Austin Withdrawal Is Rough, Y'all, So I Made 'Burritos'by Randi / June 9, 2015
My Playbill signed by Alison Bechdel herself, who was in my audience. Or, I was in her audience.
“Fun Home” is the kind of musical theatre that makes you grateful for the art form. Rarely are we treated to any art or entertainment that doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in our society or at least dumb itself down to appeal to the ignint masses. “Fun Home”, in contrast, treats its audience like intelligent, thinking people, and we are gifted the most heart-aching, mature, and deep show in years.
People think “Broadway Musical” should mean something diverting, with fun and dancing and repetitive, catchy songs about trivial happy things. And some shows are and should be like that. But modern shows need to challenge the genre and the audience in new ways to keep it growing and improving. New scores should develop emotions in ways words can’t; that’s kind of the point of having music in a play or like in the world, to express what words can’t. “Next to Normal” did all this and was revolutionary and boundary-pushing, but that was 6 or so years ago; nothing since has been up to the challenge.
Until now. “Fun Home” picks up that gauntlet thrown by “Next to Normal” and runs farther than ever. I think “Fun Home” will catch on and become more popular, and will continue to break barriers in this kind of storytelling. It seems like a really unlikely musical, given its subject matter, but it geniusly uses music to deepen its storytelling rather than embellish. The result is far more important and remarkable than anyone would have predicted.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
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‘Consent’ on the West End: A Cutting Look into Judicial and Human Failings
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about ‘Consent’ in London’s West End, playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 11.
The last time I was in London’s Harold Pinter Theatre was for the sublimely disappointing ‘Oslo’, which featured just as much screaming as ‘Consent’. However, the key difference is that the screaming in ‘Consent’ feels earned, and completely necessary. (Hey while you’re here open that ‘Oslo’ review in a new tab because it’s remarkable.) Also making this an entirely different experience? ‘Consent’ was riveting. This well written, incisive new play by Nina Raine made me feel miserable the entire time, but in a great way that good plays are supposed to. It’s timely (I don’t want to be the 1000th reviewer to mention the #MeToo movement in a review for this play but look I just did), it’s well acted, and it will make you feel like everything is hopeless and everyone is a monster and it’s best to just sit in the dark alone quietly for most of your life. Like a good play should!
‘Consent’ follows the lives of a group of barristers, probably in their late 30s, as they deal with their workload and their marriages and the fact that spoiler they are all terrible people. There are two married couples, one single barrister friend, and one outlier actress friend. The barristers joke about their cases – most are in crime – from the first person, i.e. “What have you been working on lately?” “Oh I’ve been killing pensioners, raping a few people” – things like that. Dark humor in people who work in dark fields is nothing new, a common coping mechanism. But to see it put so bluntly, so cavalierly, is an early shock into this play. And the joking doesn’t really seem to be a way for them to deal with all their feelings. They genuinely seem not to care about the awful crimes they’re arguing. And sure you can’t take everything in work personally or emotionally, but the complete lack of empathy is a vital look into their humanity, which informs how they try cases. Of course, the worst-seeming men at the start are the defense attorneys.
Now, it goes without saying that the accused need to have representation, and fair representation at that, to promote their best interests in court and to serve justice overall. Defense attorneys are important and necessary to our criminal justice system. (I’m conflating US and UK law in this area because it’s similar enough.) But defense attorneys for accused rapists are a special breed. I have witnessed a lot of rape trials, a lot a lot, and during an internship for a public prosecutor I was involved in a lot of those trials. So I think it’s fair to say I’m more of an expert than the average person on the legal aspects of this play. And Nina Raine has nailed the coldness, the sickening twisting of words, the unfair focus on negligible details that every defense attorney I’ve seen in a rape case will employ. It’s hard to think about, but most of them were pure evil. And I really mean those words. The worst of humanity I could ever imagine have been in those court rooms with me. I remember a case that was lost because the defense attorney got the jury to laugh at a gay witness, the roommate of the rape victim. He kept making gay jokes and ‘prancing’ about when he repeated parts of the witness’s testimony, and since the judge and jury were some of the many, many shitty people on this planet, they thought it was hilarious and ‘voted’ for the funny lawyer. It’s not an issue of putting up the best case for their client, which is their job. It’s that they seem to revel in the unnecessary, unsettling glee they find in demolishing already fragile witnesses (victims), in using their words and their trauma against them to prove a point – that it doesn’t matter if you were raped; all that matters is whether you are presentable, well spoken, and completely faultless in every aspect of your life. And it’s definitely not about getting at the truth, which is rarely the point of any trial.
And ‘Consent’ captured this ease of evil more than any other work I’ve seen try to. Quickly, the marriages are revealed to be on shaky ground, which is not surprising when dealing with people without the ability to empathize. Ed, our main man (Stephen Campbell Moore, terrific and terrifying), is alarming in his calculated, supremely logical look at the world, which works to win him cases but unsettles his wife Kitty (the excellent Claudie Blakley (and yes that’s spelled right I know the e and the l look like they should be swapped but alas I cannot change her name)). He’s the guy who uses logic to kill empathy and truth when it doesn’t make enough logical sense for him, and he values dispassionate logic over the truth when said truth is the kind that demands an emotional response. His absolute lack of empathy struck me right to my core, and watching him both at work and at home made me feel the same powerless yet overwhelming rage I would feel in court. I was glad when Kitty would yell at him the things I wanted to yell out (and from a front row seat, I really almost did), and I was glad that she seemed to have the right footing in such a difficult relationship. But the second act proves that she’s not the moral savior I wanted her to be, which is both disappointing and more realistic. No one is perfect, although it in this play it’s more like everyone is actually a shithead.
The other married barrister couple is Rachel (Sian Clifford) and Jake (Adam James, who my brain kept trying to make into Michael C. Hall). Jake is revealed early on to be cheating on his wife, but he’s not sorry for his actions, only sorry he got caught. He’s very clear on that and doesn’t understand why anyone would fault him for his stance. And he’s the kind of guy that would frame his argument in such a way that it would leave you without a response, almost thinking that maybe he was right – the kind of guy that’s a good barrister, and an asshole. Rachel is the one on the other side, a prosecutor, so I also put the unfair burden on her that I initially put on Kitty – that they’d be my female voices of reason against the men. Of course, people are more complicated than that, and she also let me down, with her second act opinions when it comes to the title of the play. White women, am I right!
The other friends are Zara (Clare Foster), the goofy (pitch perfect) actress friend, and Tim (Lee Ingleby), the awkward barrister who seems hapless but ‘nice’, but shows he sucks just as much. That everyone kind of sucks at times and you want to punch them all at times and you also just see them as normal sometimes all makes ‘Consent’ so convincing, and everyone so real. They’re all people you probably know in real life.
But the best part of the play is when it actually shows the rape trial, where Ed is defending and Tim is prosecuting. Heather Craney plays the victim, Gayle, and she is everything. I was crying through most of the exquisite first act because of how accurate it all was. Gayle meets Tim literally two minutes before the trial starts. She knows nothing about what’s going to happen or what she’s supposed to do because no one ever cared to inform her. It is the prosecution’s job to make sure the victim knows what to do and does it well, since she is the main part of the state’s case. But just because they should ensure that she is fully informed and ready to testify doesn’t mean it always happens. And Tim’s failure here is an example of that. Busy lawyers who think they have a handle on the facts, and who don’t see any value in devoting time and effort to such a case, might only meet the confused victim out in the hallway before the trial starts, where she might hear for the very first time that anything not in her initial statement to the police, made in the aftermath of debilitating trauma, is inadmissible. And yes that’s a bad lawyer who would do that, but it doesn’t stop it from happening – or being allowed to happen. Such is the case with Tim and Gayle. The short exchange they have says so much about the system: Gayle asks if Tim’s her lawyer, and he laughs that no silly, he’s the lawyer for the Crown. Gayle asks who her lawyer is, and Tim has to explain that she doesn’t have one, she’s just a witness against the accused. But he has a lawyer, right? Well of course he does. And his lawyer is ready to tear down everything the unprepared Gayle says, the silly woman who thought that the truth would be all that was required of her.
The genius of this play is that the failings of the judicial system reflect the personal failings in the people who work in the law. And this makes sense, after all, since society’s structures and systems will reflect the society that made them. This is the most depressing thought from the play, that the systems that are supposed to serve us really won’t improve if humanity doesn’t improve.
I wish that they kept up this theme in the second act, which is much weaker than the first as it mainly focuses on the relationships of the characters and puts the legal stuff aside. I’m obviously biased in my desire for more of the interplay between the two, but when the interpersonal relationships all blow up and there’s so much screaming and crying and so much emotion (so much), it becomes overwhelming. It would have been better, and easier to take in, if it were tempered with more glimpses into the law to provide small respites from all the heated arguments.
But as it is, ‘Consent’ is a really brilliant play. It’s not the GREATEST THING EVER, as I was left wondering at intermission whether it just might be, but it’s quite well done and so well written. The acting was so effective, I felt like all the trauma was my own. All these people are terrible, yet normal. Which scares me. Is everyone a monster? Does every person cheat? Like every single one? Because that’s what this play is telling me. I mean I know I’m mean on this blog sometimes (because it’s mine and I can do what I want with it) but I’m not a monster, I believe victims, and I don’t think I would find joy in emotionally torturing someone I love. But that’s just me I guess!
INFORMATION
The play is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 11. It runs about two and a half hours, with the first act almost 90 minutes and the second much shorter. There was an announcement at the start that one set piece was malfunctioning and so stagehands would be onstage more than usual to move sets, but it was all just loose furniture so I’m not sure how it would have been done without stagehands. Anyway go see it.
AUDIENCE
Typical English play audience, skewing older with lots of chatter among the older ladies. “Oh dear now he’s gone and done that.” “Oh dear he said it he finally said it.” SHUSHHHHHHHHHH. The very old man next to me asked if I was enjoying it at the interval and I said yes it’s quite good and he asked, “are you a lawyer?” and I said “yes?” and he said “I thought you might be!” and now every second of my life will be spent thinking, how…?
Now, it goes without saying that the accused need to have representation, and fair representation at that, to promote their best interests in court and to serve justice overall. Defense attorneys are important and necessary to our criminal justice system. (I’m conflating US and UK law in this area because it’s similar enough.) But defense attorneys for accused rapists are a special breed. I have witnessed a lot of rape trials, a lot a lot, and during an internship for a public prosecutor I was involved in a lot of those trials. So I think it’s fair to say I’m more of an expert than the average person on the legal aspects of this play. And Nina Raine has nailed the coldness, the sickening twisting of words, the unfair focus on negligible details that every defense attorney I’ve seen in a rape case will employ. It’s hard to think about, but most of them were pure evil. And I really mean those words. The worst of humanity I could ever imagine have been in those court rooms with me. I remember a case that was lost because the defense attorney got the jury to laugh at a gay witness, the roommate of the rape victim. He kept making gay jokes and ‘prancing’ about when he repeated parts of the witness’s testimony, and since the judge and jury were some of the many, many shitty people on this planet, they thought it was hilarious and ‘voted’ for the funny lawyer. It’s not an issue of putting up the best case for their client, which is their job. It’s that they seem to revel in the unnecessary, unsettling glee they find in demolishing already fragile witnesses (victims), in using their words and their trauma against them to prove a point – that it doesn’t matter if you were raped; all that matters is whether you are presentable, well spoken, and completely faultless in every aspect of your life. And it’s definitely not about getting at the truth, which is rarely the point of any trial.
And ‘Consent’ captured this ease of evil more than any other work I’ve seen try to. Quickly, the marriages are revealed to be on shaky ground, which is not surprising when dealing with people without the ability to empathize. Ed, our main man (Stephen Campbell Moore, terrific and terrifying), is alarming in his calculated, supremely logical look at the world, which works to win him cases but unsettles his wife Kitty (the excellent Claudie Blakley (and yes that’s spelled right I know the e and the l look like they should be swapped but alas I cannot change her name)). He’s the guy who uses logic to kill empathy and truth when it doesn’t make enough logical sense for him, and he values dispassionate logic over the truth when said truth is the kind that demands an emotional response. His absolute lack of empathy struck me right to my core, and watching him both at work and at home made me feel the same powerless yet overwhelming rage I would feel in court. I was glad when Kitty would yell at him the things I wanted to yell out (and from a front row seat, I really almost did), and I was glad that she seemed to have the right footing in such a difficult relationship. But the second act proves that she’s not the moral savior I wanted her to be, which is both disappointing and more realistic. No one is perfect, although it in this play it’s more like everyone is actually a shithead.
The other married barrister couple is Rachel (Sian Clifford) and Jake (Adam James, who my brain kept trying to make into Michael C. Hall). Jake is revealed early on to be cheating on his wife, but he’s not sorry for his actions, only sorry he got caught. He’s very clear on that and doesn’t understand why anyone would fault him for his stance. And he’s the kind of guy that would frame his argument in such a way that it would leave you without a response, almost thinking that maybe he was right – the kind of guy that’s a good barrister, and an asshole. Rachel is the one on the other side, a prosecutor, so I also put the unfair burden on her that I initially put on Kitty – that they’d be my female voices of reason against the men. Of course, people are more complicated than that, and she also let me down, with her second act opinions when it comes to the title of the play. White women, am I right!
The other friends are Zara (Clare Foster), the goofy (pitch perfect) actress friend, and Tim (Lee Ingleby), the awkward barrister who seems hapless but ‘nice’, but shows he sucks just as much. That everyone kind of sucks at times and you want to punch them all at times and you also just see them as normal sometimes all makes ‘Consent’ so convincing, and everyone so real. They’re all people you probably know in real life.
But the best part of the play is when it actually shows the rape trial, where Ed is defending and Tim is prosecuting. Heather Craney plays the victim, Gayle, and she is everything. I was crying through most of the exquisite first act because of how accurate it all was. Gayle meets Tim literally two minutes before the trial starts. She knows nothing about what’s going to happen or what she’s supposed to do because no one ever cared to inform her. It is the prosecution’s job to make sure the victim knows what to do and does it well, since she is the main part of the state’s case. But just because they should ensure that she is fully informed and ready to testify doesn’t mean it always happens. And Tim’s failure here is an example of that. Busy lawyers who think they have a handle on the facts, and who don’t see any value in devoting time and effort to such a case, might only meet the confused victim out in the hallway before the trial starts, where she might hear for the very first time that anything not in her initial statement to the police, made in the aftermath of debilitating trauma, is inadmissible. And yes that’s a bad lawyer who would do that, but it doesn’t stop it from happening – or being allowed to happen. Such is the case with Tim and Gayle. The short exchange they have says so much about the system: Gayle asks if Tim’s her lawyer, and he laughs that no silly, he’s the lawyer for the Crown. Gayle asks who her lawyer is, and Tim has to explain that she doesn’t have one, she’s just a witness against the accused. But he has a lawyer, right? Well of course he does. And his lawyer is ready to tear down everything the unprepared Gayle says, the silly woman who thought that the truth would be all that was required of her.
The genius of this play is that the failings of the judicial system reflect the personal failings in the people who work in the law. And this makes sense, after all, since society’s structures and systems will reflect the society that made them. This is the most depressing thought from the play, that the systems that are supposed to serve us really won’t improve if humanity doesn’t improve.
I wish that they kept up this theme in the second act, which is much weaker than the first as it mainly focuses on the relationships of the characters and puts the legal stuff aside. I’m obviously biased in my desire for more of the interplay between the two, but when the interpersonal relationships all blow up and there’s so much screaming and crying and so much emotion (so much), it becomes overwhelming. It would have been better, and easier to take in, if it were tempered with more glimpses into the law to provide small respites from all the heated arguments.
But as it is, ‘Consent’ is a really brilliant play. It’s not the GREATEST THING EVER, as I was left wondering at intermission whether it just might be, but it’s quite well done and so well written. The acting was so effective, I felt like all the trauma was my own. All these people are terrible, yet normal. Which scares me. Is everyone a monster? Does every person cheat? Like every single one? Because that’s what this play is telling me. I mean I know I’m mean on this blog sometimes (because it’s mine and I can do what I want with it) but I’m not a monster, I believe victims, and I don’t think I would find joy in emotionally torturing someone I love. But that’s just me I guess!
INFORMATION
The play is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 11. It runs about two and a half hours, with the first act almost 90 minutes and the second much shorter. There was an announcement at the start that one set piece was malfunctioning and so stagehands would be onstage more than usual to move sets, but it was all just loose furniture so I’m not sure how it would have been done without stagehands. Anyway go see it.
AUDIENCE
Typical English play audience, skewing older with lots of chatter among the older ladies. “Oh dear now he’s gone and done that.” “Oh dear he said it he finally said it.” SHUSHHHHHHHHHH. The very old man next to me asked if I was enjoying it at the interval and I said yes it’s quite good and he asked, “are you a lawyer?” and I said “yes?” and he said “I thought you might be!” and now every second of my life will be spent thinking, how…?
Sharon D. Clarke is in Blues in the Night & That’s Probably All You Need to Know
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Blues in the Night, playing at London’s Kiln Theatre in Kilburn until September 7.
Before we get into specifics about this revue-style show, I need to share two things. First, Husbo & I went to a cheeky weekday matinee so we were ready for the old-white-people chatterboxing that comes with the territory. But the show opens with a single musician in spotlight playing the saxophone, and as soon as he blared out one strong note, an old lady not close to me said at full volume “oh you know I love the sax”. I mean. We were not ready for that. We were in for quite an experience. Old biddies LOVE THEM SOME TALKING.
The second thing is that whenever I say/think/type this title, my head goes “blues is in the niiiii-iii-ii-ii-ight, blues is in the niiiii-iii-ii-ii-ight” like “Groove is in the heart” you get it. Okay I guess I didn’t *need* to share that.
Blues in the Night is a 1980s revue of bluesy standards from well before then (mostly Bessie Smith, like at least half). It “takes place” in 1938 in a run-down Chicago hotel, and it’s “about” three down-on-their-luck women – one older, one middle I guess, and one younger – and one man. The previous phrases suggesting there’s a story are in quotes because this is a revue, like Ain’t Misbehavin, that does not have a story. But unlike the enjoyable Ain’t Misbehavin, in which they were cool just putting on a killer fun show and accepting that there was no story or characters, Blues does attempt to establish characters and a whisper-thin outline of a background story, but that makes it even more obvious that there is none and kind of awkwardly cringey when they do weird ‘character things’.
I looked on the wikipedia page for some info and it says Blues is actually about these three women and the one “snake of a man” who has screwed them all over. I did NOT get that. The one man, Clive Rowe, seemed more to just be filling a role of ‘man’ in each song when needed, not that he was actually the man involved with these three women. It doesn’t make sense to me that he would have a sexual history with the three of them because, I don’t know how to say this nicely but he doesn’t exactly scream ‘womanizer’. I think we can chalk him up to being miscast if that’s what they were trying to go for (his singing was fine), along with the youngest woman, Gemma Sutton, who I loved in The Rink but is wrong here since her character’s songs simply do not fit her voice.
As for the other half of the cast, they acquit themselves more successfully but are also given weird things to do to establish some semblance of a character instead of just being allowed to sing the damn songs. Debbie Kurup, who we last saw in Sweet Charity, plays the middle woman who apparently has a fancy past but is now struggling living in this hotel and sings various songs about her fancy past and current troubles, as they all do. But like, I think at one point she was in the background doing heroin??? I mean, why? There’s no story! That is very unnecessary! And then she sells her fur coat to a waiter? Just why.
And that brings us to the fourth member of this cast, the great Sharon D. Clarke, probably the greatest West End musical theatre actress right now. The show is worth seeing just to hear her sing a super long depressing version of Bessie Smith’s “Wasted Life Blues”, so incredibly moving and fantastic that I could easily have murdered the two old men whose obnoxious ringtones blasted out during it (one even got up from the front to take his call I CANNOT). While Clarke seems to be enjoying herself and is, as always, killing it, they also have her do some ridiculous,unnecessary ‘character-building’ stuff like singing an entire song with food-based double entendres (does it count as a double entendre if it’s as obvious and unsophisticated as repeatedly joking about a man’s sausage?) and fanning her hoo-ha that it made me uncomfortable to look directly at her. I wish this show was either an actual story or just a straightforward review of good songs instead of being in some weird nether region.
This show, awkward as it is, was actually nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical – but it was a weak year. I mean Cats won.
Although it was pretty slow at times and pretty heavy on the fremdschamen, Blues has some good musical moments, namely whenever Clarke gets a non-sausagey solo (that “Wasted Life Blues” deserves its own show, with a real story and a real character for her to play, it was that good) and whether the four cast members join together in a number, like in the exciting title song. Fun fact, that song, “Blues in the Night”, was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar in 1942, along with “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. People expected one of those two to win, but Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammy Dos surprised everyone with a win for “The Last Time I Saw Paris”. Even funner fact, Kern was kinda pissed that he won an Oscar for a song that wasn’t written specifically for the movie it was in so he had the rules changed! He changed the Academy Award rules for original songs (they must be written specifically for the movie) because he was so mad he won one. I mean. That’s more interesting than anything in this show, I hate to say.
INFORMATION
Blues in the Night is playing at the Kiln Theatre until September 7. It’s a two-act, of 50 minutes each, 20 minute interval. I think there are enough clunkers that could be cut that it could be a one-act 80 minute show if they had the power to change it. Or just have a Sharon concert, really. But it’s worth catching her if you’re a fan before Broadway steals and keeps her.
AUDIENCE
I can’t even describe how much they were all talking and at full volume. Man alive they love to talk. One guy around us was humming along to the songs and man I get that these are your jams from childhood but the least you could do is hum in the right key.
