Kiev (Kyiv though) Ukraine: Nice City, Interesting Sights, Indeterminate Vibeby Randi / March 28, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we’re talking about the Hampstead Theatre’s production of “Caroline, or Change” playing until April 21. It transfers to the West End in November.
I was always obsessed with musical theatre, and in 2004 I could finally travel alone to NYC whenever I wanted/whenever my college schedule allowed and see Broadway shows more often. It was a big year – that was the year of ‘Wicked’, ‘Avenue Q’, ‘The Boy From Oz’, Alfred Molina’s ‘Fiddler’, Donna Murphy’s ‘Wonderful Town’, Audra in ‘Raisin in the Sun’. Such a busy season! I got to see Idina in ‘Wicked’, but another new show with a supposedly killer leading lady role slipped under my radar. That was ‘Caroline, or Change’, starring Tonya Pinkins as Caroline, a Tony-winning Anika Noni Rose as her daughter Emmie, and a score by Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner. It seemed pretty beloved, an interesting civil rights-age drama taking place in Louisiana, about a black maid working for a Jewish family but also with singing electrical appliances. How did that work, I wondered? It remained high on my list of shows I wanted to see someday, and so when the current English revival moved closer to the West End – to the Hampstead Theatre up north of the city – I did a little jig and said halleluyer, because I would finally see it.
It was not good.
I feel terrible saying it, because I know so many theatre fans like myself really love it, but I do not understand why. I wanted to love this show SO BADLY and no matter how much I was putting out there, hoping that it would offer me just the eeniest bit of love back, it gave me nothing. The book was a mess. How can you mess up the drama and complexities of relationships between black people and their white bosses, during the ‘60s, in the American south, right when JFK gets assassinated? I mean come on, that setting is PRIME for dramatic mining. Well, you mess it up by trying to shoehorn into a single show the stories about the relationship between the black maid and the white child of the family she works for, AND how the white boy’s mother had recently died, AND how the boy’s musician father remarried his wife’s best friend so they would have a wife/mother, AND how the white boy is handling the new mother, AND how the maid is handling the new boss, AND how the maid is dealing with raising her kids alone, AND how the maid’s kids are growing up, AND how the white boy’s grandparents from each side clash with each other over politics, AND how those grandparents conflict with the maid’s daughter over politics, AND how the maid has to deal with her pride, AND how the maid is a real B word to her fellow maids that she sees at the bus stop and refuses to be civil toward, AND how the other maid that we see like maybe twice is going to night school and wearing bobby socks, AND how the moon is an actual character AND how the electrical appliances in the basement where the maid spends most of her time SING AND DANCE and it’s all supposed to mean something? Oh and how the one thing that bonds the maid and the white boy is that she lets him light her daily cigarette.
That’s a lot of story threads that instead of braiding together and forming a solid yarn, they diminish into little wisps and amount to nothing. All these little nothing wisps mashed together mean that there’s simultaneously wayyy too much going on and yet there’s zero emotional heft, zero connection with the material when there should be loads. I know ‘Angels in America’ is a masterpiece but I’m a little wary of seeing it now, Tony Toni Tone. It was like this was going for ‘Love, Actually’ with that many threads but instead it gave us ‘Valentine’s Day’. And like the stories in that movie, you end up not being satisfied with any thread and walking out thinking it was pedestrian at best. If they focused on the relationship between Caroline and Noah, and how Noah imagined his maid’s family life versus what it was actually like (the one minute where they do that is the most compelling part), then we’d have a worthwhile story. Oh, and if Caroline were anything close to being sympathetic or even a little kind. But she’s not. She’s been through a lot of hardship, and as a black woman in the ‘60s south her hardships will never end, but that’s not enough of a reason to accept her being a vessel of pure hatred towards everyone around her. I get that anti-heroes are popular nowadays, but they usually have an appealing trait of some sort, or the whisper of charm or a sense of humor or something. Caroline gives us nothing, and maybe the point is that she doesn’t have to, and in real life she wouldn’t have to, she wouldn’t owe anyone anything, but if you want me to care about this character in a play she’s going to have to be worth caring about. If we’re supposed to feel something besides revulsion, there’s no opportunity or reason for doing so.
The main story is: Caroline is the maid working for the Gellmans, a jewish family with a little boy named Noah, who is dealing with his mother’s loss and his new stepmother, Rose. You think at first that Caroline and Noah might have a sweet relationship, bonding in the basement after school as Caroline does her work, but she’s pretty mean to him all the time. Their one thing, like I said above, is that she lets Noah light her cigarette and he’s like ‘oh boy oh boy!’ and she’s like ‘hurry up I need a smoke then get out of my face’ and we’re like this is neither cute nor sweet nor appropriate for this kid, also his mother died from smoking. The stepmother, Rose, is upset with Noah because he always leaves his money in his pockets, which Caroline finds every day as she does the laundry, and she fills the bleach cup with it and returns it to the Gellmans, every penny of it. Rose tells Caroline, you know what, to teach Noah to value his money, let’s say that everything he leaves in his pockets, everything in the bleach cup at the end of the week, is yours to keep. This is difficult for Caroline to accept because it makes her seem like a beggar, scrounging for pennies, while Rose doesn’t see the problem with it. The extra money would help Caroline so much, but taking it is a huge blow to her pride. And so the ‘change’ of the title is both the change in the times and the literal change in the bleach cup. It’s kind of trite. Caroline has it hard, with four kids, one at war, and an ex-husband who was abusive. She’s understandably mean to everyone – her employers, Noah, the other maids in the neighborhood – but just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s forgivable. She kind of sucks, and then at the end, as she gets meaner and meaner and for some reason unleashes her rage on Noah, she’s reprehensible.
Tony Kushner also wrote the lyrics, and they had me cringing in my seat. There were so many clunkers. I remember in the opening one of the grandfather’s sings about his deceased daughter’s smoking: “It killed her. She died. It killed her. She’s dead.” JESUS. Every other song mentioned how in Louisiana, the dead – and Caroline as she’s always in the basement – aren’t underground, but underwater. It’s kind of poetic and sets a certain mood, right? Yeah, the first 4 times. When you’re getting to the 20th, 30th mention of how we aren’t underground but underwater, it’s no longer profound or elegant or anything other than repetitive and annoying. We also hear a lot about how Noah’s mother played the bassoon. That’s an interesting fact, I guess. They talk about it a lot. Like a lot a lot. It does not seem that important the 15th time.
I wish that I could say Jeanine Tesori’s score was great despite Tony Kushner’s abysmal lyrics, but it wasn’t. Everything sounded the same and that same was pretty dull. It’s a real shame because I love Tesori’s other works – ‘Fun Home’ is a masterpiece, a true masterpiece, but I guess partnering with Lisa Kron was required for that one to shine. She wrote the great ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, with lyricist Dick Scanlon. And she wrote ‘Violet’, which I adore, with Brian Crawley, and ‘Shrek’, which is surprisingly magical, with David Lindsay-Abaire. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t have a steady writing partner, and she needed one for ‘Caroline’. She’s such a legendary, wonderful musician and I just don’t get what she was doing here. The only song that I remembered when I left was the one when Noah sings, revolving round and round the stage, ‘On the first day day day Caroline stayed away way way and she didn’t come back back back and she didn’t come back back back.’ Repeat 5 times. And yes the melody is just as you think, like just a childhood rhyme. Omg it was painful. Now it’s in my head again dammit.
When I first realized I was trying incredibly hard, too hard, to enjoy this show, I figured it’s because the book and score, the bones of the show, are weak and inadequate. I assumed this production did the best it could with what meager bones it was working with, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Directing this show is a huge challenge, and as I’ve only seen it once I can’t say what is this production’s doing differently. But I can say that the tone was all over the place, impossible to pin down. We have all the troubled relationships, all the misery and despair of the south, and then we have the bubbly singing washing machine, the terrifying singing dryer, the singing trio of girls (with ever-changing matching outfits that were impressive) representing the radio. At first I thought that was cute, and I assumed that the show would be the sort that could handle such bizarre portrayals of home goods, but it isn’t. Things only fell apart more when the moon arrived – the actress sits in a moon-shaped seat and floats through the rafters for a good chunk of the show – and still refuses to make any sense when paired with the dismal realism of the rest of the show. Nothing ever really gels, and yes a huge reason for that is because of the material, but the direction doesn’t help at all, nor do the performances, and I really hate saying that because this show has a great cast. But while Abiona Omonua’s Emmie was winning and adorable, Anika Noni Rose has that incredible voice that could really rip into her songs and make more out of them. I didn’t even realize until I looked at the programme after the fact that Rose was played by Lauren Ward, as in Miss Honey from the original West End and Broadway “Matilda” cast. Just had no idea. It’s hard to shine in that role. The Noah we saw was Aaron Gelkoff, a really talented kid who successfully made us feel for Noah even though he’s super annoying. And I always like Ako Mitchell but playing the dryer is just weird; there’s not much he can do with it even though it’s somehow one of the biggest parts.
But the biggest issue is with Caroline. She’s played by one of the few West End actors I actually really like, Sharon D. Clarke, who has been exceptional in everything I’ve seen her in. I thought she was fine here, making do with an unrewarding role, playing a woman who hates everyone and so we hate her back. But since seeing it, I’ve fallen down the youtube rabbit hole (fun fact: ‘Rabbit Hole’ was written by Tesori’s ‘Shrek’ writing partner Lindsay-Abaire) to watch videos of the original Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Sharon was very one-note the entire time, but Pinkins adds layers that made it just a little easier to not hate her the entire time. Pinkins’s rendition of the one big song, “Lot’s Wife”, the 11 o’clock number, shows so much more emotion. Instead of just seething with anger and resentment, Pinkins’s performance shows anguish and hope and regret and a wish with her entire being that she could be better. Sharon’s Caroline was just stone-cold anger and hate; I got nothing else from her, and I think that’s a huge reason why it didn’t work for me.
Of course, Caroline isn’t a likable character, as written, and so there’s not much the actress can do with her anyway. She has no positive attributes to make an audience root for her. And instead of coming around at the end, maybe giving Noah a hug or even an encouraging word to show that their relationship is warmer than it seems, she unleashes all her venom onto him, all the hate that bubbles within her, and tells him that “Hell is where Jews go when they die.” I choked a little bit on the pure hatred that fills this statement — and the rest of the audience laughed. And I don’t mean nervous, tense laughter; I mean they belly laughed like this was a funny joke. I ran this by my Broadway people to see if it happens usually in other productions and, except for one person who said that a few people laughed when she saw it but it was really disturbing and most people gasped, everyone was like, ‘what, no that’s not a laugh line, that is so fucked up.’ It really is. Is Europe so awash in anti-Semitism again that London audiences are laughing at stuff like this? I’m horrified, as a NORMAL person would be, FFS. Anyway, after Caroline says a line that that to a little child, you lose whatever care you had for her and since she never makes amends for it or any of her bad behavior, it just loses you completely.
Even though this is all prettayyy prettayyy negative, it’s not entirely painful to watch. The cast is good, the vocals are all good. The story, or hodgepodge of potential stories, just really didn’t work for me, no matter how badly I wanted it to. I wonder if it will change at all before the West End transfer, but I don’t know how much of what’s problematic they actually could improve.
AUDIENCE
Clearly fucked up and terrifying.
HAMPSTEAD THEATRE
Whoever designed the Hampstead Theatre is batshit crazy. The only bathrooms are by the entrance, behind the box office. That’s REAL DUMB. God people are paid to do jobs like this, I can’t even believe it.
The bathrooms are cool though, with each stall featuring a full-length portrait of a famous actress from a role played at this theatre. Well, all famous actresses save for Simon Russell Beale, who is pictured from a show where he played a woman. Fun times.
I feel terrible saying it, because I know so many theatre fans like myself really love it, but I do not understand why. I wanted to love this show SO BADLY and no matter how much I was putting out there, hoping that it would offer me just the eeniest bit of love back, it gave me nothing. The book was a mess. How can you mess up the drama and complexities of relationships between black people and their white bosses, during the ‘60s, in the American south, right when JFK gets assassinated? I mean come on, that setting is PRIME for dramatic mining. Well, you mess it up by trying to shoehorn into a single show the stories about the relationship between the black maid and the white child of the family she works for, AND how the white boy’s mother had recently died, AND how the boy’s musician father remarried his wife’s best friend so they would have a wife/mother, AND how the white boy is handling the new mother, AND how the maid is handling the new boss, AND how the maid is dealing with raising her kids alone, AND how the maid’s kids are growing up, AND how the white boy’s grandparents from each side clash with each other over politics, AND how those grandparents conflict with the maid’s daughter over politics, AND how the maid has to deal with her pride, AND how the maid is a real B word to her fellow maids that she sees at the bus stop and refuses to be civil toward, AND how the other maid that we see like maybe twice is going to night school and wearing bobby socks, AND how the moon is an actual character AND how the electrical appliances in the basement where the maid spends most of her time SING AND DANCE and it’s all supposed to mean something? Oh and how the one thing that bonds the maid and the white boy is that she lets him light her daily cigarette.
That’s a lot of story threads that instead of braiding together and forming a solid yarn, they diminish into little wisps and amount to nothing. All these little nothing wisps mashed together mean that there’s simultaneously wayyy too much going on and yet there’s zero emotional heft, zero connection with the material when there should be loads. I know ‘Angels in America’ is a masterpiece but I’m a little wary of seeing it now, Tony Toni Tone. It was like this was going for ‘Love, Actually’ with that many threads but instead it gave us ‘Valentine’s Day’. And like the stories in that movie, you end up not being satisfied with any thread and walking out thinking it was pedestrian at best. If they focused on the relationship between Caroline and Noah, and how Noah imagined his maid’s family life versus what it was actually like (the one minute where they do that is the most compelling part), then we’d have a worthwhile story. Oh, and if Caroline were anything close to being sympathetic or even a little kind. But she’s not. She’s been through a lot of hardship, and as a black woman in the ‘60s south her hardships will never end, but that’s not enough of a reason to accept her being a vessel of pure hatred towards everyone around her. I get that anti-heroes are popular nowadays, but they usually have an appealing trait of some sort, or the whisper of charm or a sense of humor or something. Caroline gives us nothing, and maybe the point is that she doesn’t have to, and in real life she wouldn’t have to, she wouldn’t owe anyone anything, but if you want me to care about this character in a play she’s going to have to be worth caring about. If we’re supposed to feel something besides revulsion, there’s no opportunity or reason for doing so.
The main story is: Caroline is the maid working for the Gellmans, a jewish family with a little boy named Noah, who is dealing with his mother’s loss and his new stepmother, Rose. You think at first that Caroline and Noah might have a sweet relationship, bonding in the basement after school as Caroline does her work, but she’s pretty mean to him all the time. Their one thing, like I said above, is that she lets Noah light her cigarette and he’s like ‘oh boy oh boy!’ and she’s like ‘hurry up I need a smoke then get out of my face’ and we’re like this is neither cute nor sweet nor appropriate for this kid, also his mother died from smoking. The stepmother, Rose, is upset with Noah because he always leaves his money in his pockets, which Caroline finds every day as she does the laundry, and she fills the bleach cup with it and returns it to the Gellmans, every penny of it. Rose tells Caroline, you know what, to teach Noah to value his money, let’s say that everything he leaves in his pockets, everything in the bleach cup at the end of the week, is yours to keep. This is difficult for Caroline to accept because it makes her seem like a beggar, scrounging for pennies, while Rose doesn’t see the problem with it. The extra money would help Caroline so much, but taking it is a huge blow to her pride. And so the ‘change’ of the title is both the change in the times and the literal change in the bleach cup. It’s kind of trite. Caroline has it hard, with four kids, one at war, and an ex-husband who was abusive. She’s understandably mean to everyone – her employers, Noah, the other maids in the neighborhood – but just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s forgivable. She kind of sucks, and then at the end, as she gets meaner and meaner and for some reason unleashes her rage on Noah, she’s reprehensible.
Tony Kushner also wrote the lyrics, and they had me cringing in my seat. There were so many clunkers. I remember in the opening one of the grandfather’s sings about his deceased daughter’s smoking: “It killed her. She died. It killed her. She’s dead.” JESUS. Every other song mentioned how in Louisiana, the dead – and Caroline as she’s always in the basement – aren’t underground, but underwater. It’s kind of poetic and sets a certain mood, right? Yeah, the first 4 times. When you’re getting to the 20th, 30th mention of how we aren’t underground but underwater, it’s no longer profound or elegant or anything other than repetitive and annoying. We also hear a lot about how Noah’s mother played the bassoon. That’s an interesting fact, I guess. They talk about it a lot. Like a lot a lot. It does not seem that important the 15th time.
I wish that I could say Jeanine Tesori’s score was great despite Tony Kushner’s abysmal lyrics, but it wasn’t. Everything sounded the same and that same was pretty dull. It’s a real shame because I love Tesori’s other works – ‘Fun Home’ is a masterpiece, a true masterpiece, but I guess partnering with Lisa Kron was required for that one to shine. She wrote the great ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, with lyricist Dick Scanlon. And she wrote ‘Violet’, which I adore, with Brian Crawley, and ‘Shrek’, which is surprisingly magical, with David Lindsay-Abaire. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t have a steady writing partner, and she needed one for ‘Caroline’. She’s such a legendary, wonderful musician and I just don’t get what she was doing here. The only song that I remembered when I left was the one when Noah sings, revolving round and round the stage, ‘On the first day day day Caroline stayed away way way and she didn’t come back back back and she didn’t come back back back.’ Repeat 5 times. And yes the melody is just as you think, like just a childhood rhyme. Omg it was painful. Now it’s in my head again dammit.
When I first realized I was trying incredibly hard, too hard, to enjoy this show, I figured it’s because the book and score, the bones of the show, are weak and inadequate. I assumed this production did the best it could with what meager bones it was working with, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Directing this show is a huge challenge, and as I’ve only seen it once I can’t say what is this production’s doing differently. But I can say that the tone was all over the place, impossible to pin down. We have all the troubled relationships, all the misery and despair of the south, and then we have the bubbly singing washing machine, the terrifying singing dryer, the singing trio of girls (with ever-changing matching outfits that were impressive) representing the radio. At first I thought that was cute, and I assumed that the show would be the sort that could handle such bizarre portrayals of home goods, but it isn’t. Things only fell apart more when the moon arrived – the actress sits in a moon-shaped seat and floats through the rafters for a good chunk of the show – and still refuses to make any sense when paired with the dismal realism of the rest of the show. Nothing ever really gels, and yes a huge reason for that is because of the material, but the direction doesn’t help at all, nor do the performances, and I really hate saying that because this show has a great cast. But while Abiona Omonua’s Emmie was winning and adorable, Anika Noni Rose has that incredible voice that could really rip into her songs and make more out of them. I didn’t even realize until I looked at the programme after the fact that Rose was played by Lauren Ward, as in Miss Honey from the original West End and Broadway “Matilda” cast. Just had no idea. It’s hard to shine in that role. The Noah we saw was Aaron Gelkoff, a really talented kid who successfully made us feel for Noah even though he’s super annoying. And I always like Ako Mitchell but playing the dryer is just weird; there’s not much he can do with it even though it’s somehow one of the biggest parts.
But the biggest issue is with Caroline. She’s played by one of the few West End actors I actually really like, Sharon D. Clarke, who has been exceptional in everything I’ve seen her in. I thought she was fine here, making do with an unrewarding role, playing a woman who hates everyone and so we hate her back. But since seeing it, I’ve fallen down the youtube rabbit hole (fun fact: ‘Rabbit Hole’ was written by Tesori’s ‘Shrek’ writing partner Lindsay-Abaire) to watch videos of the original Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Sharon was very one-note the entire time, but Pinkins adds layers that made it just a little easier to not hate her the entire time. Pinkins’s rendition of the one big song, “Lot’s Wife”, the 11 o’clock number, shows so much more emotion. Instead of just seething with anger and resentment, Pinkins’s performance shows anguish and hope and regret and a wish with her entire being that she could be better. Sharon’s Caroline was just stone-cold anger and hate; I got nothing else from her, and I think that’s a huge reason why it didn’t work for me.
Of course, Caroline isn’t a likable character, as written, and so there’s not much the actress can do with her anyway. She has no positive attributes to make an audience root for her. And instead of coming around at the end, maybe giving Noah a hug or even an encouraging word to show that their relationship is warmer than it seems, she unleashes all her venom onto him, all the hate that bubbles within her, and tells him that “Hell is where Jews go when they die.” I choked a little bit on the pure hatred that fills this statement — and the rest of the audience laughed. And I don’t mean nervous, tense laughter; I mean they belly laughed like this was a funny joke. I ran this by my Broadway people to see if it happens usually in other productions and, except for one person who said that a few people laughed when she saw it but it was really disturbing and most people gasped, everyone was like, ‘what, no that’s not a laugh line, that is so fucked up.’ It really is. Is Europe so awash in anti-Semitism again that London audiences are laughing at stuff like this? I’m horrified, as a NORMAL person would be, FFS. Anyway, after Caroline says a line that that to a little child, you lose whatever care you had for her and since she never makes amends for it or any of her bad behavior, it just loses you completely.
Even though this is all prettayyy prettayyy negative, it’s not entirely painful to watch. The cast is good, the vocals are all good. The story, or hodgepodge of potential stories, just really didn’t work for me, no matter how badly I wanted it to. I wonder if it will change at all before the West End transfer, but I don’t know how much of what’s problematic they actually could improve.
AUDIENCE
Clearly fucked up and terrifying.
HAMPSTEAD THEATRE
Whoever designed the Hampstead Theatre is batshit crazy. The only bathrooms are by the entrance, behind the box office. That’s REAL DUMB. God people are paid to do jobs like this, I can’t even believe it.
The bathrooms are cool though, with each stall featuring a full-length portrait of a famous actress from a role played at this theatre. Well, all famous actresses save for Simon Russell Beale, who is pictured from a show where he played a woman. Fun times.
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: World Premiere of Exciting New Musical
Full disclosure, before seeing the new musical version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button I assumed it was going to be hilarious. Really, you’re taking the decent-but-not-loved Brad Pitt movie and turning it into a musical? Good luck with that. I assumed it would go the route of recent screen-to-stage West End musical disasters like Made in Dagenham and Bend It Like Beckham. But I could not have been more wrong. No, as the lot of us sitting in the ‘Little’ black box studio of the Southwark Playhouse pathetically blowing our noses and sobbing during Act II can attest, I could not have been more wrong. Rather than lazily taking a known property and shoving in songs here and there as everyone else seems to do and calling it a ‘new musical’ instead of a ‘garbage fire’, the Button team did what so few can do and made something meaningful and worthwhile. They’ve taken the original F. Scott Fitzgerald story and reset it as a Cornish coastal folk tale, with an underpinning of mysticism and with inventive folk music that successfully builds an entire world, and gives poignant, impressive new life to this story.
Having its world premiere at London’s Southwark Playhouse these past few weeks, Button continued this very exciting and very inspiring new trend of original British scores being on the up and up after about a decade of swimming in the shallow end. Although folk music isn’t the kind I’d be listening to at home, this score from Jethro Compton and Darren Clark served the show well and helped convey the necessary mythology and emotion in a way that classic showtunes, for one, couldn’t have. Making Button a Celtic-inspired legend was a smart creative decision, bringing the tale from its jazz-age Americana roots and establishing it instead on the Cornwall coast, with its UK traits of the stiff upper lip, the hardworking fishermen, the omnipresent pubs.
For those of you not up on your F. Scott short stories or who somehow didn’t see the 2008 Brad Pitt – Cate Blanchett – Taraji P. Henson absolute ROMP of a movie (it’s not it’s sad) (but really good) (I know I said above it wasn’t beloved but like it was really solid and honestly thinking about the ending makes me quite emotional like old lady Cate holding the baby version of her former love as it dies???? whaaat??) (Oh ps SPOILERS just there before), Benjamin Button is this cursed child (not related to Harry Potter) born as an old man who then spends his life aging in reverse. I have to admit I’m not up on my Effe Scott Fitzy but in the movie, he’s just a creepy old-man-looking baby-sized 80-year-old or what have you, but in the stage version, he pops out of his OBVIOUSLY DISTRAUGHT mother a full-size, full-talking, full-thinking 70-year-old man. (Which yeah you understand why his mother would jump off the cliffs but I think her song “Davey Jones’ Locker” should be cut or trimmed, like yes you just had a full-grown-gramps instead of a baby and I’m sorry but we don’t feel enough sympathy for you right off the bat to connect fully with your downward spiral.)You’re probably thinking, um how did they do this on stage? And the answer is with puppetry, with puppets made out of, well, garbage, pretty much (wicker baskets and lots of plastic bottles, hooray for reusing (recycling isn’t as good as we were all told, please try to actually reduce your plastic use and as here, reuse! PSA)) and impressive maneuvering by the hard-working five-person ensemble. It was really impressive stuff, and funny when it was plastic-bottle children later on.
Speaking of the hard-working ensemble, these five actors and musicians, all onstage mostly the whole show, weave in and out of various characters and play multiple instruments as they tell this tale in a most impressive manner. Well one actor, James Marlowe, does very little weaving since he plays Benjamin for the majority of his life (they need a few more visual aids to show the passing decades, like maybe losing the mustache when he talks about not needing to shave anymore, adding a few youthful accessories or playing with wigs, things like that). And one weave was my biggest pet peeve of the show since it was completely unnecessary: Benjamin’s love interest is named Elowen, and she’s played winningly in Act I by Philippa Hogg. In Act II, as Elowen grows older and Benjamin grows younger, Rosalind Ford takes over as Elowen. The passing of the character between the two actresses is actually done in quite a lovely way – but it’s not only unnecessary, it takes away from the character development. For one, Philippa created the bond with the audience, especially in the wonderful, moving “The Moon and the Sea”, and so it’s jarring to switch halfway through. For another, more important reason, um, Philippa and Rosalind both look about the same age, so making one play only the old lady version is suuuuuuper weird and it feels wrong. It’s a shame because Rosalind’s big Act II song as Elowen is truly stunningly delivered, but for the good of the overall show, Phillippa should play Elowen the whole time (Rosalind has enough to do otherwise whereas Philippa in Act II felt underused). We’re supposed to be focusing on how Benjamin is changing in odd ways, not having the ‘normal’ people do that.
Aside from that quibble, Compton’s clever direction was a feat, and despite the tiny stage and the tiny black room, you could sense the wind and waves crashing against the shores of Cornwall. Despite a slow start that would be much helped in the next production by trimming one of Benjamin’s parents’ songs (the weakest material is over with right at the start at least), they built this world pretty quickly, drawing the audience in fully and keeping us there, on board for all the twists and heartbreaks of the story. I loved the a cappella Celtic theme song of the show and how well it captured the right mood (although I think it had one too many reprises?). Even all the references to space travel paid off in a lovely, surprising, poignant way. A lesser quality show would have drawn eyerolls at, e.g., the reprise of the super-fun-every-action-is-connected song “A Matter of Time” when it tries to pull that sad as hell shit at the end, but instead we were all gutted along with the characters. It really worked. And then as the heartbreak keeps building in a really beautiful way, the audience, like I said, was sobbing. I can’t believe what this little show managed to pull off, but it was an extraordinary first effort at mounting this new musical.
INFORMATION
I have to give a shout-out to whoever designed the programmes, which for some reason only cost £1. They were the best programmes ever. Actually interesting notes from the creatives? A FULL BREAKDOWN of what it cost to mount this production and how they raised the money?? Show everyone how it’s done, son.
While this initial run is now over, hopefully it will come back in a slightly revised but no less fantastic form soon.
Broadway’s “Fiddler on the Roof”: It Might Be Over But Nope It’s Never Over
“Fiddler on the Roof” is an important show for so many reasons. It’s a golden age classic with a memorable score that has held up today. It’s up there with other classics like “The Sound of Music” and “Singin’ in the Rain” in terms of how important they were to my upbringing and development. But most significantly, Fiddler is a consistent reminder to a people who apparently need consistent reminding that the fight against racism and fascism is a serious one, a terrible one, and an apparently never-ending one. “Fiddler” has never been as relevant in my lifetime as it is today, as we grapple with the shock and terror of the government discriminating against an entire religion again. Despite this fantastic revival closing over a month ago on Broadway, I’m still thinking about it regularly, about how fantastic this cast and production were, how moved I was at moments that I never really cared for before, how yet again theatre exactly reflects the struggles of humans today. I don’t usually write about things I’ve seen that have long since closed, but I have been thinking about it constantly and about how important it is to keep talking about the issues raised by this beautiful show and to add to the chorus of sane people who don’t think religious persecution is okay.
If you aren’t familiar with “Fiddler on the Roof”, a) I don’t know how you put pants on and b) you really should rent the movie at the very least. IT IS A MARVELOUS CLASSIC. It’s about a poor milkman named Tevye who lives with his wife Golde in Anatevka, a small village in Russia in the early 1900s, right about when the violent pogroms of that decade (not to be confused with violent pogroms of other decades) were happening. Tevye’s favorite thing to kvetch about is that he has five daughters. “Five?” “Five!” he always answers in a way that conveys how hard it is and also how proud he is. Tzeitel is the oldest, and she is in love with her best friend, the tailor Motel Kamzoil, in an era when marriages were arranged. Hodel is the next oldest, followed by Chava. We follow these three as they fall in love and deal with the ramifications of their choices, when they aren’t supposed to be making any choices. We also have Shprintze and Bielke, the little ones who don’t do much but for damn sure will be the names of two of my future dogs.
If you’ve only seen the movie with Topol, then you still know how great the show and the score are and Topol is on your list of Top Five Mosts. Or maybe you have seen footage of original Tevye, Zero Mostel, or at least have the original Broadway cast recording and love Zero. Topol and Zero set the bar for most Tevyes to be somewhat comical and often over-the-top, as well as establishing the unwritten rule that actors playing Tevye have ridiculous names. But Danny Burstein turned all of that on its head, surprisingly, but beautifully. First of all, his name is Danny. Second of all, his Tevye was more grounded, warmer, and unbelievably charming. His humor – and there was so much of it – came not from the usual comic broadness but more from a place of warmth, sincerity, and Elmo-levels of adorableness. In fact, I would not have been surprised if his Tevye had been given an extra song called “The Letter of the Day” (p.s. my favorite song). He does get angry and mean at times, of course, but it’s more believable and moving because he built up that earnest and loving foundation. He’s a much more rounded and authentic character because of it.
And he wasn’t the only stunningly authentic aspect of this revival. More than any other production of Fiddler, this revival felt real, like it was happening in real life. I mean maybe that’s because it is, actually, happening in some form, and in America no less. But the family and the townspeople came across as people I felt like I knew, whose struggles I cared about sincerely. The sparse set of the farm and the effective lighting helped Danny tell his story in a way that made me forget I was in a theatre. (Well, until the grown ass adults who don’t know how to behave in the theatre needed to be shushed behind me.)
As soon as it began, this production distinguished itself from all others. Bartlett Sher, one of the greatest directors today of golden age musicals, used a very controversial framing device to open and close the show. At the start, Burstein walked onto the stage in modern clothes, wearing a red ski jacket, bare-headed, and he looked around Anatevka while holding a book – the book that Fiddler was originally based on, Tevye And His Daughters, by Sholem-Aleichem (pen name obvs). He said the famous opening line of the show – regarding the precarious perch of a fiddler on the roof, “sounds crazy, no?” – in this outfit. Then he slowly took off the jacket and put on his Tevye cap and prayer shawl and transformed into Tevye, like he was a modern man exploring his ancestors’ history, going to Anatevka both in person and in the abstract. I’d heard a lot of debate about people loving or hating this tiny update, and I expected to hate such a change to a revered classic, but I thought it was very effective in its message. More on that at the end.
That was the only noticeable difference, and in less than a minute we were off to a rollicking start with “Tradition”. The medium-sized chorus on that cavernous empty stage seemed a little wrong at first but the joy of the song and the enthusiasm of the cast improved it. We then saw a little interaction between Tevye, his wife Golde – one of those great early stereotypes of a shrew who always gives her husband a hard time – and the matchmaker Yente. In her small role, Yente is usually worth her comic weight in gold, and although at first I was resistant to Alix Korey’s more restrained Yente (compared to the usual), she quickly won me over with her hilarious, sarcastic line readings.
As we went into “Matchmaker” I remembered that nearly every song of this score is beloved and memorable. I got even more excited but then kind of disappointed, as “Matchmaker” was the one part I was annoyed with. “Matchmaker” should be a bouncy, energetic song. Yet most of this rendition was slow, thudding along sadly despite the song screaming for liveliness. Also, this is one of Tzeitel’s only real moments to shine, yet I thought the usually-great Alexandra Silber was lackluster. Between her substandard vocals and the too-slow tempo, it was the one low point of the production.
Luckily, the next Top 10 hit on the schedule was “If I Were A Rich Man”. If I were a rich man, I would have made a tie in last year’s Tony Awards so that Danny Burstein could have won a much deserved award despite the existence of Hamilton. He was everything. I am still in awe of his performance. He made this ridiculous song feel important and touching and he was so lovable. His little celebratory shimmy that he did throughout “Rich Man” will stand throughout eternity as one of the Top 3 Shimmies, up there with Hillary Clinton’s Debate Shimmy and John Mulaney’s Realtor Trying to Pressure Him into Having a Baby Shimmy.
Tevye’s relationship with his wife was, as was the trend, also more understandable and moving than I’ve ever seen. This is probably because Danny was amazing and Judy Kuhn, as Golde, was his equal. I was kind of upset not to have caught the original Golde of this production, Jessica Hecht, with her kicky beret. (Hecht was Susan, Ross’s ex-wife’s lesbian lover, throughout the entire run of ‘Friends’. You know her.) But not really, because Judy Kuhn was the most exciting replacement they could have possibly announced. She is always dependable and guaranteed to move you to tears even when she only has one song (one insane killer song) like in “Fun Home”. I loved their bickering and Danny was at his funniest when responding to her. And Judy made Golde, who is usually played harsh in her shrewishness, seem like the grounded reasonable one in the family, more pleasant than ever.
As for the daughterssss the daughters, they were solid in general. As I said before, Silber’s Tzeitel was kind of disappointing considering that she is usually great, but she wasn’t bad. I loved Adam Kantor’s Motel (the tailor Motel Kamzoil, as you always have to say), mainly because he was a dead ringer for every boy who went to my camp. Real Main Line Jewish looking. I would have loved to see him as Jamie in “The Last Five Years”. His “Miracle of Miracles” was joyous and fun, although the blocking felt a little off. He and Tzeitel were far apart a lot, which is weird when they are celebrating their love and impending marriage. I also really enjoyed Samantha Massell’s Hodel. She had a gorgeous voice and her presence just felt right, very appropriate for the role. Melanie Moore’s Chava was very good too. I especially liked that she looked like Keri Russell with that signature pointy chinface and so it was like a small signal that she was going to fall for the Russian. Apparently, she was a winner on ‘So You Think You Can Dance’, which is awesome, so although the little dancing she did was beautiful, I would have loved a lot more, considering.
One of the best scenes ermagerd came really early; I forget how chockfull of winners this show is. “To Life”, the one everyone knows (or is that every other song), was su-freaking-blime. Tevye’s classic miscommunication with Lazar Wolf, when Lazar wants to marry his daughter and Tevye thinks he wants to buy his cow, is as wonderfully chauvinistic as ever and just hilarious in the hands of these actors. Throughout this show, even though you know what’s coming at every step, it’s still so enjoyable. And this is where the choreography from Hofesh Shechter started to shine. This choreography was a big deal, because productions usually use the original choreography or stuff that looks like it. Hofesh, instead, created this energetic and kind of wild choreography that really jumped off the stage and brought new surges of celebration to “To Life” and new levels of meaning to the movement in other scenes, namely the wedding scene, which seemed to go on forever yet ended too soon. It was glorious dancing. Somehow in its frenetic movement, the ensemble looked like they were black charcoal drawings that came to life. So many horizontal lines thrashing about and it really looked like sketch art. It was enthralling and entirely unexpected. I made a big deal last year about how “Shuffle Along” should have won the Tony for Best Choreography over “Hamilton”, but I later changed my mind when I started really looking at the latter’s lyrical movement. However, I honestly think I would have voted for “Fiddler” now; it was that unexpected and impressive. I mean anytime you have Jews in suits doing those super-low quad-burning Russian squat kicks I am IN. But in “To Life” and especially the wedding scene and its ‘bottle dance’, I was blown away by how scrappy and kind of feral the movement seemed and how much I was reminded of etchings. It made me really understand the meaning in movement, as it was obvious that these men (it was mostly the men dancing like this) were dancing for their lives, trying to keep it jubilant but veering towards desperate, reflecting their struggle in their increasingly violently anti-Semitic society.
The scene I was most excited to see on Broadway was the big dream sequence, when Tevye fakes a visit from his grandmother beyond the grave in order to convince Golde to allow Tzeitel to break the engagement with Lazar. Grandma Tzeitel’s little old lady voice always kills me and here was no exception. Danny and Judy were wonderful on their little twin beds too. I was really surprised, however, at how Fruma Sarah, Lazar Wolf’s deceased wife, was done. I expected her to fly. Even in our high school production we had the girl flying around in the rafters like a real scary ghost would. Instead, Fruma Sarah was a giant demon in statue form, wheeling around the stage at maybe 20 feet tall. Really odd! It still worked okay, especially with the ghostface killah ensemble, but I remember thinking this is so weird! Like a giant statue. On wheels. And no flying! Whatevs.
At least one thing that went as expected was how moving “Sunrise, Sunset” would be. It was beautiful and perfect, although every time I hear that song, I can’t help but remember our high school production and how one night our Tevye began the song singing the second verse, and all the kids facing me, with their backs to the audience (so, the other main characters) were cracking up and shaking. Hilarious. This was not hilarious but it was lovely, and followed by the aforementioned impressive extended dance scene, including when the men danced with bottles balanced on their heads. I’m sure they were attached somehow but that didn’t matter. I didn’t want it to end. Well except it’s the last part of Act I and I really had to pee but you get what I’m saying.
The wedding scene is also where the real drama of Fiddler starts to boil over, when it’s no longer about family problems but about an entire people being persecuted. So, it’s when the decent people in the audience start shifting in their seats and going, oh shit, this is familiar. The Russian officers of the village break up the wedding and destroy everything and threaten all the Jews with continued violence. It was devastating to watch even without the real-life context, but with it, it was chilling.
In Act II, the next two daughters, Hodel and Chava, see their frowned-upon romances bloom as Tevye struggles to handle how everything he knew to be sure is falling apart, as the Russians take more control, more violence occurs, and the village hears more news of Jews in similar villages being forced to flee. Whereas before I would be upset with Tevye when his anger erupts at his wife or children, thinking why can’t he just let them be happy, it made a lot more sense to me through Danny’s performance. Everything he knew is changing against his will. All of his traditions are being destroyed, his family is separating in ways he never expected, and his entire way of life is threatened because of his religion. Each part separately would be a lot to handle, so expecting him to retain any semblance of self-control or compassion is expecting too much of one decent man.
As the threat of the Russian takeover builds, Hodel falls in love with the girls’ high-minded revolutionary tutor Perchik, a very political activist who I hope has been reborn today to help fight in this same fight again. Sure he gets sent to Siberia as punishment for his activism but at least he’s fighting injustice. Ben Rappaport did a fine job as our activist, and even though Perchik gets what I think is the ugliest song ever written for musical theatre, “Now I Have Everything”, he made it bearable. Seriously though, it’s such a bad song. It’s really hard to not sound terrible on, and then it ends on the wrong note, kind of like the end of Javert’s Soliloquy when all of a sudden you’re like oh what I was not expecting that note in that key to be where that phrase ended up, but at least for Javert the music swells and changes to make that weird ugly note make sense and it all resolves. Nothing resolves in “Now I Have Everything”, it just stays ugly like nails on a chalkboard as the final ‘wrong’ note just lingers. Yeesh. Hodel’s relationship with Perchik, though very briefly shown, felt believable, mostly because Samantha did a fantastic job with her heartbreaker of a song, “Far From the Home I Love”. These later scenes felt extra touching because the lighting changed with the mood of the show, as Tevye’s heart broke more and more.
Meanwhile, Chava develops a relationship with one of the very Russians destroying their lives, Fyedka. Sure he is one of the nice ones, but he’s still part of the group that is persecuting Tevye and his people. It’s more than Tevye can be asked to manage, and so he orders his daughter to stop seeing him, even though she loves him, because he is the enemy. I always hated Tevye when he disowns Chava after she elopes with Fyedka, but Danny made Tevye’s journey to that decision so convincing that even though it’s cruel I could understand why and how he could do that. It’s the only thing left for him to do in his efforts to keep a handle on what he knows to be true. And his fragile and heartbreaking “Chavelah” was too much for any of us to handle. Ugh it’s so sad.
Then of course there’s no time to mourn because the Russians are forcing all the Jews to flee their homes for who knows where because people are terrible and dogs should rule the planet and make things better. “Anatevka” is as sad as ever, more so because, like I said a hundred times, this is happening again and I don’t want to think about how many people in that audience helped make it happen and/or aren’t doing anything to fight it. We all know now that “Fiddler” is timeless, but who thought that 50 years on it would not only have such a lasting score and important message but that it would be so scarily relevant to what’s going on in our society? This is where the framing device used in this production really paid off. As the villagers wheeled their carts, stuffed with all the belongings they could fit, around the stage to signify their leaving during “Anatevka”, Tevye separated himself without really being noticed and Danny showed up in the modern clothing and the red coat again. As the villagers sang, he watched and then decided to join them, taking the handles of a cart from one of them, breaking through the division between his ancestors’ past and his present, the world he knows and the world whose history he was exploring to show that their fight was his fight and vice versa. He represented us, today, and how we are now facing that same choice of whether to join in that same fight that the people of Anatevka were fighting. It was so effective, and so frightening. It was a small, subtle way to lift this production to even higher levels of quality and emotional significance. I hope that this show, one of the most widely produced musicals ever, continues to be performed and continues to inspire and teach people about religious persecution. And that religious persecution is wrong; I feel the need to clarify nowadays. It’s wrong! Okay? Got it?! good.
