What Do You See: “Red” Brings Rothko Back to the West Endby Randi / May 17, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “Chess” at London’s English National Opera, playing until June 2.
You know how Broadway keeps trying to make shows about basketball and they never really take off? Well at least basketball has some action to it. Imagine a show about the most boring game ever. “Chess”, the 1980s musical from ABBA menfolk Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus with lyrics from Tim Rice, really truly did that. The music still stands as some of the most famous and mainstream to come out of musical theatre (‘One Night in Bangkok’, anyone?), yet the book veers on ridonk. It’s one of the few shows I prefer to be done in a concert version. Still, I had high expectations for London’s new big production at the English National Opera’s Coliseum, but these expectations were not met. The score was well sung, but the production – both in terms of visuals, sound, and more – did more to hurt the show than help it.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
The story begins with men singing about the history of chess, and projections of like Egyptian hieroglyphs line the walls and you’re like wat. Oh yes, so this production’s biggest faux pas is relying on digital projections instead of sets or ya know taste. Weird images that suggest that someone was having a bit too much fun with a new computer program make up most of the artwork projected onto the various block-shaped screens. The set up of the square screens is copied from the original concept album artwork, which is…a nice throwback, I guess, but not enough of a reason to design the entire staging that way. You can see the same idea of the squares in the picture at the top of the page – the set up is such that images projected onto the square screens were chopped up in places where the squares don’t meet, so there was a lot of distortion. I’m sure the set designers and production team will justify the distortion with some lofty statement about how reality is distorted when projected from screens too but that is also not enough of a reason to excuse such horrible visuals for nearly 3 hours.
After the unclear history lesson, things go haywire if you are familiar with the American stage version. The American and British books for ‘Chess’ are COMPLETELY different. Anatoly wins in one, Freddie the other. In one, the first match takes place in Italy, the second in Bangkok, but in the other, the whole show is just one match in Bangkok! The song orders are completely scrambled too. I don’t know HOW that happened. So the British version is what we are talking about here, obvs. Anatoly and Freddie arrive in Merano, Italy for their big world championship chess tournament, and the mayor and townspeople rejoice by singing the lamest song “Merano” that just does not fit the show. It’s a huge white chorus in laderhosen and braids because they are close to Switzerland I guess and they do dorky folk dances and it’s super awkward considering the modern pop taste of the rest of the score. After this seemingly photoshopped insert, Freddie and Anatoly are met with an enormous crowd of TV cameras and lots of shouting. Freddie responds with a song that I think was also about shouting (“Commie Newspapers”) as he fights with his assistant and yells at all the reporters. I would too though; most of them are awful. Here, the projections changed to be close-ups of the actors’ faces. I noticed two cameramen onstage who I believe were capturing the footage of the actors that was projected live, which like that’s cool that you figured that out to do it live but it is not attractive. Most of the projections – and remember, that is the entirety of the set and set design here – for the rest of the show were Tom Hooper-style close-ups of the actors’ faces. It was horrendous. Now this is the first full-fledged production of ‘Chess’ that I’ve seen, so this could be how the show is always supposed to be staged. It doesn’t mean it’s good. If the show was supposed to be on screen it would be on screen, and not in a live theatre. TV requires a completely different set of skills and tools, not just on the part of the actors, so to kind of force these performances to be both theatre and television at the same time made both a big mess. Remember during the Tony performance of ‘The Book of Mormon’ the camera focused on one ensemble member who was doing all his funny-face reaction shots for his track? You weren’t supposed to just be looking at him. Also, I did not want to stare at the giant projected faces of the characters the entire time; I wanted to watch the actual actors and maybe their interaction instead of counting their pores. That’s what theatre is for.
Using all my might to focus on the actors and not the atrocious projections, I followed the ridiculous story. Freddie yells at everyone, Anatoly kind of simmers with unpredictability – it could be either rage or boredom – and the world…watches? Their meeting in competition, broadcast all over the world, represents the larger conflict between the two countries they represent, so the entire world is on the edge of their seats watching. Not really though, because it’s chess. The first round of the match is about to begin and lights focus aaaaaand…then we have just two men sitting at a table playing chess quietly. It doesn’t exactly make for good theatre. Their playing sessions should have had them singing. Instead they just sat there and played and it was super boring. Then of course Freddie yells that Anatoly is cheating (because Freddie is losing) and he storms off like the brat he is and you’re like maybe the ‘action’ isn’t better than the boring chess match.
Freddie’s assistant and presumed lover, Florence Vassy (Cassidy Janson, who is pretty great), begs Freddie to have dinner with Anatoly to reconcile after the storming off, but Freddie gets sidetracked by Bangkok’s nightlife (“One Night in Bangkok”, which is more talk-sung that I remember and when you don’t have Adam Pascal’s incredible talk/scream-singing ability to make it pop it’s really just awkward) so Florence and Anatoly end up alone and they…fall in love? Dudes. Florence is a young attractive lady and Anatoly is MICHAEL BALL. Nothing against Mr. Ball (hehe ball) but he is like 60? And he’s not exactly a hot young guy of the sort that help Anatoly make any kind of narrative sense. Florence’s love for him comes out of nowhere and then is the emotional underpinning of the entire show and the trying-so-hard-to-be-dramatic-ending so if you aren’t invested in their love, or if you don’t believe even a bit of it, the whole piece fails and feels forced and empty.
Anatoly is married, by the way, and has a young son. We see him say goodbye to them in the weird Egyptian prologue. His wife Svetlana is played by Alexandra Burke, the one who won a season of The X Factor. She is NOT EVEN 30 YEARS OLD. She’s like a super hot young recording artist. She’s not married to Michael Ball ffs! And Cassidy is like 37 and beautiful and hot in Ireland (a ginger) and she is not falling in love at first sight with Michael Ball! This is NONSENSE. If you don’t buy right off the bat that all the young gorgeous women love them some Anatoly, then the show doesn’t work. After Anatoly affairs up with Florence, most of the drama has nothing to do with chess. It’s all about the two women dealing with their love for this troubled man. AIN’T BUYING IT.
Lots of nonsense happens after this, like Anatoly defects from the Soviet Union (in Soviet Union, they defect you) and seeks asylum with Florence in Britain; Svetlana teams up with a TV station to confront her husband Jerry Springer-style on live TV (??? AIN’T BUYING IT); and there’s more quiet games of chess in a freaking musical. The book is so strange, the set design is as I said the devil’s work, and yet the score is overall so great. You have Svetlana’s big soul-searching “Someone Else’s Story”, a lovely song that deserves to be about more than this hot woman’s old cheating Rusky husband. Alexandra does a nice job as Svetlana considering she isn’t an actress but a recording artist. Her acting leaves something to be desired but in this production it’s fine. You have Florence’s big angry “Nobody’s Side” which absolutely rocks out as a song but deserves to be about more than a fight she had with her asshole boss. (Florence’s songs seem tailor-made for Idina Menzel, who played the role in a concert version years back. They’re written in a way that lets Cassidy kind of sound like Idina sometimes too, which is cool but just makes you wish you were seeing Idina. (Josh Groban played Anatoly in that version, with Idina. Don’t get me started on how badly I wish I could have seen that version. That’s the goddamn great version.)) Then you have the big duet between the two women, “I Know Him So Well”, the highlight of the show but again, it deserves to be about something better than two women being sad about an inadequate man. I wish these songs had a better book to hold them up in the pantheon of musical theatre but alas.
I know I’m being quite mean to the men in this show, but it’s not their fault. Everyone behind the scenes is responsible for what doesn’t work here, not the actors. Michael Ball is like the greatest British musical theatre actor but he is not right for this part. He sings his songs beautifully but (sadly) this isn’t a concert version. Casting matters! I’ve railed enough about the set design but the sound design was bad too! And this is the freaking English National Opera building. It takes effort to destroy the acoustics. But often, with the fast-paced songs (a lot of them in this poppy score), the lyrics would come through the speakers just as sort of an indecipherable hum or growl. I honestly can’t believe they let that kind of issue stand.
Luckily, the music is so good and generally so well sung that “Chess” is still a decent time at the theatre. This production really should have been a concert version though. Or they should have cast men who better matched with the women they cast, or vice versa. Or they really should have just gotten Josh Groban to reprise his role. I wouldn’t even be writing this complainy complainerson review if that were the case; I’d still be there watching every single performance. Big mistake, men*. Big. Huge!
INFORMATION
Never, and I mean NEVER, sit anywhere at the ENO except for the stalls/orchestra. There’s only one staircase to the upper levels and the crowd is uniformly old so it takes literal hours to get out from upstairs. It’s an infuriating fire hazard for one thing and a real pain in my ass for another.
They do have water pitchers at the bar though.
STAGE DOOR
I saw it on my birthday so I didn’t stage door. I had cake to eat.
*I looked at the production and the creative team and except for the costume designer all the people are men.
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Broadway’s “Hedwig & The Angry Inch”: Belated Thoughts Plus Current News!
First, the news, which gave me a valid reason to post this review so very much later than I should have. Michael C. Hall (yes, Dexter) will return to the role of Hedwig on Broadway TONIGHT for at least a week! Hall ended his fabulous run a month ago. Producers are saying it’s just for one week (till February 21) but current Hedwig star (and creator) John Cameron Mitchell injured his knee a week ago, and knee injuries are serious, so if he needs more time to rest he should take it. Although it’s a shame that ticket holders for this week’s performances won’t get to see the unparalleled JCM, at least he’s promised to return in due time, so hopefully they can go back later. But for all people in or near New York City who have the chance, run this week to see Michael C. Hall! He is incredible! End news. Begin review.
To everyone’s surprise and delight, “Hedwig & The Angry Inch” is still selling out on Broadway almost a year later. I mean selling out like seats, and necessitating standing room tickets, not ‘selling out’ like abandoning principles. Although, funny stream of consciousness connection time, when a Broadway production was announced, many fans of the super fringe, culty, super off-Broadway original Jane Street production thought that a Broadway run would leave the beloved show overly sanitized to be safer for the regular mainstem (old/white/wealthy) crowd. But it didn’t. It was superb and just as sharp as before, but now available to become beloved by many, many more fans. With current temporary star Michael C. Hall, it’s a must-see.
And I am definitely one of those new fans. I watched the movie version of “Hedwig” in college but wasn’t really paying attention so I didn’t get it and didn’t even realize what amazingness I was watching. But then Neil Patrick Harris brought Hedwig back to life last spring and it won lots of Tonys and it was the hardest ticket to get. Since I like to see everything every season, this was very difficult for me to accept. Luckily I did not have to learn a lesson in not getting everything I want, Broadway edition, because my super awesome friend at Ever the Wayfarer got me ungettable tickets to NPH’s final weekend! Best ever! It was his beautiful performance that made me an obsessive fan of all things Hedwig.
“Hedwig & The Angry Inch” tells the story of a young man named Hansel, a ‘slip of a girly boy’ living with his austere mother in East Berlin before the wall came down. NB, that was the really shitty side. Hansel met Luther, an American soldier, who lured him with lots of candy like he was driving a white van, and made Hansel an offer he couldn’t refuse: to marry him, and thus get out of East Berlin. Obviously, this was happening before gay marriage was allowed anywhere, even in Europe, and so Hansel would have to undergo a sex change operation to pass the physical examination. Hansel’s mother gives him her passport and tells him he can go by her name, Hedwig. And so the new Hedwig goes to surgery, and as you probably can guess from the title, it is botched, to say the least, and he’s “left with a one-inch mound of flesh where my penis used to be, where my vagina never was. It was a one-inch mound of flesh, with a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face.” I freaking love that line and had to share.
So he, now she, Hedwig, is moved to Junction City, Kansas to live with her new husband Luther, who soon leaves her alone, living in a motor home, working a checkout counter, left to watch the fall of the Berlin wall on television too soon after all she went through to escape.
It’s pretty damn depressing. But it gets better like they all say! Because here she is, for her ‘one night only’ Broadway performance (as the show is billed as), made possible by the previous night’s mid-show closing of the first performance of the fictitious “Hurt Locker: The Musical”. To play up this backstory, fake “Hurt Locker” playbills are strewn about the auditorium before every performance, so if you are lucky enough to find one, you should frame it. These fake playbills are HILARIOUS, from the list of songs in the fake musical (including gems like “Won’t you buy my porn DVD” and “Hot Desert Nights!”) to the castlist (including Bobby Cannavale, Taye Diggs, and D’Bree Dazeem (Adele’s sister)) to the standard Playbill “How many have you seen” section all full of made-up and hysterical shows (including “Streep No More”, “SoulCycle On Broadway”, and, my favorite, “Tyler Perry is Madea is Medea”). Whoever made this fake playbill deserved a huge raise if not his or her own Tony. I still can’t get over how incredible it is.
Anyway, Hedwig is here in her one-night only concert, using the Hurt Locker set (a blown up car, lots of pipes and dinginess) and singing her glorious songs for a huge NYC crowd while telling us the rest of her history. After Luther left her, she started babysitting for a kid named Tommy, and together they wrote unbelievable music as they fell in love, a love that has both sustained and plagued Hedwig since. See, as a young boy, Hedwig was enamored with the story of the Origin of Love, based on Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, which tells how humans used to be of three sexes in forms about double what we are now. When the gods got angry and scared of our strength, they split everyone into two, making us the size and shape we are now while simultaneously creating the idea of our ‘other halves’, our soulmates. This is considered the origin of love, as the two people, the two parts, form one whole, and the search for that other half is what will make you complete. It’s really a lovely story, and the performance of this song is my favorite part of the whole show, with superb simple animation projected on a screen.
But Hedwig takes this story a little too seriously, and has been searching for her other half her whole life. She believed she found it in Tommy, but he was reviled by her situation downstairs, and things fell apart. To add insult to injury, Tommy became a famous rock star stealing all the songs they wrote together, which crushed Hedwig. Despite Hedwig’s now marriage to one of her musicians, a male Jewish drag queen named Yitzhak (played to perfection by Lena Hall), and all the time that has passed, she is still heartbroken yearning for Tommy. In addition to Hedwig’s words, the show itself demonstrates her feelings for Tommy, as it begins with the highest energy, like a rock concert. It’s loud and energetic and totally awesome, with “Tear Me Down” and “Sugar Daddy”. But once we hear Hedwig’s anthem, “Wig In A Box”, the dynamic changes and the songs become more personal, more sensitive, more sad.
The fantastic, clever, and intriguing aspect of the story is the ambiguity of the relationship between the characters of Tommy and Hedwig. The set up is that Tommy, a huge rock star, is playing an enormous venue just behind the Belasco, where Hedwig is singing. The venues share a door that repeatedly gets opened by Hedwig or Yitzhak during the show, when we can hear Tommy’s Midwestern voice addressing his adoring fans. Because the actor playing Hedwig also plays Tommy, some people think they are the same person, and that Hedwig’s struggle that she’s been telling us about has really just been within herself. While the latter is definitely true, it seems more widely accepted that they are indeed two different people, but that they are so similar in many ways that they both need to go through this journey, and rather than becoming complete by joining together, they become complete by, in Hedwig’s case, letting the other go and, in Tommy’s case, recognizing how much their relationship meant to him and apologizing for the past. I love how the “Wicked Little Town Reprise”, after Hedwig’s stripping down and/or transformation into Tommy, is sung clearly in Tommy’s voice. I love how much this show plays with gender boundaries and how nebulous the whole ending is because it allows everyone to come to their own conclusions at the end. There are also people who think Hedwig is fictitious, and that it’s Tommy the whole time, and that the whole German persona is a way for Tommy to deal with some emotional issues. This is actually closer to the story of its creator, John Cameron Mitchell, whose childhood mirrors Tommy’s and who indeed created Hedwig as a means of expression, as all art is. It’s such a compelling story no matter what your interpretation of the whole thing is. The most important part, regardless of which interpretation you form, is that the ending has Hedwig, or Tommy, or both, finally accepting who he/she is and finding inner peace.
All of this analysis is as fascinating as it is because Stephen Trask wrote the most magnificent music to tell this story. Before I saw this revival, I only knew “Wig In A Box”, but I’m now obsessed with the entire score, which has become one of my favorites. Every song captures so much emotion in a different way. Also, it seems like there’s really no supporting cast, because it’s just Hedwig up there with her band, but Yitzhak is a crucial role. I didn’t appreciate Lena Hall’s performance much the first time. I thought, okay, she has an amazing voice and talks like a man pretty convincingly, but a Tony? But on second viewing, I was stunned. Her interplay with Hedwig is everything. Every look that passes between them, all the times she (well he, Yitzhak, but easier to say she because Lena) jumps up to help Hedwig and all the times she purposefully pisses him off. Hedwig’s treatment of Yitzhak is despicable, not only because she’s always saying how Tommy was her soulmate, in front of her husband! So the ending, when Hedwig lets Yitzhak get back in drag and shine as perhaps an even stronger performer than Hedwig, is as much about Yitzhak’s journey and growth as about Hedwig’s.
And a hugely enjoyable part of the show is how much can change depending on the lead actor’s interpretation. NPH was funny, so charming, and often sad. His Hedwig seemed wistful more than stuck. He was also really pretty as a woman! He was at least believable as a ‘slip of a girly boy’. And his jokes were hysterical, especially my favorite “what’s an eight track” line in “Wig”. His energy was unbounded, his “Sugar Daddy” was insanely fun and unparalleled, and his “Origin of Love” was also beautiful. While NPH’s Hedwig seemed a downcast victim of ill fortune, Michael C. Hall’s was graver, darker, with more edge to his jokes and his singing. MCH’s much more masculine physical appearance made a difference as well, as his butch and kind of garish Hedwig made it more obvious that the path Hedwig’s life took – becoming a woman, a wife, an ex-wife, leaving home – was not exactly the product of free will. His “Midnight Radio” was incredibly powerful and his “Wicked Little Town” so wrenching and lovely. Both performances are worthy of acclaim (and were given it), but Michael’s deeper misery made a huge impact on me and showed how many layers there are to this seemingly simple story. I’m insanely jealous of the people who have seen all of the actors in this revival, especially John Cameron Mitchell, who should be back next week (but will finish before I’m back in NYC. Time to learn that lesson.). If you have the chance this week to see Michael, it’s definitely worth it. And if you have the chance to see John Cameron Mitchell, then I hate you.
And I am definitely one of those new fans. I watched the movie version of “Hedwig” in college but wasn’t really paying attention so I didn’t get it and didn’t even realize what amazingness I was watching. But then Neil Patrick Harris brought Hedwig back to life last spring and it won lots of Tonys and it was the hardest ticket to get. Since I like to see everything every season, this was very difficult for me to accept. Luckily I did not have to learn a lesson in not getting everything I want, Broadway edition, because my super awesome friend at Ever the Wayfarer got me ungettable tickets to NPH’s final weekend! Best ever! It was his beautiful performance that made me an obsessive fan of all things Hedwig.
“Hedwig & The Angry Inch” tells the story of a young man named Hansel, a ‘slip of a girly boy’ living with his austere mother in East Berlin before the wall came down. NB, that was the really shitty side. Hansel met Luther, an American soldier, who lured him with lots of candy like he was driving a white van, and made Hansel an offer he couldn’t refuse: to marry him, and thus get out of East Berlin. Obviously, this was happening before gay marriage was allowed anywhere, even in Europe, and so Hansel would have to undergo a sex change operation to pass the physical examination. Hansel’s mother gives him her passport and tells him he can go by her name, Hedwig. And so the new Hedwig goes to surgery, and as you probably can guess from the title, it is botched, to say the least, and he’s “left with a one-inch mound of flesh where my penis used to be, where my vagina never was. It was a one-inch mound of flesh, with a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face.” I freaking love that line and had to share.
So he, now she, Hedwig, is moved to Junction City, Kansas to live with her new husband Luther, who soon leaves her alone, living in a motor home, working a checkout counter, left to watch the fall of the Berlin wall on television too soon after all she went through to escape.
It’s pretty damn depressing. But it gets better like they all say! Because here she is, for her ‘one night only’ Broadway performance (as the show is billed as), made possible by the previous night’s mid-show closing of the first performance of the fictitious “Hurt Locker: The Musical”. To play up this backstory, fake “Hurt Locker” playbills are strewn about the auditorium before every performance, so if you are lucky enough to find one, you should frame it. These fake playbills are HILARIOUS, from the list of songs in the fake musical (including gems like “Won’t you buy my porn DVD” and “Hot Desert Nights!”) to the castlist (including Bobby Cannavale, Taye Diggs, and D’Bree Dazeem (Adele’s sister)) to the standard Playbill “How many have you seen” section all full of made-up and hysterical shows (including “Streep No More”, “SoulCycle On Broadway”, and, my favorite, “Tyler Perry is Madea is Medea”). Whoever made this fake playbill deserved a huge raise if not his or her own Tony. I still can’t get over how incredible it is.
Anyway, Hedwig is here in her one-night only concert, using the Hurt Locker set (a blown up car, lots of pipes and dinginess) and singing her glorious songs for a huge NYC crowd while telling us the rest of her history. After Luther left her, she started babysitting for a kid named Tommy, and together they wrote unbelievable music as they fell in love, a love that has both sustained and plagued Hedwig since. See, as a young boy, Hedwig was enamored with the story of the Origin of Love, based on Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, which tells how humans used to be of three sexes in forms about double what we are now. When the gods got angry and scared of our strength, they split everyone into two, making us the size and shape we are now while simultaneously creating the idea of our ‘other halves’, our soulmates. This is considered the origin of love, as the two people, the two parts, form one whole, and the search for that other half is what will make you complete. It’s really a lovely story, and the performance of this song is my favorite part of the whole show, with superb simple animation projected on a screen.
But Hedwig takes this story a little too seriously, and has been searching for her other half her whole life. She believed she found it in Tommy, but he was reviled by her situation downstairs, and things fell apart. To add insult to injury, Tommy became a famous rock star stealing all the songs they wrote together, which crushed Hedwig. Despite Hedwig’s now marriage to one of her musicians, a male Jewish drag queen named Yitzhak (played to perfection by Lena Hall), and all the time that has passed, she is still heartbroken yearning for Tommy. In addition to Hedwig’s words, the show itself demonstrates her feelings for Tommy, as it begins with the highest energy, like a rock concert. It’s loud and energetic and totally awesome, with “Tear Me Down” and “Sugar Daddy”. But once we hear Hedwig’s anthem, “Wig In A Box”, the dynamic changes and the songs become more personal, more sensitive, more sad.
The fantastic, clever, and intriguing aspect of the story is the ambiguity of the relationship between the characters of Tommy and Hedwig. The set up is that Tommy, a huge rock star, is playing an enormous venue just behind the Belasco, where Hedwig is singing. The venues share a door that repeatedly gets opened by Hedwig or Yitzhak during the show, when we can hear Tommy’s Midwestern voice addressing his adoring fans. Because the actor playing Hedwig also plays Tommy, some people think they are the same person, and that Hedwig’s struggle that she’s been telling us about has really just been within herself. While the latter is definitely true, it seems more widely accepted that they are indeed two different people, but that they are so similar in many ways that they both need to go through this journey, and rather than becoming complete by joining together, they become complete by, in Hedwig’s case, letting the other go and, in Tommy’s case, recognizing how much their relationship meant to him and apologizing for the past. I love how the “Wicked Little Town Reprise”, after Hedwig’s stripping down and/or transformation into Tommy, is sung clearly in Tommy’s voice. I love how much this show plays with gender boundaries and how nebulous the whole ending is because it allows everyone to come to their own conclusions at the end. There are also people who think Hedwig is fictitious, and that it’s Tommy the whole time, and that the whole German persona is a way for Tommy to deal with some emotional issues. This is actually closer to the story of its creator, John Cameron Mitchell, whose childhood mirrors Tommy’s and who indeed created Hedwig as a means of expression, as all art is. It’s such a compelling story no matter what your interpretation of the whole thing is. The most important part, regardless of which interpretation you form, is that the ending has Hedwig, or Tommy, or both, finally accepting who he/she is and finding inner peace.
All of this analysis is as fascinating as it is because Stephen Trask wrote the most magnificent music to tell this story. Before I saw this revival, I only knew “Wig In A Box”, but I’m now obsessed with the entire score, which has become one of my favorites. Every song captures so much emotion in a different way. Also, it seems like there’s really no supporting cast, because it’s just Hedwig up there with her band, but Yitzhak is a crucial role. I didn’t appreciate Lena Hall’s performance much the first time. I thought, okay, she has an amazing voice and talks like a man pretty convincingly, but a Tony? But on second viewing, I was stunned. Her interplay with Hedwig is everything. Every look that passes between them, all the times she (well he, Yitzhak, but easier to say she because Lena) jumps up to help Hedwig and all the times she purposefully pisses him off. Hedwig’s treatment of Yitzhak is despicable, not only because she’s always saying how Tommy was her soulmate, in front of her husband! So the ending, when Hedwig lets Yitzhak get back in drag and shine as perhaps an even stronger performer than Hedwig, is as much about Yitzhak’s journey and growth as about Hedwig’s.
And a hugely enjoyable part of the show is how much can change depending on the lead actor’s interpretation. NPH was funny, so charming, and often sad. His Hedwig seemed wistful more than stuck. He was also really pretty as a woman! He was at least believable as a ‘slip of a girly boy’. And his jokes were hysterical, especially my favorite “what’s an eight track” line in “Wig”. His energy was unbounded, his “Sugar Daddy” was insanely fun and unparalleled, and his “Origin of Love” was also beautiful. While NPH’s Hedwig seemed a downcast victim of ill fortune, Michael C. Hall’s was graver, darker, with more edge to his jokes and his singing. MCH’s much more masculine physical appearance made a difference as well, as his butch and kind of garish Hedwig made it more obvious that the path Hedwig’s life took – becoming a woman, a wife, an ex-wife, leaving home – was not exactly the product of free will. His “Midnight Radio” was incredibly powerful and his “Wicked Little Town” so wrenching and lovely. Both performances are worthy of acclaim (and were given it), but Michael’s deeper misery made a huge impact on me and showed how many layers there are to this seemingly simple story. I’m insanely jealous of the people who have seen all of the actors in this revival, especially John Cameron Mitchell, who should be back next week (but will finish before I’m back in NYC. Time to learn that lesson.). If you have the chance this week to see Michael, it’s definitely worth it. And if you have the chance to see John Cameron Mitchell, then I hate you.
Sondheim’s Memory Will Absolutely Be a Blessing
It’s so strange to think that Stephen Sondheim is no longer on this earth when the earth has so often felt like simply a platform for his work to exist. Everything that happens and everywhere I go and every word that every person says reminds me of some truth he shared with the world that we were lucky enough to hear and understand and connect with emotionally. No one was more honest about the complexities of human emotion and the depths of human frailty, and applying that honesty to musical theatre elevated it as an art form and reinforced that it’s deserving of respect. Look at what musical theatre can achieve, he said. Look at how we need musical theatre to truly express our humanity. That’s why we love him so much.
I’m not foolish enough to think that I can eulogize him better than others have (except the Guardian of course) or discuss the brilliance of his works in detail like theatre historians. I just wanted to take a few minutes to think about how important his creations are to me personally. Unfortunately I’m not able to do what everyone loves doing (and you can’t really fault them for doing it), which is to share a photo of me and the deceased, because I never had the opportunity to meet him. While part of me is of course sorry that that will never happen, part of me is glad because I can go on imagining him as more than an ordinary man. For me and for most of us who love theatre, he was this sort of holy figure, whose genius necessitated that he must be more than human, despite understanding and expressing humanity on such unparalleled levels.
This past weekend, I was without power and cell service for a few days due to the storm, and while that experience was one of the worst, it let me have a few extra days of believing I actually shared a planet with him, this great figure. That we existed in the same era and in the same universe is a miracle to me, and not just because it’s Chanukah and he was Jewish and I’m primed to be thinking all miracley anyway. He would be the last person to think of himself in such laudatory terms as we all do, as he was just a man (a NJB really), but his genius made him seem superhuman, despite that very genius being grounded in humanity.
On a personal level, his works form important touchstones for so many parts of my life. One of my earliest memories is watching the PBS airing of ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ over and over with my mom. She had taped it (VHS baby) so she would put it on frequently for years after. I remember it was even on when she was drying her hair one morning, and I was just staring at the small screen. Mandy Patinkin quickly became my mom’s favorite non-family (maybe even including family who knows) person in the world, and I loved everything about it, this woman in the dress with the poofy butt (who know one day I would work with her) and the colors and all these characters and above all the sound of this perfect music that I was too young to understand but knew was beautiful and important. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the dark twists of ‘Into the Woods’ and the lessons it taught about consequences and the ramifications of wishes, especially as someone raised on Disney princesses. But, I was also raised on ‘West Side Story’ and with it my dad’s favorite story of his single line: ‘COPS!’ And I’m not saying I married a man because he appreciates and loves how insanely ingenious ‘Assassins’ is but it’s not not why. I can’t imagine what life looks like without his shows helping us understand it.
It doesn’t matter that he was 91 or that we’ve been fearing this moment since his big 80th celebration. Genius of that sort is rare and now we are without his. But we have his work, his brilliant creations, each of them special and so many of them continually surprising in their truth and beauty. We are so lucky that his works keep getting produced and we can keep experiencing them, and in new ways, even if we will never get that fabled next show from him.
His genius was in peeling away layers to reveal raw human truths that seem so simple and clear but are so complicated, and doing that to incredible music. He seemed to so often be drawn to extremely niche situations for his settings — not e.g. a basic family drama that everyone could relate to but instead a group of aging former performers confronting their pasts in a closing dilapidated theatre, or a beloved painting brought to life through the backstory of its creator and muse, or a group of historical assassins detailing their exploits and commenting on the current state of politics (current at any time, another aspect of his brilliance). Even the situations that don’t seem too rare or extreme, like the single man deliberating his singledom, were novel and innovative at the time. Instead of writing characters as every day people we would immediately relate to, he made it so we related to people we didn’t automatically see ourselves in. We weren’t always reflected outwardly but we would soon feel emotionally connected and reflected due to the honesty and depth of his words and how the music enhanced their meaning. He found emotional truths in this nuance and showed them so clearly that the shadows seemed like daybreak. His legacy for me is how he let audiences easily see themselves in characters that aren’t clearly similar to them, or see truth in situations that don’t look like their normal lives, which more easily lets people connect with those different from them in real life. I believe he did this, and since being able to connect in those ways increases empathy, with his art he thus made the world a better place.
When loved ones die, Jewish people say may their memory be a blessing. To remember Stephen Sondheim is to remember his genius and how that genius manifested in the creation of these lasting works of emotional truth and humanity. His memory is a blessing, and will always be a blessing, as his life was, as his art was.
