All the Best Things about Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)by Randi / December 17, 2021It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Flying Over Sunset, playing at my fave Vivian Beaumont Theatre in NYC’s Lincoln Center until January 16.
Last week I had the privilege of seeing the completely original new Broadway musical Flying Over Sunset, which just this week announced a premature closing. The early end to its run is not surprising, but it’s still a bummer. Even though this show could have used a few more swipes of the red pen, I am very grateful that it made it to Broadway and that I got to see it, since it’s rare that a musical with a brand new score that isn’t based on any known entity makes it this far, and that is worth celebrating.
Of course, we could be celebrating more and for longer if it had an out-of-town tryout to work out its shortcomings (like answering the main question of ‘why though’), but what’s an out-of-town tryout to the big names involved in this! A new score from Tommy Kitt and Michael Korie?? Motherforking James Lapine writing the book and directing?! Who was going to clear their throat at that meeting to say ‘um…it needs a little more work’? NO ONE. When this show was first announced, I was all in like Luke on his first date with Lorelai. (His not realizing at that point how much of a shit-show her parents and Christopher (*ptoi ptoi*) would cause in his life = my not realizing before seeing FOS that other people’s trips are hard for an audience to enjoy.) The names of the lead characters the story would focus on — Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, and Clare Boothe Luce — were almost as amazing as the names of the actors portraying them — Tony Yazbeck, Harry Hadden-Paton (HHP), and Carmen Cusack. I MEAN! Modern Broadway royalty. For my recent trip home for the holidays, I think I secured my tickets to this (LincTix for the everlasting win!) before my flight. FFS, Tony Yazbeck as Cary Grant is some galaxy brain thinking casting right there. WHEW I WAS IN. Oh…what’s that??? The story is a fictitious account of those three real people taking LSD together…??? It sounds amazing.
And while it could have been, and while parts are great, the dramatic question is lacking. Stuff is happening, but without a reason or intention driving it forward. Another problem is, as fun and amazing and original and crazy as that concept sounds, it’s hard to make someone else’s acid trip compelling. If any medium can do it, it’s the Broadway musical, and parts of this show soared. The opening number, which has the cast shuffling gracefully around the gigantic stage keeping the changing rhythm with their coordinated footfalls, created a classic sense of theatrical magic that filled my heart with joy and my eyes with tears. It was gorgeous, this most compelling and most promising opening I’ve seen in years.
From there, Act I stayed somewhat steadily at an enjoyable level as it focused on introducing the three characters one at a time, letting us learn who they are, what their story is, and why they’re taking LSD. It has the strongest musical numbers, with some beauties from Kitt and Korie. And all three of the lead performances are glorious to watch, as these three actors always are. HHP’s pharmacy-set scene of his first trip is a load of fun, as he imagines Botticelli masterpieces coming to life in a goofy-yet-semi-highbrow form of a trip. HHP is wonderful back on the Beaumont stage (petition for him to star in everything Lincoln Center does) as Aldous Huxley, nailing the desired portrayal of him as brainy but buoyant. Then, the show’s highlight apart from the opening number is Yazbeck’s intro scene, when his Cary Grant asks his wife’s psychiatrist to give him what he’s been giving her. (It’s not a promise to comply with HIPAA, that’s for sure.) His first use of LSD in the doctor’s office takes him back to his childhood in a tap-dancing extravaganza with Atticus Ware as his younger self (when his name was still Archibald Leach (fun fact: I just watched ‘His Girl Friday’ and Cary Grant’s character makes a reference to a guy named Archie Leach)) as he once performed for money on the English streets. Anytime Tony taps it’s a treat, and this is his moment to shine in this show. It should have happened more often, because HOT DAMN. The emotionally charged tapping and whirling of these two dancers is spellbinding, a true telling of story through movement. Yazbeck should be acknowledged as the Cary Grant of our time, not just on stage, because, again, HOT DAMN, just as Robbie Fairchild should be internationally recognized as the Gene Kelly of our time.
In Carmen’s solo scene, she gets a beautiful song to sing, as well as a LSD-induced orgasm to perform onstage, so that’s something you don’t see every day. Cusack is such a gorgeous MT performer that you sometimes look past the fact that Clare Boothe Luce kind of seems like a shitty republican who would still be a republican today. Her drug-induced visions of her deceased mother and daughter are heartbreaking emotional moments that cut clear across the theatre.
But, other parts, too many parts, do not soar, despite the characters’ getting so high they were like ‘oh she’s meeting Jesus? cool’ ‘oh I’m a giant rocket ship penis? cool’. The second act lagged, when somehow the magic that should have occurred when you brought the three of them together to experience their new fave drug was replaced by nonsense, head-scratching, and a disappointment at what could have been. In the early scenes, it was suggested that they were each facing an important moment in their lives, feeling that no one was listening, unsure of their footing at the next stage, dealing with frustration or stagnancy and needing an outlet. Despite their guide friend (Robert Sella) pointing out point blank “oh you all seem to be at a crossroads” in a kind of cringe-y blatant way, the story itself never capitalized on that tie binding them, when doing so could have been the grounding element the story needed. It needed something to defend the why of this story, to elevate it into a sum greater than the separate generally pleasant parts.
Without that dramatic element, the second act feels untethered, as song by song gets further away from a central feeling of importance en route to stoned nonsense. The song that has Tony’s Cary imagining dancing with his recent costar Sophia Loren is insanely unnecessary and something I can’t believe wasn’t cut. Same for Cary’s song about imagining himself as a giant penis rocketship in his delirious state. My reaction was very Mark-Evan-Jackson-as-Shaun-the-demon saying “You guys are seeing this, right?! I’m not crazy!” Nothing really comes of the three characters coming together for their trip (except the men almost drowning, which almost gave me a panic attack because oh my god you NEED SOMEONE SOBER WITH YOU IF YOU GO SWIMMING WHILE SUPER FUCKING HIGH JFC), which adds more questions of why to the story. I hate to say it but James Lapine, legend that he is, needed a collaborator to ensure that this story was in top shape before it got to Broadway. I’m still so glad it was made, but it could have and should have been stronger.
INFORMATION
Flying Over Sunset closes on January 16.
To attend a Broadway show, you must show proof of full vaccination. On the way inside, there are staff members checking your vaccination documentation. (I had the NHS barcodes in my virtual wallet as well as a PDF printout — both worked at different shows.) At all the shows I attended, the vax checking was swift, not causing a delay to entry. You must wear a mask at all times. The staff actually cares that you wear a mask, and properly. All bars are closed because Broadway staff realizes that if you are drinking, your mask would necessarily be off, and we don’t want that. THANK YOU BROADWAY.
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“The Twilight Zone” at London’s Almeida Theatre: Creepy Humans Are Creepy (and…Moving?)
It’s Theatre Thursday y’all! Today we are talking about “The Twilight Zone” at London’s Almeida Theatre, which is playing until January 27.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
The Twilight Zone currently at the Almeida Theatre (right across from an Ottolenghi! Have a pure happy veggie meal before questioning the universe) was adapted from the Rod Serling (I keep wanting to say Sterling) television series by playwright Anne Washburn, who did a very interesting take on an apocalyptic future Mr Burns story a few years ago that my husband loved. I didn’t get to see that, so i was excited to see what she did here. I think her hands were a little tied creatively because, due to using famous specific episodes, there was only so much she could add or change. What we get is pretty straightforward episode play, and even though I don’t remember ever watching the TV show, I guess I did because I remembered some storylines.
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
OH OH this will have nothing to do with your experience, but I must share: The man sitting two seats away from me (I was next to his wife) PEELED AND ATE AN ORANGE DURING THE SHOW. WHO DOES THAT. WHOOOO DOES THAT. It was the strongest smelling orange ever and even though I like oranges I got nauseous. WHO DOES THAT OMG CAN PEOPLE PLEASE TRY TO BEHAVE BETTER IN THE THEATRE FFS?
‘Onegin’ at the Bolshoi Ballet: So Amazing I Want to be a Ballerina Just For This
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the best ballet ever, ‘Onegin’ at the Bolshoi. We’re back in Russia all over this website!
With all the theatre I see, I don’t have much time for ballets. I see them every once in a while but usually I’m like “this would be so much better if you were singing toooooo!” That’s why ‘An American in Paris’ is so good. And usually the plots are so alarmingly sexist that I just roll my eyes the entire time so as not to actually scream. I saw ‘Giselle’ last year the English National Opera. Do you know what that’s about? A peasant girl dies of a broken heart because her lover is a cheatin fool and then her ghost joins a ghost troop of all virgin girls who died before they were married and they dance/kill men who go through their forest. It’s forked up. Luckily, ‘Onegin’ is not actively offensive; in fact, it’s a pretty good tale of a woman actually standing up for herself, sort of, as much as you can expect in old-timey stories. More importantly, it’s the most gorgeous dancing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m including the ending of ‘Center Stage’ can you believe it? even the part where the camera pans down and then when it goes back up Jody is all of a sudden in a red leotard and she pushes everyone away and Jamiroquai goes ‘DANCE!’ and it’s the best. I was naively a little upset that the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow wasn’t playing something I was more familiar with while we were there, but I can’t imagine ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘The Nutcracker’ (now I’m out of ballets I know) being nearly as spectacular as ‘Onegin’ was. And since this week on the travel blog we are back in Russia, it’s time to talk about this Bolshoi production.
Written by Alexander Pushkin, the beloved Russian poet, the novel ‘Eugene Onegin’ inspired Tchaikovsky to write an opera about it. (I never read ‘Eugene Onegin…and I’m not sure I ever read any Pushkin actually. Sacre bleu! I mean blin!) Tchi tchi put some dance scenes in his opera, and he hired a choreographer named John Cranko to choreograph them. Cranko, cursed with an unhappy name but blessed with immense talent, crankily thought “this story merits its own ballet, not just secondary dancing in an opera! We’re gonna make a whole ballet bout this feller!” His stories are so inspirational! Everyone loves Pushkin, from all the statue makers all over Russia (so many!) to all these artists whose greatest works were inspired by his words. Fun fact, Pushkin is a classic, beloved Russian author as well as a cute nickname for a baby. Little Pushkin with that punim!
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
