“The Rink” at Southwark Playhouse: Excellent Production Gives New Life to Kander & Ebb Showby Randi / June 14, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “My Name is Lucy Barton” at the Bridge Theatre in London, playing until June 23.
The best one-man shows are those that make you forget that only one person is up on that stage. It takes an enormous talent to fill a theatre so completely that you feel the force of a whole company entertaining you with their stories. The last time (maybe only other time?) I felt like a stage was filled with several great entertainers instead of just one was in Michael Urie’s brilliant one-man show Buyer and Cellar. Now the wonderful Laura Linney manages to achieve a similar result in The Bridge Theatre’s “My Name is Lucy Barton”, in which she tells her story so vividly and describes other people so keenly that it feels as effective as a play with a big ensemble. She distracts you from how hard she’s working up there with how realistic her storytelling is. Directed by Richard Eyre, this moving tale of one woman’s struggles to come to terms with her past while recognizing her internal pain is at times funny, depressing, and surprisingly universal in its representation of the humanity of loneliness.
The best one-man shows are those that make you forget that only one person is up on that stage. It takes an enormous talent to fill a theatre so completely that you feel the force of a whole company entertaining you with their stories. The last time (maybe only other time?) I felt like a stage was filled with several great entertainers instead of just one was in Michael Urie’s brilliant one-man show Buyer and Cellar. Now the wonderful Laura Linney manages to achieve a similar result in The Bridge Theatre’s “My Name is Lucy Barton”, in which she tells her story so vividly and describes other people so keenly that it feels as effective as a play with a big ensemble. She distracts you from how hard she’s working up there with how realistic her storytelling is. Directed by Richard Eyre, this moving tale of one woman’s struggles to come to terms with her past while recognizing her internal pain is at times funny, depressing, and surprisingly universal in its representation of the humanity of loneliness.
In what’s pretty much a 90-minute monologue that at times will make you think holy hell how does anyone memorize a thing like this and also isn’t she so thirsty I’m almost done my water and I’m just sitting here, Linney plays Lucy Barton, the character from Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 (damn they worked fast) novel of the same name, adapted for this stage by Rona Munro. Although it’s a work of fiction, the character of Lucy is so fleshed out and so genuine that it seems like a true story. With the lights up, Lucy in her NYC-hospital-chic ensemble tells the audience that she was once in the hospital for nine weeks, away from her husband and her two daughters for all that time. During her hospital stay, her mother surprised her with a visit. The lights go down as she returns to that hospital room to tell us what happened during that reunion with her mother, and what informed their relationship from their difficult past.
At first, I’m watching Linney say interesting words about how sick she was (if I recall correctly, they never really say what the issue was) and how her relationship with her mother was rough to say the least, but after about 10 or so minutes, Linney became Lucy Barton, and although I was still staring at Linney’s amazing face dimples (definitely one of my top five favorite face dimples), I was watching Lucy tell her story. She told her story of her hospital stay while interweaving details from her past, her terribly rough childhood out in the sticks of Illinois with her father, who had PTSD from the war, her cold mother, her siblings who it seems she never bonded with, and all the abuse she suffered, even as a young child who couldn’t understand why she was being punished. Her storytelling is peppered with thoughts about how hard it was to be so lonely in that hospital room, and then her loneliness becomes the driving theme of her entire existence, developed in her pitiful childhood.
At first, I’m watching Linney say interesting words about how sick she was (if I recall correctly, they never really say what the issue was) and how her relationship with her mother was rough to say the least, but after about 10 or so minutes, Linney became Lucy Barton, and although I was still staring at Linney’s amazing face dimples (definitely one of my top five favorite face dimples), I was watching Lucy tell her story. She told her story of her hospital stay while interweaving details from her past, her terribly rough childhood out in the sticks of Illinois with her father, who had PTSD from the war, her cold mother, her siblings who it seems she never bonded with, and all the abuse she suffered, even as a young child who couldn’t understand why she was being punished. Her storytelling is peppered with thoughts about how hard it was to be so lonely in that hospital room, and then her loneliness becomes the driving theme of her entire existence, developed in her pitiful childhood.
Honestly, I just read Orphan Train this week and I’m getting the horrible childhood details from that book confused with Lucy’s, that’s how bad it was. We learn that as a young girl her parents would lock her in her dad’s truck sometimes at night, and she would scream for them to let her out. Even when a snake was in there with her, they wouldn’t listen to her screams. With that kind of detail, you can’t help but despise her mother and understand how big a deal it was that she visited her sick daughter, coming all the way to New York City when she is scared of traveling, and how anxious Lucy was about it even though a large part of her was happy to have the comfort of family. I mean it’s the least she could do. Linney’s, or Lucy’s, imitations of the mother were superb, with that thick Chicago-area accent and the too accurate recounting of how gossipy she is. I don’t remember the mother’s name but I remember her tales of her frenemy Cathy Neely, because of how often the mother talked about this woman, spitting out her name with pure venom and those exaggerated mid-West vowels. I LOVED how at one point in Lucy’s mother’s chitchat including a tidbit about a girl Mary who got married and the vowel she used for Mary and marry was the same, which is such a precise dialect detail that I almost stood up and shouted GIVE HER AND HER VOCAL COACH ALL THE AWARDS. I’m kind of obsessed with the Mary/merry/marry dialectical test because as a Philadelphian we are among the few, we happy few, who pronounce all three distinctly. Anyway.
Linney is pitch-perfect as she unfolds the truth behind why Lucy’s relationship with her mother is so strained, and why her loneliness feels like the main disease she’s suffering from, more debilitating and hopeless than whatever has been keeping her in the hospital for months. It’s such a full-bodied recounting that it feels like all the characters she mentions are up there with her, shoring up her tale. I was especially struck by the idea of her neighbor and friend Jeremy, and when Lucy spoke of a man dying from AIDS that she saw in the hospital, I immediately thought of him. When she carried on with her story, I brushed away the thought, but at the end her heartbreaking final thoughts circle back in what I thought was the most moving part of the story. She talks about what it was like to reconnect, or try to reconnect, with her estranged mother after all these years, and about her childhood and all the experiences that shaped her, but her story was mostly confiding in us about how lonely she was, no matter what she tried to do about it.
It’s really remarkable, and a testament to the skill of the writers as well as to Linney’s acting, how much the audience feels it knows Lucy and how much we learn about her life, simply by listening to her tell us about her hospital stay, something that seems so mundane and uninteresting. At the end, she again comes to the most downstage point and looks directly at us to share her most private thoughts and pains, pounding on her chest in one of the most powerful theatre moments. You’re so invested in Lucy’s emotional distress that you almost forget you’re watching Linney, as she makes a compelling London debut and receives a much-deserved standing ovation.
INFORMATION
The Bridge Theatre put in Linney’s programme bio that she was in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” but not that she was in “Dave”, the BEST MOVIE EVER and her character’s name was RANDI and she wasn’t a gross man so like FIX IT, BRIDGE.
Also fix your late seating policy. It was nonsense how many people were seated 20 minutes into the show. Just stop allowing late seating, all theatres. If someone is late and it’s not their fault let them exchange their tickets. I mean people who missed 20 minutes missed a LOT of information; it’s not even worth seeing it. And it was so distracting to everyone else.
STAGEDOOR
The stagedoor is around the side of the complex closest to Tower Bridge, past the Ivy restaurant and then next to the By Chloe that’s there. We only waited 10-15 minutes because it was disheartening to see how many Londoners were still supporting that restaurant’s shitty owners. Anyway, the people working inside said she isn’t consistent about which exit she uses, and I guess they couldn’t find out if she was planning to come out that way, and I was cold, so we left.
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macauley.cuny.edu
WHAT is happening in London’s opera scene? A whole lot of shit, that’s what’s happening. Like there wasn’t enough misogyny in the world and in all forms of entertainment, now London’s opera bigwigs apparently decided that all the biggest summer productions at the city’s most respected opera houses would not only be anti-feminist but anti-female, pro-rape, pro-violence against women, and not good. Big steaming poop messes are at the English National Opera and the Royal Opera House and are unrelated to this week’s heat wave.
First off, the one that has been in the news. Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera. This Rossini opera is about William Tell, could you have guessed? You know what’s interesting about this show? It was the last opera Rossini wrote even though he lived for 40 more years after it. I think he was shamed by nighttime visions of this future production that kept him up at night and he was all, I’m never giving these futuristic f**kers any more fodder to be assholes with, or something.
So, it starts with the Lone Ranger theme, and then villagers sing about weddings, archery contests occur, and Swiss people get upset that their country is oppressed (by Austria). After two acts of that comes a scene in which soldier baddies celebrate 100 years Austrian oppression in Switzerland. The baddies drink and sing and then notice that Tell and his son aren’t joining in, so they’re like, oh we gotta arrest you, even though we respect what a great archer you are, do you want to tell your son to run or is he gonna stick around?
So that’s the third act of Guillaume Tell. Do you know what happens in the current abomination at the Royal Opera House? When they celebrate Austrian rule, the soldiers drink and sing and sing and drink, and then they take the servant girl who is providing the alcohol, and they force themselves on her, and they pour all the wine on her so she’s soaked through, and then the men put her on the table and take off her clothes (the audience sees her naked), and all the many many men sexually assault her further at gunpoint before Tell rescues her.
That doesn’t sound like the opera as written, does it? It’s not. That is utter bullshit completely added in by the dirty f**kface director Damiano Michieletto, bag o’ dicks director of opera at Covent Garden Kasper Hotlen, and the producers at the ROH. None of that violence adds anything to the show, so there is no excuse for it. I’m sure they argue that they wanted to show how terrible those men were, but it was not necessary to do so, especially to such an extent. All it really accomplished was reminding everyone in the audience that people still consider violence against women to be totally okay and permitted. Luckily, the audience booed during this scene, so much so that news outlets actually did mention the booing, but how many people walked out? How many cancelled their subscriptions? What’s more important, and disturbing: how many people are now buying tickets to the rest of the performances to catch this ‘newsworthy’ production?
This production should have been vilified for this gratuitous brutality and I know I will not be giving the Royal Opera House any money until they apologize. Indeed, Holten said they will not apologize for the scene and they refuse to edit it even though it will be broadcast in movie theatres. He described it as “an honest attempt to talk about the reality of war” and said people maybe “felt we should have warned them better, as people may not want to be exposed to sexual violence”. That’s not it, you ignorant douchebag. People don’t want to see in their entertainment depictions of what at least 60% of your audience has to live with and fear every day of their lives if it is not necessary to convey the message you hope to. And this was not necessary. Did you know, Kasper, that that’s the definition of gratuitous? I’m sure it was really fun for all you men involved to be like, ‘oh hey we can do this shit because it makes people realize how bad war is.’ A) People know how bad war is. B) All it did was remind people how terrible modern society still is when it comes to understanding rape culture. You, sir, do not understand it.
***
Now to the one that has not received any media attention that I know of, probably because people with the power to make things known in the media don’t really realize how misogynistic this one is, especially since there’s only so much opera coverage allowed by the populace. “Carmen”, Bizet’s famous opera about the wiles of a Gypsy woman, is playing at the English National Opera. First things first, the ENO does all their productions in English. It sucks. I’ve been there a lot, and the productions are sometimes great, but it’s never my or most opera fans preference to see works translated from their original language. I saw “Rigoletto” once in Austria and it was in German instead of Italian. It was terrible. Oh but they did the famous aria “La donna e mobile” in Italian. Just that part.
Moving on, “Carmen” is a pretty misogynistic opera to begin with, but ENO succeeded in making it even more gratuitously so with this ‘modernized’ production. I don’t understand why directors feel the need to unnecessarily change aspects of great works just for the sake of changing it, when it doesn’t add any artistic value. There are some alterations or reimaginings or revivals that are worthy, like the recent “Spring Awakening” production in California that used many deaf and disabled cast members to highlight the rampant lack of understanding and capability in the show. That sounds brilliant. The half-assed modernization of “Carmen” was not: it kept most of the same ideas – lots of soldiers, being in Spain, smugglers – and added hysterically hideous ‘90s-era-Italy outfits and like 6 cars, doing the smuggling, onstage at one time. I don’t know what they were going for.
So “Carmen” tells the story of a seductive gypsy who seduces men and is a gypsy. She is a cigarette girl among hundreds of cigarette girls who apparently work in the same barracks as hundreds of soldiers. It was a big cast. The soldiers are all disgusting. They treat the women like toys and Carmen like a piece of meat. They grope everyone and repeatedly stick her face in their crotchular regions. But Carmen enjoys it, apparently, because she is seductive, so she is asking for it. Hence it being a super misogynistic show as written, differentiating it from the above monstrosity.
The soldiers beg for her to choose a lover and stop taunting them by existing, so she chooses Jose, who was ignoring her. Smart plan! She sings her super famous aria that goes ‘da dum dum dum!’ about how those who love her should beware. Then all the girls fight like really actually fight, because who doesn’t love women fighting and hitting and scratching each other with their claws? Carmen is accused of whipping out a knife in what should have been merely a skin fight, so the male official says she’s going to be arrested and tells Jose to tie her hands together while they figure out what to do because small man brain. That’s what happens normally.
Here, the men tie Carmen to a flagpole with the official’s workbelt, take off her shirtdress, and position her so she’s on her knees. People I talked to at intermission thought this was disgusting. One woman who knows the opera well felt that tying her up completely, as opposed to just her hands, unnecessarily made her subordinate and submissive and was just gross.
Carmen then beguiles Jose, tasked with guarding her, and he becomes pretty infatuated with her. He lets her escape, whereupon he is imprisoned for a month or two.
When he gets out, he and we find Carmen with her smuggler friends, who are driving regular-sized cars across the stage to show how modern the show is. Three women (and one little girl, sadly) compose the group with 3 or so indistinguishably disgusting men, who assault them and grope them all with no regard for which woman it is or what she’s doing or how drunk she is (very drunk). They meet Escamillo, the famous toreador, who sings the famous toreador song (and not very well, also sadly). Escamillo ‘falls in love’ with Carmen, who is instead in love with her Jose, whom she is now seeing for the second time ever. Jose has to go back to camp for nighttime, and Carmen, being an awful no good female who doesn’t understand that men have to work, gets really upset that he isn’t willing to sacrifice his job for her, because if he really loved her he would. This is apparently how Rossini thought women’s little brains worked. As written, Jose’s superior officer arrives looking for Carmen (every man thinks he is in love with her), and Jose fights him. Having done that, he can’t go back to soldiering, so he joins the smugglers.
Here, he punches Carmen instead, for mocking his need to go back to work. She falls to the ground in fetal position, where she remains while Jose sings not about how he’s sorry but about how much he loves her. Then he cuddles up next to her and declares his love more. And what choice does she have but to accept it? What other kind of love could she possibly know?
Then more cars appear and it’s really just nonsense.
Then, Carmen gets bored with Jose, because that’s how women are, those fickle people, and the toreador tells her he loves her. Hey guess what, she returns the favor now. That happens really with no build up, I thought she was lying, but that’s how women do, just transfer affection really easily when they’re bored. Then Carmen and her friends do tarot cards, and Carmen gets the one saying she’s going to die. No one else seems really worried, though Carmen tells them it’s probably Jose.
Escamillo invites pretty much all of Spain to see him in his next bull-fight, and during that famous song we get to watch 100 or so actors in neon shorts and smartphones jumping up and down in unison for a good 2 minutes. It’s like they stopped trying. Anyway, outside the arena, Carmen and her two girlfriends are about to enter, before they leave her and are like, ‘Hey don’t get killed, we know that’s a possibility but we’re going to leave you alone now.’ Carmen keeps a watchful eye until she needs to do her makeup, and Jose sneaks in while she is looking in the compact, because oh girls with their makeup! So silly! So Jose is devastated that she no longer wants to be with him, even though he hit her, and even though now she loves someone else, so he kills her. At the end, after Jose kills her, he normally confesses to the murder. Here, instead, he grabs her by the lifeless foot and drags her offstage as the lights go out. Cute!
So ENO is not nearly as guilty as ROH for disgusting and gratuitous anti-female sentiment, because so much of it is in the text, but how they chose to augment what was already a plethora of misogyny reinforces how normal all the people involved considered it to be. This already has violence against women, but let’s make it worse! This one doesn’t have violence against women, so let’s add a lot, for art’s sake. It’s not art, guys. It’s violence, and it’s perpetuating the acceptance and sickening tolerance of rape culture.
So that’s the third act of Guillaume Tell. Do you know what happens in the current abomination at the Royal Opera House? When they celebrate Austrian rule, the soldiers drink and sing and sing and drink, and then they take the servant girl who is providing the alcohol, and they force themselves on her, and they pour all the wine on her so she’s soaked through, and then the men put her on the table and take off her clothes (the audience sees her naked), and all the many many men sexually assault her further at gunpoint before Tell rescues her.
That doesn’t sound like the opera as written, does it? It’s not. That is utter bullshit completely added in by the dirty f**kface director Damiano Michieletto, bag o’ dicks director of opera at Covent Garden Kasper Hotlen, and the producers at the ROH. None of that violence adds anything to the show, so there is no excuse for it. I’m sure they argue that they wanted to show how terrible those men were, but it was not necessary to do so, especially to such an extent. All it really accomplished was reminding everyone in the audience that people still consider violence against women to be totally okay and permitted. Luckily, the audience booed during this scene, so much so that news outlets actually did mention the booing, but how many people walked out? How many cancelled their subscriptions? What’s more important, and disturbing: how many people are now buying tickets to the rest of the performances to catch this ‘newsworthy’ production?
This production should have been vilified for this gratuitous brutality and I know I will not be giving the Royal Opera House any money until they apologize. Indeed, Holten said they will not apologize for the scene and they refuse to edit it even though it will be broadcast in movie theatres. He described it as “an honest attempt to talk about the reality of war” and said people maybe “felt we should have warned them better, as people may not want to be exposed to sexual violence”. That’s not it, you ignorant douchebag. People don’t want to see in their entertainment depictions of what at least 60% of your audience has to live with and fear every day of their lives if it is not necessary to convey the message you hope to. And this was not necessary. Did you know, Kasper, that that’s the definition of gratuitous? I’m sure it was really fun for all you men involved to be like, ‘oh hey we can do this shit because it makes people realize how bad war is.’ A) People know how bad war is. B) All it did was remind people how terrible modern society still is when it comes to understanding rape culture. You, sir, do not understand it.
***
Now to the one that has not received any media attention that I know of, probably because people with the power to make things known in the media don’t really realize how misogynistic this one is, especially since there’s only so much opera coverage allowed by the populace. “Carmen”, Bizet’s famous opera about the wiles of a Gypsy woman, is playing at the English National Opera. First things first, the ENO does all their productions in English. It sucks. I’ve been there a lot, and the productions are sometimes great, but it’s never my or most opera fans preference to see works translated from their original language. I saw “Rigoletto” once in Austria and it was in German instead of Italian. It was terrible. Oh but they did the famous aria “La donna e mobile” in Italian. Just that part.
Moving on, “Carmen” is a pretty misogynistic opera to begin with, but ENO succeeded in making it even more gratuitously so with this ‘modernized’ production. I don’t understand why directors feel the need to unnecessarily change aspects of great works just for the sake of changing it, when it doesn’t add any artistic value. There are some alterations or reimaginings or revivals that are worthy, like the recent “Spring Awakening” production in California that used many deaf and disabled cast members to highlight the rampant lack of understanding and capability in the show. That sounds brilliant. The half-assed modernization of “Carmen” was not: it kept most of the same ideas – lots of soldiers, being in Spain, smugglers – and added hysterically hideous ‘90s-era-Italy outfits and like 6 cars, doing the smuggling, onstage at one time. I don’t know what they were going for.
So “Carmen” tells the story of a seductive gypsy who seduces men and is a gypsy. She is a cigarette girl among hundreds of cigarette girls who apparently work in the same barracks as hundreds of soldiers. It was a big cast. The soldiers are all disgusting. They treat the women like toys and Carmen like a piece of meat. They grope everyone and repeatedly stick her face in their crotchular regions. But Carmen enjoys it, apparently, because she is seductive, so she is asking for it. Hence it being a super misogynistic show as written, differentiating it from the above monstrosity.
The soldiers beg for her to choose a lover and stop taunting them by existing, so she chooses Jose, who was ignoring her. Smart plan! She sings her super famous aria that goes ‘da dum dum dum!’ about how those who love her should beware. Then all the girls fight like really actually fight, because who doesn’t love women fighting and hitting and scratching each other with their claws? Carmen is accused of whipping out a knife in what should have been merely a skin fight, so the male official says she’s going to be arrested and tells Jose to tie her hands together while they figure out what to do because small man brain. That’s what happens normally.
Here, the men tie Carmen to a flagpole with the official’s workbelt, take off her shirtdress, and position her so she’s on her knees. People I talked to at intermission thought this was disgusting. One woman who knows the opera well felt that tying her up completely, as opposed to just her hands, unnecessarily made her subordinate and submissive and was just gross.
Carmen then beguiles Jose, tasked with guarding her, and he becomes pretty infatuated with her. He lets her escape, whereupon he is imprisoned for a month or two.
When he gets out, he and we find Carmen with her smuggler friends, who are driving regular-sized cars across the stage to show how modern the show is. Three women (and one little girl, sadly) compose the group with 3 or so indistinguishably disgusting men, who assault them and grope them all with no regard for which woman it is or what she’s doing or how drunk she is (very drunk). They meet Escamillo, the famous toreador, who sings the famous toreador song (and not very well, also sadly). Escamillo ‘falls in love’ with Carmen, who is instead in love with her Jose, whom she is now seeing for the second time ever. Jose has to go back to camp for nighttime, and Carmen, being an awful no good female who doesn’t understand that men have to work, gets really upset that he isn’t willing to sacrifice his job for her, because if he really loved her he would. This is apparently how Rossini thought women’s little brains worked. As written, Jose’s superior officer arrives looking for Carmen (every man thinks he is in love with her), and Jose fights him. Having done that, he can’t go back to soldiering, so he joins the smugglers.
Here, he punches Carmen instead, for mocking his need to go back to work. She falls to the ground in fetal position, where she remains while Jose sings not about how he’s sorry but about how much he loves her. Then he cuddles up next to her and declares his love more. And what choice does she have but to accept it? What other kind of love could she possibly know?
Then more cars appear and it’s really just nonsense.
Then, Carmen gets bored with Jose, because that’s how women are, those fickle people, and the toreador tells her he loves her. Hey guess what, she returns the favor now. That happens really with no build up, I thought she was lying, but that’s how women do, just transfer affection really easily when they’re bored. Then Carmen and her friends do tarot cards, and Carmen gets the one saying she’s going to die. No one else seems really worried, though Carmen tells them it’s probably Jose.
Escamillo invites pretty much all of Spain to see him in his next bull-fight, and during that famous song we get to watch 100 or so actors in neon shorts and smartphones jumping up and down in unison for a good 2 minutes. It’s like they stopped trying. Anyway, outside the arena, Carmen and her two girlfriends are about to enter, before they leave her and are like, ‘Hey don’t get killed, we know that’s a possibility but we’re going to leave you alone now.’ Carmen keeps a watchful eye until she needs to do her makeup, and Jose sneaks in while she is looking in the compact, because oh girls with their makeup! So silly! So Jose is devastated that she no longer wants to be with him, even though he hit her, and even though now she loves someone else, so he kills her. At the end, after Jose kills her, he normally confesses to the murder. Here, instead, he grabs her by the lifeless foot and drags her offstage as the lights go out. Cute!
So ENO is not nearly as guilty as ROH for disgusting and gratuitous anti-female sentiment, because so much of it is in the text, but how they chose to augment what was already a plethora of misogyny reinforces how normal all the people involved considered it to be. This already has violence against women, but let’s make it worse! This one doesn’t have violence against women, so let’s add a lot, for art’s sake. It’s not art, guys. It’s violence, and it’s perpetuating the acceptance and sickening tolerance of rape culture.
The End of “How I Met Your Mother”, or How To Make A Loyal Fan Angry: F That Noise
I am ANGRY and I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight! So instead I am going to discuss the cause of my ANGER with you and I hope that you agree or better yet have ways to help me get rid of this ANGER so I can get some rest. BUT OH MYLANTA WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TONIGHT?? The great-for-so-many-years-but-weak-for-a-few-there television show of our generation, “How I Met Your Mother”, ended its 9-year-run tonight. It could have gone the “Friends” route and bestowed lovely happy endings unto our beloved characters at the expense of laughter, but instead it presented horrible, awful, anger-inducing endings at the expense of laughter. F that noise.
Freal this is me. Breathing…breathle–Heaving breath…heaving breaths…
For 9 years, this show convinced us that Ted and “Aunt Robin” were not supposed to be together. For 9 years, we eagerly and anxiously awaited the introduction of Ted’s true love, the Mother, hoping that she would be everything we, and Ted, hoped for. (She was.) For 9 years, we knew that this Mother was the real deal, Ted’s soulmate, serving as a counterpoint to Robin, who proved time and again that she was only right as Ted’s friend, nothing more. For about 5 years, we were made to love and ‘ship Barney and Robin, and we did, because they were awesome together, with their overhead high-fives and nerves of steel. But in one shittastic literally mind-blowing (as in my mind is exploding, literally) hour, the entire foundation of the show collapsed and we were left with a finale that seemed like it matched the pilot episode yet no other episode in the series. Like everything was a waste. I am ANGRY. Ted and Robin are not supposed to be together.
As a small note, I did appreciate that the entire show was Ted telling his kids about their deceased mother. It definitely makes more sense as a framing device, even though it’s unbearably sad. But it should have ended like that, as a lovely and touching tribute to the love of Ted’s life. It shouldn’t have been an excuse for him to move on to Robin ‘finally’. It cheapens the relationship with the Mother. Not that we saw ANY of that.
As a small note, I did appreciate that the entire show was Ted telling his kids about their deceased mother. It definitely makes more sense as a framing device, even though it’s unbearably sad. But it should have ended like that, as a lovely and touching tribute to the love of Ted’s life. It shouldn’t have been an excuse for him to move on to Robin ‘finally’. It cheapens the relationship with the Mother. Not that we saw ANY of that.
Things I liked:
- Lily, unable to handle a goodbye hug, asking Ted for an E.T. goodbye (Ted’s finger meeping to Lily’s forehead), and saying “Thanks that helped; it was creepy and I don’t want to see you for a while.” Like she was reading our thoughts for 90% of the series. But it was cute.
- Mother/Tracy: “When I get married I want to kind of fit in my dress…[hint hint].” Lily: “What’s going on?” Barney: “She’s getting a boob job!!!”
- Playing “Murder Train” at Robots v. Wrestlers!! Amazing; hurrah for some continuity that isn’t about that damned French horn.
- Ted: “I’ve got a castle guy!” Barney: “I’ve got like three castle guys.”
- Cristin Milioti was so winning, it’s such a shame they didn’t use her more. But her few scenes over the past few months, and tonight, have been the best.
Things that made me go hmm:
- Lily’s 2017-2018 bangs.
- The Mother’s crappy wedding dress. If they had the money for a French castle wedding complete with stallions and a hot-air balloon, they could have afforded a dress in a quality material. It’s impossible to use a half-loop stitching on low-viscosity rayon. It would snag the fabric.
- Dumb: Barney and Ted’s high-five to echo throughout eternity. Waste of a few precious minutes. Not that time was well spent tonight.
- Marshall: “Hey you kids, do you have any idea what happened in this very bar?…All kinds of stuff.” What a great set-up of a line that ended with a disappointing fizzle, like a balloon deflating. Should have and could have been amazing and moving, if Marshall just said something simple but not dumb, like, “…Everything.”
Things that are making me a red-faced merkit:
- Everything felt slow. The old lady at Farhampton station got more screen time, and lines, than Robin and the Mother combined. Sure sure. Good decision.
- Robin alone in the empty apartment should have been a tearjerker (a la the “Friends” finale) but it wasn’t. What a shame. Though Lily’s little face sobbing in that scene was very sad. But Lily’s little face is the best.
- Barney has a love child. I’m glad he gets to have the child he always wanted, but the baby mama doesn’t matter? We don’t meet her? he has no relationship with her? What.
- Robin and Barney getting divorced. What in the EVERLASTING TUCK. We waited years, and then had to put up with this entire season taking place over their wedding weekend, only to have their marriage last five minutes. Epic fail.
- The Mother actually died. Like I said, I appreciate this twist as a really sensible framing reveal that makes the show as a whole a whole lot more meaningful. Doesn’t mean I like it.
- Ted going after Robin. Sure guys, realize 1000-times over that you aren’t right for each other…for FIRST marriages! Wait till your wife dies/you get divorced and THEN you can be each other’s secondsees! Ok! WHAT A FABULOUS ENDING.
The series should have ended when Ted and Tracy were talking under the yellow umbrella at Farhampton station. That would have been lovely. It would have almost made up for the Barney and Robin shitstorm. This show of course was about the 5 best friends, but it was also supposed to be about how Ted met the kids’ Mother, not about how he outlasted her so he could then guiltlessly go after Robin in middle age. When I watch my beloved reruns of this often wonderful show, I’m going to rewrite this ending.
