Morimoto Philadelphia: The Original Sushi Lovers' Paradise Has Wonderful Vegan Optionsby Randi / May 23, 2014
You know the feeling when everyone loooves something and proclaims how it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and you’re like…what? Are you high?
That’s how I feel about “Violet”, the current revival of the Jeanine Tesori musical (which premiered Off Broadway in 1997) starring Sutton Foster as a young, disfigured woman in the south on a journey to get a televangelist to fix her face. It’s the “American Hustle” of this awards season, except of course it’s 100x better than “American Hustle” because please. But like I said about that horrid movie, it’s like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, with everyone saying how they like it, I think, in order to save face. Although “Violet” is actually decent and perfectly performed, I think people are “Emperor’s New Clothes”-ing it in their over-effusive, insanely exuberant adoration for what is really just an okay show.
That’s how I feel about “Violet”, the current revival of the Jeanine Tesori musical (which premiered Off Broadway in 1997) starring Sutton Foster as a young, disfigured woman in the south on a journey to get a televangelist to fix her face. It’s the “American Hustle” of this awards season, except of course it’s 100x better than “American Hustle” because please. But like I said about that horrid movie, it’s like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, with everyone saying how they like it, I think, in order to save face. Although “Violet” is actually decent and perfectly performed, I think people are “Emperor’s New Clothes”-ing it in their over-effusive, insanely exuberant adoration for what is really just an okay show.
Violet is about a woman named Violet who is turning violet, Violet, who was disfigured by a wayward axe (jesu!) as a tween and is ghastly to look at – judging by the reactions of people we see meet her. My favorite thing about this show is that the deformity is left to the imagination. Seeing the beautiful Sutton Foster treated like a troll when we can’t see her scars adds great depth and meaning to the show. But it says a lot about this show that that’s my favorite part. Incidentally, I found it very strange that, while the deformity is left to the imagination, the actual axe-ident is portrayed with tween Violet (Emerson Steele, solid) covered in blood. I was like, what is this, “Carrie”??
Anyway, Violet, who’s turning violet, Violet, is like hey, I’m…of age…I’m going to ride a bus for days on end (man alive) to see this television preacher man who “heals” and “gets ratings” in…other southern state…and make him heal my facial deformity and make me purdy! So at the outset it’s hard to have much sympathy for her. I mean you feel bad for her, but not enough to get behind her on this journey to meet a televangelist. You’re like, Oh Violet, you are so spunky and full of gumption and you win over everyone you meet on this bus, yet you beleive in the magical powers of these greedy lying bastards who make money off “religion”? It’s “Sutton Foster meets “Leap of Faith””, the terrible no good Raul Esparza musical from a few years ago. (I actually enjoyed “Leap of Faith” more than “Violet”. It’s nowhere near as good, but it’s more enjoyable and fun! Take that as you will. Actually, I would love to see Sutton and Raul in a show together. But preferably not about televangelists. I think two Broadway shows about that kind of thing is enough.) Obviously, the real point of the story isn’t about the destination of meeting the preacher but about the journey and the people she meets, as all motivational posters will tell you.
Violet gets on the bus (a group of chairs, thank goodness they didn’t try to make a bus) and chats up a nice old lady who recoils at the first sight of Violet’s face. Throughout the journey, Violet makes friends with two uniformed soldiers who just happen to both be gorgeous. Colin Donnell (Broadway’s Jon Hamm lookalike when he has a good haircut (i.e. not in his headshot)) is underused in a part that never really amounts to much. Joshua Henry gets the better role as the black man willing to fight for his country (it’s Vietnam era) yet having to constantly deal with the shitty people actually living in that country, in the American south in the 1960s (or really just the American south, period. Or really just America. Or anywhere. People are racist). Henry, as Flick, is one of the few people who can understand the prejudice Violet experiences when people just see what she looks like. It’s a lovely sentiment that the two would share this connection, but the suggestion that the effects of racism are similar to the effects of having a messed-up face is bothersome to say the least.
The greatest part of this show is Flick’s show-stopping, star-making song “Let It Sing”. It seems kind of out of place in the show, yet it’s the best reason to see the show (similar to the out-of-place “Fly Fly Away” from “Catch Me If You Can”, which should have been cut for story purposes but was indeed the best song written for the show). Joshua Henry has a voice, dammit, and it’s spectacular. He’s the most exciting and interesting part of this show. Actually, I’d love to see a whole show about Flick with Violet as the secondary character! Now that would be interesting! I want to see Henry headline all of the shows. Seriously, whenever he’s in a musical, you’re gonna want to see it.
The journey continues, and the relationships between the three main characters blossom into friendship and then into more. So yeah, both men fall for Violet. I guess there aren’t that many confident yet disfigured ladies in the south so once they met this no-nonsense gal they were like, “This is the shitttt!” or something. It reminded me of how on “Orange is the New Black” both guards think they are in love with Daya, who just seems kind of lame and blah and named after a vegan cheese that gives people stomachaches. Violet is 100x cooler than Daya, but the idea is the same. Violet and Colin Donnell have an unexpected tryst in a very dirty looking hotel room, and Violet sings my favorite song which for years and years I did not know was from this or any show but just something I fortuitously heard, memorized, and sang in my head before bed every single night. So when Violet started singing my special song to a sleeping nekkid man for whom she had lukewarm feelings, I was like…man. (The song is the lullaby “Lay Down Your Head”. Here is the best version imaginable.)
They make it to whatever square-seeming state they are going to, and Violet runs into a church yelling for the famous preacher man. She desperately screams how everything depends on him and she came all this way. It’s very intense and sad because you are like, Listen Violet, even if you see the man and he tries to help you, nothing is going to change. Realizing that she could not be healed, Violet has a kind of hallucinatory heart-to-heart with her deceased father, who is responsible for her deformity. The scene, heartbreaking yet lovely, seems out of place, as though it’s part of a more serious, important show. All the energy seems to have been saved for these final 10 minutes, which offer a too-short look at what the rest of the show should have sustained.
“Violet” is a really well done, very well performed, generally lovely show, yet in the end it feels not quite special enough. It’s small and sweet, and while other small and sweet shows can achieve untold levels of brilliance (like “Once”), this show doesn’t. I simultaneously felt that it was too short to accomplish what it was trying to, yet if it were any longer I would have started getting cranky and impatient. It belongs off-Broadway where it could be interesting but insubstantial without leaving people feeling unsatisfied. “Violet” is giving me the opposite experience that “Rocky” did: At “Rocky”, my audience was enraptured, energetic, and completely invested, yet the critics are meh about it, or worse; at “Violet”, my audience was bored (a guy next to me asked his girlfriend if he could leave, and it’s only 90 minutes!) and underwhelmed, yet critics are like orgasming over it. And many people are putting Sutton as the frontrunner for the Tony. Listen, Sutton Foster is incredible and will be in the Broadway Hall of Fame (I think that’s actually a thing but I mean it metaphorically), but she has two Tonys awards already. If she is THREE? That would be nuts. Like, Hilary Swank has two Oscars, and wouldn’t it seem a little excessive at best and ludicrous at worst if she had the same number as Meryl Streep? Same here. She’s wonderful and perfect and always is, but this isn’t the show for Tonys, and definitely not for a third. It’s a perfectly pleasant and enjoyable night at the theatre, but it’s lacking. Like a perfectly performed production of a B-level show.
Anyway, Violet, who’s turning violet, Violet, is like hey, I’m…of age…I’m going to ride a bus for days on end (man alive) to see this television preacher man who “heals” and “gets ratings” in…other southern state…and make him heal my facial deformity and make me purdy! So at the outset it’s hard to have much sympathy for her. I mean you feel bad for her, but not enough to get behind her on this journey to meet a televangelist. You’re like, Oh Violet, you are so spunky and full of gumption and you win over everyone you meet on this bus, yet you beleive in the magical powers of these greedy lying bastards who make money off “religion”? It’s “Sutton Foster meets “Leap of Faith””, the terrible no good Raul Esparza musical from a few years ago. (I actually enjoyed “Leap of Faith” more than “Violet”. It’s nowhere near as good, but it’s more enjoyable and fun! Take that as you will. Actually, I would love to see Sutton and Raul in a show together. But preferably not about televangelists. I think two Broadway shows about that kind of thing is enough.) Obviously, the real point of the story isn’t about the destination of meeting the preacher but about the journey and the people she meets, as all motivational posters will tell you.
Violet gets on the bus (a group of chairs, thank goodness they didn’t try to make a bus) and chats up a nice old lady who recoils at the first sight of Violet’s face. Throughout the journey, Violet makes friends with two uniformed soldiers who just happen to both be gorgeous. Colin Donnell (Broadway’s Jon Hamm lookalike when he has a good haircut (i.e. not in his headshot)) is underused in a part that never really amounts to much. Joshua Henry gets the better role as the black man willing to fight for his country (it’s Vietnam era) yet having to constantly deal with the shitty people actually living in that country, in the American south in the 1960s (or really just the American south, period. Or really just America. Or anywhere. People are racist). Henry, as Flick, is one of the few people who can understand the prejudice Violet experiences when people just see what she looks like. It’s a lovely sentiment that the two would share this connection, but the suggestion that the effects of racism are similar to the effects of having a messed-up face is bothersome to say the least.
The greatest part of this show is Flick’s show-stopping, star-making song “Let It Sing”. It seems kind of out of place in the show, yet it’s the best reason to see the show (similar to the out-of-place “Fly Fly Away” from “Catch Me If You Can”, which should have been cut for story purposes but was indeed the best song written for the show). Joshua Henry has a voice, dammit, and it’s spectacular. He’s the most exciting and interesting part of this show. Actually, I’d love to see a whole show about Flick with Violet as the secondary character! Now that would be interesting! I want to see Henry headline all of the shows. Seriously, whenever he’s in a musical, you’re gonna want to see it.
The journey continues, and the relationships between the three main characters blossom into friendship and then into more. So yeah, both men fall for Violet. I guess there aren’t that many confident yet disfigured ladies in the south so once they met this no-nonsense gal they were like, “This is the shitttt!” or something. It reminded me of how on “Orange is the New Black” both guards think they are in love with Daya, who just seems kind of lame and blah and named after a vegan cheese that gives people stomachaches. Violet is 100x cooler than Daya, but the idea is the same. Violet and Colin Donnell have an unexpected tryst in a very dirty looking hotel room, and Violet sings my favorite song which for years and years I did not know was from this or any show but just something I fortuitously heard, memorized, and sang in my head before bed every single night. So when Violet started singing my special song to a sleeping nekkid man for whom she had lukewarm feelings, I was like…man. (The song is the lullaby “Lay Down Your Head”. Here is the best version imaginable.)
They make it to whatever square-seeming state they are going to, and Violet runs into a church yelling for the famous preacher man. She desperately screams how everything depends on him and she came all this way. It’s very intense and sad because you are like, Listen Violet, even if you see the man and he tries to help you, nothing is going to change. Realizing that she could not be healed, Violet has a kind of hallucinatory heart-to-heart with her deceased father, who is responsible for her deformity. The scene, heartbreaking yet lovely, seems out of place, as though it’s part of a more serious, important show. All the energy seems to have been saved for these final 10 minutes, which offer a too-short look at what the rest of the show should have sustained.
“Violet” is a really well done, very well performed, generally lovely show, yet in the end it feels not quite special enough. It’s small and sweet, and while other small and sweet shows can achieve untold levels of brilliance (like “Once”), this show doesn’t. I simultaneously felt that it was too short to accomplish what it was trying to, yet if it were any longer I would have started getting cranky and impatient. It belongs off-Broadway where it could be interesting but insubstantial without leaving people feeling unsatisfied. “Violet” is giving me the opposite experience that “Rocky” did: At “Rocky”, my audience was enraptured, energetic, and completely invested, yet the critics are meh about it, or worse; at “Violet”, my audience was bored (a guy next to me asked his girlfriend if he could leave, and it’s only 90 minutes!) and underwhelmed, yet critics are like orgasming over it. And many people are putting Sutton as the frontrunner for the Tony. Listen, Sutton Foster is incredible and will be in the Broadway Hall of Fame (I think that’s actually a thing but I mean it metaphorically), but she has two Tonys awards already. If she is THREE? That would be nuts. Like, Hilary Swank has two Oscars, and wouldn’t it seem a little excessive at best and ludicrous at worst if she had the same number as Meryl Streep? Same here. She’s wonderful and perfect and always is, but this isn’t the show for Tonys, and definitely not for a third. It’s a perfectly pleasant and enjoyable night at the theatre, but it’s lacking. Like a perfectly performed production of a B-level show.
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All the Best Things about Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)
There are no excellent boiled potatoes, but the Ferrero Rocher tower will have to do.
It’s Theatre Thursday! (Well it was supposed to be but I forgot to publish so let’s just go with it!) Today’s show is the phenomenally fun Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) playing at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. As of publication it is one of the West End shows not closed due to Covid cases so go see it and have a laugh!
As a passionate devotee of Pride & Prejudice by way of the Colin Firth miniseries that gave way to the superior (will fight to defend) Keira/Macfadyen movie and all its subsequent instagram meme content, I am undoubtedly the target audience for this hilarious and goofy take on the classic, and yet I still was not prepared for how much fun I would have. I could spend 1000 words just saying “lol x was so funny….lol y was so funny…lol z was so funny” so to do that but in a less annoying way, I’ve made a list, I’m checking it twice*, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,** Santa Claus he doesn’tttt exiiiiist.
*lolz like I ever edit this blog
**nice people wear masks, naughty people who don’t wear masks should be getting a lump of coal shoved up their bums next week heyooo.
The Best Parts of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) (besides everything)
– The pre-show bits
Starting even from the pre-show bits as people were still going to the bar and finding their seats, I was cracking up. The cast desperately tried to get a cleaning glove down from the chandelier in wildly entertaining hijinks, all performed while they kept telling the audience “no we HAVE NOT started yet!” It made me giddy with hysterics. I was all in from the start.
– The use of modern music
At opportune moments throughout the play, the characters grabbed microphones and sang relevant, fun, and/or scathing overviews of the current situations. My favorite was probably Elizabeth grabbing the mic and singing “You’re So Vain” to Darcy at the Bingley Ball, a perfect theatrical moment. Does it count as a jukebox musical? Don’t worry about it.
– Literally everything Hannah Jarrett-Scott did
As Charles Bingley, Caroline Bingley, Charlotte Lucas, and other characters, HJS had me sobbing with laughter. She managed to embody a believable version of Bingley without being actually like him, instead choosing a kind of doltish pomposity by way of merely a jacket. Her Sister Bingley was my favorite, that bitch. And playing poor Charlotte as in love with Lizzie was clever and meaningful without being overly sad. The audience was in stitches whenever Hannah appeared, in whichever character’s hat. She was the gem of the show for me.
– Isobel McArthur’s Mrs. Bennet
Usually portrayed to infuriating you (well, me), Mrs. Bennet here was understandable and more agreeable if only because she was so damn funny. The only reason I didn’t love Isobel’s Darcy as much is merely because it wasn’t Matthew Macfadyen melting the screen. It was still a riot. I didn’t realize until after that this actress was Isobel McArthur as in the writer of this adaptation and co-director. People shouldn’t be so talented it’s just not right.
– Mary’s glasses
Poor fucking Mary.
– The lack of Kitty
Not having anyone even briefly don a cap as Kitty made me continuously cackle. She lifts right out!
– Every time Lydia appeared onstage
Tori Burgess’s portrayal of Lydia as an out of control twit of a party girl was too on the nose. Of course she’s be the one getting drunk first. She was played exactly like so many girls I see out and about in the city on the weekends and it was glorious.
– The props
The Ferrero Rocher tower. The chandelier. The horse (below). Everything was so funny. Darn I said I wouldn’t just keep saying it over and over but really what else can I say; also it’s been a few weeks and I forgot to take notes, so.
– Mr. Bennet
Absolute genius to have him ‘portrayed’ like that, and also a scathing critique of a character that usually gets a pass simply because he isn’t annoying like his loudmouth wife. At least the mother has a purpose to her behaviour, trying to get FIVE DAUGHTERS MARRIED. Can you imagine.
– The de Bourgh family values
Every time Christina Gordon’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh appeared in her insane and elaborate getup, it was a riot, but the best was the stupid/clever joke about the song “Lady in Red” by her relative, you know, Chris de Burgh. I love when I get stupid jokes and this was no exception. Ridiculous.
– Jane on the gd horse.
As Jane traveled on horseback to the Netherfield at her mother’s urging (you know the part, when it rains and she has to stay there for a few days because rain was a death sentence back then), Christina Gordon kicking her heels in time as she sang “At Last” atop that giant fake horse was one of the funniest bits of physical comedy on stage in years. I am cracking up here just thinking about it.
Do yourself a favor and go see this if you haven’t yet. It’s at the Criterion, the one right in the center of Piccadilly Circus. Sit house right (stage left) in the orchestra and you’ll be closest to the bathrooms by the bar. It’s a bit of a cave, this theatre, with all levels underground, and you can sometimes hear the tube, but this show is so much fun you (I) will (did) forget that you’re (I’m) claustrophobic.
Not a Fando of this Orlando at the Garrick Theatre
After just watching Emma Corrin in Netflix’s new adaptation of Naked Chattering with My Sturdy Lover or whatever it’s called, I was very excited to see what this likable performer can do onstage and maybe with more clothes on. (No I still haven’t watched The Crown, I’m bored thinking about it.) But despite all the glowing reviews from everyone else about Orlando at the West End’s Garrick Theatre, I found it quite the disappointment, especially compared to the book or to the superior movie with Tilda Swinton. The tone was hard to pin down, and more pressingly, it felt chaotic in its energy. More than anything, watching this show felt like reading a book by reading a few sentences every 50 pages.
This adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s beloved novel feels like the creatives were trying to erase the magic that theatre could have so ingeniously enhanced. Theatre’s unique potential to show the wonder and intrigue and joy of this story — of a young man in Elizabethan times who falls asleep for 100 years and then becomes an ambassador to Constantinople but then falls asleep again and wakes up a woman and then lives for centuries more but doesn’t really age and has a gay old time dressing as both men and women and having all kinds of lovers and then getting married for like a day and so on — felt kind of squandered in an attempt to pare the story down to bare bones. But this story doesn’t really have bones — its magical flowery surrealism is its essence! So paring it down — and at 90 minutes or less, it really is unnecessarily pared down — feels like the wrong move.
It felt like they were trying to ground (or really, ground down) the surrealist aspect of the story (and isn’t it all surreal??!!) instead of letting it fly and having the magic of theatre smooth the rough edges and augment the ambiguity in a great way. Instead, all the rough edges seemed to be highlighted. Like the fact that Orlando keeps falling asleep and waking up in new centuries even though his nursemaid is alive and the same age feels forking weird, instead of being another lovely thing to let color the mood and shape of the piece. Sure the nurse is the funniest part of the show but even that feels like a random insertion when compared to the rest of the cast and happenings.
The attempts at sincerity, especially at the end trying to show Orlando’s feelings for her new husband, feel incredibly unearned and false since nothing was given the chance to feel earned. Everything felt quick, random, chaotic. The pointed proclamations made about gender and living freely etc thus also feel unearned, even though they were disappointingly weak and bare to begin with. So overall it just felt like a missed opportunity, focusing too much on the meta-story of the 8 or so Virginias Woolf writing the story as it was shown to us (even that felt half-assed) and not enough on letting the story breathe fully in its gloriousness so it could have the strength to say something worthwhile.
INFORMATION
Run time: 90 minutes.
Orlando is playing at the Garrick until February 25. The Garrick is an old for the earth theatre and I keep forgetting that the circle is better than the stalls, but for this short show the stalls weren’t so bad. Just remember that the ladies toilies are upstairs. And old. For the earth.
The pillars that restrict views in the stalls aren’t really that bad, so it’s worth saving a few pounds.
Mask count: two, me and husbo. Everyone else was coughing freely. Humans are gross.
