complexities of relationships between black people and their white bosses, during the ‘60s, in the American south, right when JFK gets assassinated? I mean come on, that setting is PRIME for dramatic mining. Well, you mess it up by trying to shoehorn into a single show the stories about the relationship between the black maid and the white child of the family she works for, AND how the white boy’s mother had recently died, AND how the boy’s musician father remarried his wife’s best friend so they would have a wife/mother, AND how the white boy is handling the new mother, AND how the maid is handling the new boss, AND how the maid is dealing with raising her kids alone, AND how the maid’s kids are growing up, AND how the white boy’s grandparents from each side clash with each other over politics, AND how those grandparents conflict with the maid’s daughter over politics, AND how the maid has to deal with her pride, AND how the maid is a real B word to her fellow maids that she sees at the bus stop and refuses to be civil toward, AND how the other maid that we see like maybe twice is going to night school and wearing bobby socks, AND how the moon is an actual character AND how the electrical appliances in the basement where the maid spends most of her time SING AND DANCE and it’s all supposed to mean something? Oh and how the one thing that bonds the maid and the white boy is that she lets him light her daily cigarette.
That’s a lot of story threads that instead of braiding together and forming a solid yarn, they diminish into little wisps and amount to nothing. All these little nothing wisps mashed together mean that there’s simultaneously wayyy too much going on and yet there’s zero emotional heft, zero connection with the material when there should be loads. I know ‘Angels in America’ is a masterpiece but I’m a little wary of seeing it now, Tony Toni Tone. It was like this was going for ‘Love, Actually’ with that many threads but instead it gave us ‘Valentine’s Day’. And like the stories in that movie, you end up not being satisfied with any thread and walking out thinking it was pedestrian at best. If they focused on the relationship between Caroline and Noah, and how Noah imagined his maid’s family life versus what it was actually like (the one minute where they do that is the most compelling part), then we’d have a worthwhile story. Oh, and if Caroline were anything close to being sympathetic or even a little kind. But she’s not. She’s been through a lot of hardship, and as a black woman in the ‘60s south her hardships will never end, but that’s not enough of a reason to accept her being a vessel of pure hatred towards everyone around her. I get that anti-heroes are popular nowadays, but they usually have an appealing trait of some sort, or the whisper of charm or a sense of humor or something. Caroline gives us nothing, and maybe the point is that she doesn’t have to, and in real life she wouldn’t have to, she wouldn’t owe anyone anything, but if you want me to care about this character in a play she’s going to have to be worth caring about. If we’re supposed to feel something besides revulsion, there’s no opportunity or reason for doing so.
The main story is: Caroline is the maid working for the Gellmans, a jewish family with a little boy named Noah, who is dealing with his mother’s loss and his new stepmother, Rose. You think at first that Caroline and Noah might have a sweet relationship, bonding in the basement after school as Caroline does her work, but she’s pretty mean to him all the time. Their one thing, like I said above, is that she lets Noah light her cigarette and he’s like ‘oh boy oh boy!’ and she’s like ‘hurry up I need a smoke then get out of my face’ and we’re like this is neither cute nor sweet nor appropriate for this kid, also his mother died from smoking. The stepmother, Rose, is upset with Noah because he always leaves his money in his pockets, which Caroline finds every day as she does the laundry, and she fills the bleach cup with it and returns it to the Gellmans, every penny of it. Rose tells Caroline, you know what, to teach Noah to value his money, let’s say that everything he leaves in his pockets, everything in the bleach cup at the end of the week, is yours to keep. This is difficult for Caroline to accept because it makes her seem like a beggar, scrounging for pennies, while Rose doesn’t see the problem with it. The extra money would help Caroline so much, but taking it is a huge blow to her pride. And so the ‘change’ of the title is both the change in the times and the literal change in the bleach cup. It’s kind of trite. Caroline has it hard, with four kids, one at war, and an ex-husband who was abusive. She’s understandably mean to everyone – her employers, Noah, the other maids in the neighborhood – but just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s forgivable. She kind of sucks, and then at the end, as she gets meaner and meaner and for some reason unleashes her rage on Noah, she’s reprehensible.
Tony Kushner also wrote the lyrics, and they had me cringing in my seat. There were so many clunkers. I remember in the opening one of the grandfather’s sings about his deceased daughter’s smoking: “It killed her. She died. It killed her. She’s dead.” JESUS. Every other song mentioned how in Louisiana, the dead – and Caroline as she’s always in the basement – aren’t underground, but underwater. It’s kind of poetic and sets a certain mood, right? Yeah, the first 4 times. When you’re getting to the 20th, 30th mention of how we aren’t underground but underwater, it’s no longer profound or elegant or anything other than repetitive and annoying. We also hear a lot about how Noah’s mother played the bassoon. That’s an interesting fact, I guess. They talk about it a lot. Like a lot a lot. It does not seem that important the 15th time.
I wish that I could say Jeanine Tesori’s score was great despite Tony Kushner’s abysmal lyrics, but it wasn’t. Everything sounded the same and that same was pretty dull. It’s a real shame because I love Tesori’s other works – ‘Fun Home’ is a masterpiece, a true masterpiece, but I guess partnering with Lisa Kron was required for that one to shine. She wrote the great ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, with lyricist Dick Scanlon. And she wrote ‘Violet’, which I adore, with Brian Crawley, and ‘Shrek’, which is surprisingly magical, with David Lindsay-Abaire. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t have a steady writing partner, and she needed one for ‘Caroline’. She’s such a legendary, wonderful musician and I just don’t get what she was doing here. The only song that I remembered when I left was the one when Noah sings, revolving round and round the stage, ‘On the first day day day Caroline stayed away way way and she didn’t come back back back and she didn’t come back back back.’ Repeat 5 times. And yes the melody is just as you think, like just a childhood rhyme. Omg it was painful. Now it’s in my head again dammit.
When I first realized I was trying incredibly hard, too hard, to enjoy this show, I figured it’s because the book and score, the bones of the show, are weak and inadequate. I assumed this production did the best it could with what meager bones it was working with, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Directing this show is a huge challenge, and as I’ve only seen it once I can’t say what is this production’s doing differently. But I can say that the tone was all over the place, impossible to pin down. We have all the troubled relationships, all the misery and despair of the south, and then we have the bubbly singing washing machine, the terrifying singing dryer, the singing trio of girls (with ever-changing matching outfits that were impressive) representing the radio. At first I thought that was cute, and I assumed that the show would be the sort that could handle such bizarre portrayals of home goods, but it isn’t. Things only fell apart more when the moon arrived – the actress sits in a moon-shaped seat and floats through the rafters for a good chunk of the show – and still refuses to make any sense when paired with the dismal realism of the rest of the show. Nothing ever really gels, and yes a huge reason for that is because of the material, but the direction doesn’t help at all, nor do the performances, and I really hate saying that because this show has a great cast. But while Abiona Omonua’s Emmie was winning and adorable, Anika Noni Rose has that incredible voice that could really rip into her songs and make more out of them. I didn’t even realize until I looked at the programme after the fact that Rose was played by Lauren Ward, as in Miss Honey from the original West End and Broadway “Matilda” cast. Just had no idea. It’s hard to shine in that role. The Noah we saw was Aaron Gelkoff, a really talented kid who successfully made us feel for Noah even though he’s super annoying. And I always like Ako Mitchell but playing the dryer is just weird; there’s not much he can do with it even though it’s somehow one of the biggest parts.
But the biggest issue is with Caroline. She’s played by one of the few West End actors I actually really like, Sharon D. Clarke, who has been exceptional in everything I’ve seen her in. I thought she was fine here, making do with an unrewarding role, playing a woman who hates everyone and so we hate her back. But since seeing it, I’ve fallen down the youtube rabbit hole (fun fact: ‘Rabbit Hole’ was written by Tesori’s ‘Shrek’ writing partner Lindsay-Abaire) to watch videos of the original Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Sharon was very one-note the entire time, but Pinkins adds layers that made it just a little easier to not hate her the entire time. Pinkins’s rendition of the one big song, “Lot’s Wife”, the 11 o’clock number, shows so much more emotion. Instead of just seething with anger and resentment, Pinkins’s performance shows anguish and hope and regret and a wish with her entire being that she could be better. Sharon’s Caroline was just stone-cold anger and hate; I got nothing else from her, and I think that’s a huge reason why it didn’t work for me.
Of course, Caroline isn’t a likable character, as written, and so there’s not much the actress can do with her anyway. She has no positive attributes to make an audience root for her. And instead of coming around at the end, maybe giving Noah a hug or even an encouraging word to show that their relationship is warmer than it seems, she unleashes all her venom onto him, all the hate that bubbles within her, and tells him that “Hell is where Jews go when they die.” I choked a little bit on the pure hatred that fills this statement — and the rest of the audience laughed. And I don’t mean nervous, tense laughter; I mean they belly laughed like this was a funny joke. I ran this by my Broadway people to see if it happens usually in other productions and, except for one person who said that a few people laughed when she saw it but it was really disturbing and most people gasped, everyone was like, ‘what, no that’s not a laugh line, that is so fucked up.’ It really is. Is Europe so awash in anti-Semitism again that London audiences are laughing at stuff like this? I’m horrified, as a NORMAL person would be, FFS. Anyway, after Caroline says a line that that to a little child, you lose whatever care you had for her and since she never makes amends for it or any of her bad behavior, it just loses you completely.
Even though this is all prettayyy prettayyy negative, it’s not entirely painful to watch. The cast is good, the vocals are all good. The story, or hodgepodge of potential stories, just really didn’t work for me, no matter how badly I wanted it to. I wonder if it will change at all before the West End transfer, but I don’t know how much of what’s problematic they actually could improve.
AUDIENCE
Clearly fucked up and terrifying.
HAMPSTEAD THEATRE
Whoever designed the Hampstead Theatre is batshit crazy. The only bathrooms are by the entrance, behind the box office. That’s REAL DUMB. God people are paid to do jobs like this, I can’t even believe it.
The bathrooms are cool though, with each stall featuring a full-length portrait of a famous actress from a role played at this theatre. Well, all famous actresses save for Simon Russell Beale, who is pictured from a show where he played a woman. Fun times.
HABIBI Take 2: The Band’s Visit at the Donmar
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is one of my all-times, The Band’s Visit.
In 2017, I saw a preview of a little Broadway musical based on a little Israeli movie I remembered seeing years and years prior, and for the five years since that night I have rarely gone a day without thinking about how beautiful it was. That’s a long time and a lot of thinking about beauty! No ragrets! For its London premiere at the Donmar, I was hella nervous (this city and its antisemitism, wooof) but need not have been. It was treated with respect, there were no uninformed idiots protesting outside (I had some nightmares), and while it didn’t have all the superb magic of the Broadway run, it was still wonderfully done with still plenty of magic.
Read: Habibi Part 1 (The Broadway review)
The Band’s Visit is the small show that could, a slice of boring life in the Israeli desert where its inhabitants live the same day in and out, waiting for something to change but nothing ever changes, which many people across the world can surely identify with. One day, though, something different happens: a touring Egyptian military band mistakenly arrives in their little one-camel town, having mistaken this town of Bet Hatikva (made up for this show) with their intended destination Petah Tikvah (real place!). Those pesky b’s and p’s! Forced to stay overnight until the next bus, the musicians are put up at various locals’ homes, and relationships are almost-forged, as much as people can connect in almost one evening. Which, as it turns out, is enough to remind us of the importance of human connection.
The beauty of the show that I thought so much about, well, first of all it was mainly the music. This sounds like a nothing story on paper, sure, but David Yazbeck’s music is what brings it alive. With a mix of klezmer, Arabic music, orchestral concertos, all kinds of traditional, lovely sounds from the Middle East, it’s so well considered, so gorgeous and moving, with each melody and lyric serving a purpose, as the best in musical theatre should. This is a show that was clearly edited and discussed to make it the best version of itself it could be, which is probably a good part of why it struck me so deep (so rarely the case!). But also, back up, it’s NOT a nothing story. Itamar Moses (who never got his chance as hosting SNL as the Tony-contender book writers that season were obviously meant to) wrote a subtle, nuanced book that, without you aware in the moment, reminds us of the splendor in everyday life, in interpersonal relationships, in simply humans connecting with other humans. It’s so little and so much all at once, the most important thing in the world presented without a fuss. And the magic of it all is heightened by the fact that we only get a glimpse into each set of characters, each grouping of local Israeli with the Arab musicians they’re hosting. We don’t get full stories or neat conclusions, just glimpses, which makes it all even more relatable, realistic, and touching.
This London production gets bonus points for showing this town what proper representation in a cast can look like: there are actual Israels, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, playing these parts, so it feels authentic and not like, as happens so often here, caricatures. It’s a breath of fresh air to hear stories from the people they’d be about. Everyone is great, but so far into the run they don’t have the same magic connection to the music that the Broadway cast had. Mira Mesika plays Dina, the central character, as much as there is one in a true ensemble piece. Her stage presence and strong singing voice guide the show. Her “Omar Sharif” is gorgeous and when she belted the higher notes it. was. EVERYTHING. The heightened sense of desperation she revealed in her Dina really worked for her interpretation, and her dependable singing was a lovely contrast to Broadway’s Katrina Lenk, although she lacked what made Katrina’s performance so special – that strange mystical physical presence that Katrina used to almost dance through the show, heightening the sense of exoticism and magic.
It’s just different takes, for the most part, and not lack of talent. But I did find myself wishing for the Broadway takes. Our Tewfiq was authoritative and respectable, great especially at the end, but not heartbreaking to the extent Tony Shalhoub was with his adorableness and his sadness. But that’s why Tony is such a big star, that special extra something. Our Haled was fun and very good, but he and the director, I guess, didn’t notice the thing that made Haled on Broadway so effective with just one song that he won a Tony for it: Ari’el Stachel was doing exactly what the song was about – he was melting it. He was actually acting the lyrics: “it’s not about the conversation, the words are like your lips are reaching out to kiss the ears.” When I first saw him on Broadway, I was entranced because it was this otherworldly smooth legato energy coming directly into my ears like a nonstop beam melting the world away. That’s how he won a Tony for singing one song. This Haled was good but was singing the song, not doing the song. It was lovely and fun but wasn’t an act of revolution.
But again these are all tiny tiny differences between the productions, and this one is still fantastic, really served by the tiny stage and intimate theatre. Oh also I think Peter Polyinalltheshows’s iteration of the father character and his song “The Beat of Your Heart” were phenom, excellent stuff. The only slight slight almost a disappointment but of course not really but just a little, is the finale – the Telephone Guy’s song “Answer Me”. This is one of my favorite songs of all time and it lacked a bit of vocal heft here, the strength of the longing and the emotional expression that made Adam Kantor and then the whole cast together leave the audience in tears, feeling their loneliness but all together. It was a stunning theatrical moment that here is lovely and still heart-rending but not heart-breaking in its gloriousness. STILL, I say STILL, this is a wonderful production with a lot of heart and joy and love and I wish I could see it a dozen more times. I’m so glad this beautiful brave little toaster made it here.
INFORMATION
The musical is 100 minutes no intermission, which is…hard! Seriously folks, if you want to call your theatre-making accessible, 100 minutes no intermission is the MAX WE GO. Get over yourself.
The Donmar audience at my show was one of the worst I’ve ever seen! Maybe 2 masks, but we’re used to that by now. No, the horror came from the behavior. People all around talking, not whispering, literally the whole time. People next to us dancing in their seats (when? there are no dance songs!) and making out, it was really just so annoying and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re to blame for any bits of disappointment I felt. Also the man next to me who AFTER THE SECOND SONG, said to his friend “oh I guess this is a musical”. WAS THAT NECESSARY.
ALSO, unforch, the shows that encourage you to film the curtain call and maybe the finale, moves that we thought would placate the filmers, have instead led to people thinking they can film EVERY show’s finale and curtain call, which you can’t! People! You are here! Live! Experience the live theatre, why must you film everything? jfc put your gd phones away!
Speaking of jfc and gd, the Donmar cancelled the first preview of this run because of the Queen’s death which was…like…a month before the scheduled first preview. They said it pushed the rehearsal/tech process back a day. Which I guess is understandable, but if you have a sold out show, or heavily sold, and then you cancel one, shouldn’t you add in another show? So that people who are suddenly out of tickets – especially since they are likely the people most eager to see the show – can actually see it? I know too many fellow first-preview-ticket-holders who were only able to scrounge up like a terrible back of theatre seat in December. Add a f-ing performance if you cancel the first one, guys! What else could be fair? I’m still very angry even though I was not very affected, it’s the principle of the thing.
Wow this little info section made me really f-ing angry and hateful towards my fellow man, guess I have to see the show again and remember that they aren’t all monsters. But then the audience will prob be monsters, and then I’d be stuck in a vicious cycle! Just be better people!
