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Post by Steve on Apr 18, 2024 12:17:45 GMT
I think most of that points to the audience being allowed access to Myrtle's thoughts -- her insecurities and anxieties -- rather than being evidence of an actual mental breakdown, which would typically involve panic attacks, inability to function or other dysfunctional behaviour, rather than singing to a dead person. Oh, I think its pretty clear. I do agree that Myrtle has so many things wrong with her, its sometimes hard to tell them apart. So, to clarify, when the show opens, Myrtle seems perfectly functional despite a midlife crisis that causes her to whinge about her character stereotyping her as old. But then. . . Spoilers follow. . . The 19 year old fan dies and her anxiety spirals, such that:- (1) She falls on the floor in a glazed semi-comatose state, her eyes riddled with tears; (2) She writes a dead girl's name, "Nancy" across her mirror; (3) When asked to speak, she sings; (4) She starts seeing a dead girl that noone else can see; (5) She's a no-show to rehearsals because she thinks the dead girl is subbing for her; (6) She starts drinking to excess, leaving her stumbling about the streets instead of working. Now, since a "nervous breakdown" is just a non-clinical colloquial term referring to someone with extreme anxiety that causes them to be dysfunctional, I think Myrtle definitely qualifies. But Myrtle also enters diagnostic psychiatric territory as soon as the dead girl shows up, since hallucinating and talking to a dead person, and assuring everyone else that that is what you are doing, is accurately referred to as a "psychotic break." Consequently, we have a character, Myrtle, who is in a mid-life crisis, has a nervous breakdown, drinks to excess and has a psychotic break. That the show never really separates out all her problems is an inheritance from the source material, whereby none of the other characters reaches out to help her with any of her problems. Poor Myrtle.
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Post by Steve on Apr 18, 2024 11:56:31 GMT
Agree with Steve. (But also, I know what psychopomp means). Ha ha, there is mention of a "psychopomp" in the opening speech, and I didn't know what it meant. The character did explain it but then he made the mistake of saying that if we didn't understand what he was saying, just think of him as "Death." I assume a psychopomp is like Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin in "Dead Like Me" on the Telly, where they helped dying people make a painless exit, or is that TV show long forgotten now and no longer a reference anyone remembers lol!
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Post by Steve on Apr 17, 2024 22:13:45 GMT
Saw the matinee and agree with parsley1 that this isn't as thrilling or as original as "Appropriate" or "An Octaroon" or "Gloria." This is a passable reunion play. Its also a memento mori, like one of those classical portraits where the painter would put a skull in it to remind everyone that everyone in the painting, and everyone viewing the painting, is going to die (of which the most famous painting I can think of is "The Ambassadors" at the National Gallery by Hans Holbein). Some spoilers follow. . . The reason I compare this to a painting is that its static like a painting, more a portrait of characters at a fixed time in their lives than a drama about them. And the reason I compare it to a memento mori painting is that Death is a character in the play. One drawback of the play is that the most likeable characters get the least lines and the least likeable characters get the most lines. As the most likeable character (she was just as great as the most unlikeable character in "Unreachable" at the Royal Court), Tamara Lawrance is great and there is far too little of her. As far as the portraits of the other characters go, I loved Ferdinand Kingsley as the most dramatic character (there really isn't any drama at all except when he's on stage), I liked Yolanda Kettle as the most convincingly chaotic character and I liked Katie Leung as the funniest character. As the whining lead character, Emilio, the one with the scores to settle, I admired how much charisma Anthony Welsh injected into him to make him tolerable, and Welsh's turn as Death (they all take a turn) was the most effective one. The play has so little drama though that ultimately it's a lesser entry among reunion plays (of which Jacobs-Jenkins' own "Appropriate" is one of the better ones). 3 stars from me.
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Post by Steve on Apr 17, 2024 19:43:14 GMT
Well she’s having a mental breakdown, she doesn’t just not love her character. I didn’t feel that this was effectively communicated in the writing though - her despair came as across as shallow and the reasoning being that she didn’t want to look old to the audience is so deeply misogynistic. Vis-a-vis her breakdown, I'd say that it goes like this:- Spoilers follow. . . The dead girl's name appears across Myrtle's dressing room mirror. We can infer she wrote it. She hasn't yet broken down but we can infer that that's a bit weird, and it could be heading that way. Later, the dead girl herself appears to Myrtle as she's looking in the mirror. She sings "I Forgive You" to Myrtle, nose to nose, hugging and cuddling and stroking Myrtle. Now we know it's a nervous breakdown. Noone else sees the dead girl, ever, in the course of the play. To hammer the point home, in the next scene, Myrtle starts SINGING to her Ex-husband to "Meet me at the Start" of our relationship, and start again. Nicola Hughes's writer says "WHY'S SHE SINGING?" The Director and Stage Hand discuss calling a Doctor. Now they all know she's lost it. Now the furious and despairing Nicola Hughes's writer sings about how "Life is Thin," and how you can totally lose it in one moment. It's one of the most powerful songs in the show, really unbelievably, incredibly powerful, like Shirley Bassey at her best.
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Post by Steve on Apr 17, 2024 17:41:46 GMT
It seems Helen is as superficial, if not more so, than the colleagues she had no capacity to relate to. I agree with your analysis. For me, the fact that Sheehy humanises her to such a massive extent despite this, and despite her terrible choices, is why this is such a powerful production for me. Spoilers follow. . . I think Treadwell's point is that society is even more terrible than the "Young Woman" is. We know she's shallow, like you say, cos she is fixated on "wavy hair" lol. A fetishistic dream she has because all this mechanised society does is compartmentalise everybody for their parts, and she's been brought up to be part of this machine. She even talks like a machine, like a ticker tape talking about how she hasn't found anyone with those all-important "curls:"
"that I’d like – that I’d love – But I haven’t found anybody like that yet – I haven’t found anybody – I’ve hardly known anybody – you’d never let me go with anybody. . ."
And she concludes in her absolutely tragic ticker tape mechanised voice: "I’ve never found anybody – anybody – nobody’s ever asked me – till now – he’s the only man that’s ever asked me – And I suppose I got to marry somebody – all girls do."
And there you have it. "All girls" are programmed to be destroyed by this society. She's just a computer program, confused and desperate about being part of the machine because somehow she's taken the red pill, and has become aware of her situation.
Imagine the foresight and bravado and audacity and genius of someone writing this in the 1920s, deliberately sympathising with the worst behaviour like this because the society that programmed the atrocious behaviour is even worse.
It's such a great pioneering play, so willing to do things differently. It's hard to fathom even now, a hundred years later. I completely understand your response, but I can't help thinking the current production is close to perfect.
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Post by Steve on Apr 16, 2024 8:18:05 GMT
For drama to hold your attention, it has to have interesting characters -- and here they are deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes --, a gripping story, or a spectacle for the eyes. Having only a message is not enough, especially when that message is rammed home without nuance or subtlety. [ I can easily imagine a great drama inspired by Ruth Snyder's life. It would be exactly like "Double Indemnity," in which a woman insures her husband, then murders him together with her lover to collect the loot, which is what Ruth Snyder did. Billy Wilder made a smashing job of that story, which is almost as good as "Sunset Boulevard." And I agree that this piece lacks all the moment-to-moment nailbiting qualities of a drama like that. Some spoilers follow. . . But Sophie Treadwell did things differently: an absolute pioneer of a woman reporter who interviewed the Mexican Revolutionary, Pancho Villa, reported on World War 1, marched with suffragettes, refused to take her husband's surname and wrote AND directed for the New York Stage! I suppose she didn't want to write a conventional drama about Ruth Snyder that's forgotten about as soon as the dramatic ride is over, and wanted to be a bit pioneering about this play too (though Eugene O'Neill had already written an Expressionist play for the New York Stage with a male protagonist, "The Hairy Ape.") So, yes, she writes "deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes," and names her protagonist, "Young Woman" and denies every character in the play a name except the antagonist, "George H Jones," the husband who dares to have individuality but reduces her only to her "pretty little hands." Treadwell adopts the Expressionist technique of 9 panels, like the "Stations of the Cross," though her panels end not with Resurrection but with Crucifixion, because she is not creating moment-to-moment drama at all, but showing us a horrific vision of our life as objects, caricaturing us as machines to reveal how we are trapped in a great big capitalist unfeeling machine (just like in Sheena Easton's video lol). The triumph of Richard Jones's production is how clearly and cuttingly he illustrates Treadwell's vision, how claustrophobic and revelatory he makes it. Unlike you, I agree with drmaplewood that Rosie Sheehy finds an "incredible" amount of humanity in all the robotic motions she has to march through. I really think there is a place for a revelatory dark Expressionist vision of humanity like this, alongside typical dramas, written by a pioneering feminist who could see the coming of AI and machines taking over the world more than a hundred years ago. Obviously don't put it on at the Gielgud though.
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Post by Steve on Apr 16, 2024 7:04:33 GMT
Phew, glad you liked it Steve as we seem to have similar taste from looking back at history on this board. I’m seeing it on Saturday and had been nervous given initial posts on the board and as I’m taking a friend after constantly singing Ian Rickson’s praises. I’m definitely intrigued and hope to be on your side of the aisle on this but can imagine how this has divided opinion I think PJ Harvey is the crux of it. I've seen her at the Troxy, the Albert Hall, Brixton Academy, and the music in this is, in my opinion, completely of a piece with her other stuff, always trying to meld and contextualise life and land in a folky, sometimes rocky, typically mournful, sometimes angry way. She did an album called "Let England Shake," and this could be the sequel, "Let London Flow," or something like that. This work is 50 percent Dickens, 50 percent PJ Harvey. If you don't like PJ Harvey, this show is an absolute no-no! But even if you like PJ Harvey, you still may not like her work commandeering Dickens's drama, which it does. Her work is the lodestar of this piece, even more than Dickens. It makes sense that a national theatre in a capital city would put on a piece about life in that capital. The primacy of PJ Harvey's vision is why the piece is called "London Tide" instead of "Our Mutual Friend," I imagine. And even if you like the idea of that, you still could conclude that the two pieces, PJ Harvey and Dickens are not sufficiently fused together to be more than the sum of their parts. So the gate is small and the road is narrow that leads to liking this piece lol. Be warned and good luck!
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Post by Steve on Apr 14, 2024 0:06:27 GMT
You might have guessed, but I LOVED this! I do acknowledge that this is going to be marmite, with Dickens fans missing some of their favourite characters, and with some drama and musicals fans wondering why the action keeps stopping for a mournful PJ Harvey song about London which does not move the plot forward. Some spoilers follow. . . If you love Silas Wegg or Mr Venus or the parasitic social climbing Lammles, forget about it, they're gone. The wider world of the novel is gone. Ben Power has focused on the two ladies, Ami Tredea's Lizzie Hexham and Bella Maclean's Bella Wilfer, and their relationships, and then he borrows a bit from Shakespeare comedies to tie up the plot more simply and directly than Dickens ties it up, albeit one character gets the more modern feminist not-defined-by-a-man "Bad Cinderella" type of trajectory lol. Anyway, the bare bones of Dickens's ingenious plotting is still there to enjoy, although his simplistic themes are deepened by PJ Harvey's input. This is not a musical where the music directs the action. This is a play with music which stops the plot to deepen the show with thematic resonances So where Dickens would be saying that greed is bad and love is good, and snobbery is bad and egalitarianism is good, this production employs PJ Harvey to layer on something a bit deeper: about how landscape shapes the people on it and how people shape the landscape in return, how London is and always has been a seething mass of people's histories that imbue it with rivers of meaning and which imbue meaning in its river, and about the specificity of London as a living organism: how "London is not England, and England is not London." If you've seen "the Detectorists" on the telly, then Dickens's vibrant plotting of London lives full of action, love, life and death is presented here as part of London's history below the ground, submerged in the tide of the river, while PJ Harvey's songs are kind of above the ground, above the water, scanning like metal detectors, finding connections, each song saying "What you got?" Her songs are about the connections between the present and the past, about the interconnection of environment and people, about the sweep of local history. I found the melding of bits of Dickens with bits of PJ Harvey quite unique and wonderful, more than the sum of its parts. Ami Tredea's Lizzie's emotional responses to everything and everyone around her are brilliantly realised, and her connection with Jamael Westman's Eugene Wrayburn is moment to moment fascinating, and both these actors can sing. That said, Wrayburn's character development here is nowhere near as well realised as it was in that 1998 BBC TV adaptation, where the 5 and a half hour running time allowed for a magnificently intricate and enigmatic depiction of the character by Paul McGann. Interestingly, Peter Wight was in that BBC series as Bella Wilfer's Dad who hands over his daughter to the care of the wealthy Boffins. Here he plays Boffin, taking custody of Bella from her Dad, completing a kind of circle lol. Wight is great, but again, the part is much diminished in colours from the magnificent performance by Peter Vaughn in said BBC TV show (which I now would love to see again lol). As Bella, Bella Maclean is another actor who can sing, though neither of her potential beaus, Tom Mothersdale and Scott Karim's Bradley Headstone could be classed as natural singers. Karim does make a dastardly well-acted villain, though, and Mothersdale's more nuanced John Rokesmith is utterly intense and compelling. The untrained singing does not really matter as PJ Harvey's music is about ordinary people being part of the land and water, so earthy untrained singing is a good fit for it, and this is not a musical anyway, but a play with music. (And nobody is as earthy and untrained as Jake Wood's Gaffer Hexham, whose untrained singing was redeemed by his spot on acting). The most surprisingly delightful performance of the evening was by Ellie-May Sheridan, as the girl who treats dolls as babies, Jenny Wren. In the Dickens, she comes across as tragic, but here she's a delightfully direct, forthright and funny friend for Lizzie, who lights up every scene she's in. Anyway, count me among those who think that Dickens and PJ Harvey do mix well to the tune of 4 stars.
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Post by Steve on Apr 13, 2024 22:31:00 GMT
I wasn’t going to book this as didn’t love the Almeida version. These early reviews are making me wonder though. Anyone who has seen both want to compare and contrast them? The Almeida production was clever and cool. It jumped a decade each scene, the set was like an Amazon packing plant, expanding and contracting, surrounded by an expansive darkness. Emily Berrington was like a nervous out-of-place alien negotiating all the cool cleverness from scene to scene. The Almeida production, which I liked, but which left me a little cold, is why I LOVED this production! Some spoilers follow. . . If the Almeida was ice, this production is fire. The yellow walls, inescapable windows (painted over), cramped triangular space is much more of a unity, much less clever than the Almeida production. It doesn't go for the intellectual exercise of comparing decades, or offering the escape of expansive darkness, but instead just shuts a human being in a tiny oven, peoples that oven with the boiling inanity of conformist people saying conformists things like clocks that never stop, a big Brother house that's the size of a thimble completely overpopulated and utterly maddening. And unlike Berrington , there is nothing alien about Sheehy, there's nothing to push away and say that's not like me. Sheehy is a totally normal everywoman boiling in depression and fury because of the insidious compression, noise, and lack of opportunity and fulfilment. She's like a boiling lump of a human, persistently in mental agony, getting more and more depressed and infuriated, until Jones gives her character a brief breather before breaking her. This is a much less intellectual, much less disjointed, much more physical, much more brutal, much more claustrophobic, much more relatable and ultimately much more effective production of the play, in my opinion. Sorry, Fleance, I skipped the Fiona Shaw production. In those days I mostly only went to musicals.
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Post by Steve on Apr 13, 2024 16:37:04 GMT
I saw it a third time this evening in the second row of the stalls. I saw the first preview in the Grand Circle (2.5 stars) and the first show after press night in the Dress Circle (3 stars). I really loved it this time! ... 4.5 stars! Is this the theatrical equivalent of Stockholm syndrome? If you watch it enough, you come to empathise with it. We need a name for it! "Ugly Duckling" syndrome: The drama ducks saw her and rated her "desperately deadly dull;" The Cassavetes ducks saw her and rated her sickly sweet, soporific and "unsophisticated;" The Musical ducks rated her "dirge"-like and dimwitted; The director ducks said she was a dull copy of ducks done before; But if you saw her again, you started to see she was was like nothing else at all, unique, and there had never been anything like her and never would again, and if you saw her again after that, you suddenly saw she was never a duck at all, but a swan, a delicate, compassionate creative, melancholy utterly unique teary-eyed Sheridan-souled swan with the lifespan of a firefly, destined never to be seen again. Except once a decade at the Palladium and on T-shirts.
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Post by Steve on Apr 12, 2024 6:47:38 GMT
Saw this last night and agree with everyone above that it's a total smash, that the set designer deserves an A Star for brutal claustrophobic simplicity and that Rosie Sheehy is giving one of those great performances that nobody who sees it will ever forget. Some spoilers follow. . . The fact that Richard Jones did Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" previously at The Old Vic, with Bertie Carvel, and that Rosie Sheehy was in it, just feels so perfect. Cos that play could easily be subtitled "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Male version." Whereas, this play feels like the Sequel: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Female version." We await Jones's conclusion to the Trilogy: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: AI in Charge, Human Life is Cancelled" with Rosie Sheehy as the AI lol. In "The Hairy Ape," Rosie Sheehy's character was the daughter of the Capitalist magnate who pretty much owned Bertie Carvel's character, and when she looked at him with disgust, it was like he took the red pill and realised he was in the Matrix, and he would never escape. In "Machinal," it's Rosie Sheehy's character who slowly realises she's in "The Matrix," a confused polar bear in a zoo tragically bashing its powerful head against the walls of an inescapable cage. And the garish slopped-on in-yer-face yellow paint of these walls (just two rather than the three at Bath) makes this inescapable stark triangular prison maddening in a way the Big Brother TV producers would be proud of, always looking for environments that will drive human beings up the wall lol. Anyway, I loved the way Jones has directed the ensemble to function so robotically in this prison of a space (all the windows are illusions that never open up for us), I loved the way Daniel Bowerbank's File Clerk constantly declares "Hot Dog" in blue-pilled delight at his own prison, I loved how turning the lights off seems to represent "freedom," even though we know the walls are still there in the dark, I love Pierro Niel-Mee's apparently warm young man, offering so much possibilities in such a shallow way. And most of all I love Rosie Sheehy's physicality, her moment to moment fish-on-a-hook straining against her cages (can you imagine if your "hands" were all someone thought you had to offer?), her onslaught of utterly real, utterly human despair, her immense tangible raging against the machine in every scene. I thought she was great in Hairy Ape, in The Wolves, in King John, in Oleanna, in Romeo and Julie, but God, this is something beyond, something unforgettable. 5 stars from me.
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Post by Steve on Apr 11, 2024 18:17:26 GMT
I guess I won't be seeing it in June then. Should I make an effort to see it? Is there a show I might have seen before and either liked or hated that would be a good barometer? There really aren't any shows like this, and I'm certainly not one to listen to about this as I'm an outlier opinion. However. . . (Some spoilers follow) . . .the best comparisons I can make are with works where a creative individual is stuck in a rut and a frantic world whirls around them. Such shows are more introspective and static than dramatic and event-filled, though they turn to fantasies to provide an element of drama. The best such show is "Sunday in the Park with George," which gets into George Seurat's creative head, and is, in my opinion, better than this, a 5 star show, lifted by Sondheim's genius and a clever ending, which time jumps away from the static first act. Another show like this is "Preludes," which gets into Rachmaninoff's head, and all the zaniness in that head, and personally, I did not enjoy that as much as this show, and rated it 3 stars of passable at Southwark Playhouse. "A Strange Loop" is a bit like this too, but less so, as it's more an exploration of identity than creativity, but the similarity is being caught in the protagonist's head negotiating creative blocks. I liked that show more than "Preludes" but less than "Opening Night." The best scenes in this show all revolve around Sheridan's Smith's essentially static character, Myrtle, entering into extreme emotional states, lost in a creative block brought on by aging, while a threatening creative world threatens to eat her up. Like all the above plays (except the clever time jump in the Sondheim final section), there is little real drama going on. That's why this was never a good bet for the West End. I really don't think that "Preludes" or "A Strange Loop" could have done much better business than "Opening Night" at the Gielgud, though "Sunday" could have, as Sondheim is more universally loved than Rufus Wainwright, and Jake Gyllenhaal is a world famous actor, rather than a UK famous actor, so the tourists could prebook that from abroad for their holiday visits. Anyway, I think to enjoy this, you must prepare yourself for the stasis, not expect dynamic action, nor must you expect the misanthropic intensity of the movie. Wainwright isn't intense, he's a mournful sardonic observer of life more than a participant. Instead, just allow yourself to imbibe Sheridan Smith's Myrtle's lostness (has any actor ever cried more tears in a play?), and allow Wainwright's comforting wistful music to sweep you and her into a dreamland for each disconnected, strange moment of her suffering, redeemed by the music. In Myrtle's eleven o'clock number, "Ready for Battle," which I had thought might be called "The World is Broken," Myrtle, like Seurat in "Sunday," sings of finding "order in the disorder" of her creative life, which is what Seurat does with his painting. One of the reasons I preferred this to "Preludes" and "A Strange Loop" is the sheer emotionalism of Sheridan Smith's character in every scene. She reminds me of Tracie Bennett's Judy Garland in "End of the Rainbow." I voted 4 stars in the poll, making my opinion an outlier lol.
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Post by Steve on Apr 10, 2024 22:19:40 GMT
Saw this tonight and thought it was wonderful. Some spoilers follow. . . This is like an amiable one hour ten minute episode of "Talking Heads," where you get insights into acting, aging, memory, Shakespeare, storytelling, the inevitability of change and the importance of love. This is a one man play featuring Paul Jesson, written especially for Paul Jesson by Richard Nelson, with input by Paul Jesson, such that the fact and fiction blur, and I for one, couldn't tell you where one begins and the other ends. Both character and actor have had part of their jaw removed to cut out cancer, and have had to convalesce. There are reminiscences about acting in Shakespeare plays, anecdotes about Laurence Olivier and whatnot, that all felt like utterly real, albeit desperately moving and elegaic, chit chat. I recall Jesson as a brilliant Gloucester opposite Derek Jacobi's Lear at the Donmar, and he was great too as Cardinal Wolsey opposite Ben Miles's Thomas Cromwell in "Wolf Hall." In film, he was affecting opposite Timothy Spall, in "Mr Turner," as the painter's loving, secretly unwell Dad. Here, after his convalescence, while he may have acquired what sounds like a lisp, it is much more mild than you might imagine, just like anyone who has had a lifelong lisp, and it has had no deteriorative impact on his moment to moment acting, where you feel you can almost touch his thoughts as they emerge as bright and misty-eyed reminiscences. This play feels like an episode of Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads," though Richard Nelson is less committed to drama than Bennett. Like Granville-Barker, the lead character in his play "Farewell to the Theatre," which also played at the Hampstead Theatre, Nelson is more interested in creating an involving meaningful theatrical world and immersing us in it, than playing dramatic tricks on us, and in that he very much succeeds. The collaboration between Nelson and Jesson in creating this play actually feels more like a three-way collaboration, where Shakespeare is a third partner, for Shakespeare's insights and lines inform much of the play, much of which involves Jesson's character recollecting the peculiarities of his beloved partner, Michael. Having himself played Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," at the Globe, here Jesson's character is impelled to speak the last act lines of Paulina (last heard by me spoken by Judi Dench in Kenneth Branagh's West End production) about how "dear life redeems you," and indeed, there is something very redemptive about this conversational, uneventful but deeply moving production. 4 stars from me.
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Post by Steve on Apr 10, 2024 14:42:39 GMT
Market forces will prevail and you should really blame the people who are willing to pay inflated prices to see shows Not the people selling the tickets This is the exception to the market forces rule, though. These specific tickets have been subsidised by the producers for a specific class to attend, not so they can resell the tickets. Its outrageous to resell these tickets. It should be stopped.
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Post by Steve on Apr 6, 2024 12:02:51 GMT
Tom’s casting makes it higher profile and therefore more likely to get people who don’t go to the theatre frothed up. So, we all know that this type of casting is common, but they don’t. Noone should have to suffer this. It's horrible that a talented actress needs shielding from an online mob.
On X, some of these people are convinced its a Disney film, some of them think that Juliet was real, some of them are white supremacists.
All of them seem to want Shakespeare's original vision without realising that the only thing we know for sure about Juliet from Shakespeare is that she's 13 YEARS OLD and Romeo fancies her. Bet they'd be up in arms if they got that!
Bet they don't realise Shakespeare himself would have cast a bloke! They'd probably be up in arms if they got that too.
These sorts of insults don't tend to succeed in achieving anything anyway, as the backlash is usually stronger. I remember how The Sun called Jade Goody a "pig," an "oinker," and "a hippo," and in the end the backlash to their barrage of insults lifted Jade Goody higher on a tide of public sympathy than she ever would have been without the insults in the first place.
I hope Francesca Amewudah-Rivers becomes an even bigger superstar than she otherwise would have been.
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Post by Steve on Apr 6, 2024 11:29:19 GMT
Yes, agreed. I’d really like to hear it again, especially the song in Act 1 that was performed as a quartet (almost like two duets juxtaposed against one another). I don’t even know the song name as they weren’t in the programme! I loved that song too. I called it "One More Dream," as that was the key refrain, but the critics got a songlist, and they named it "Talk to Me," so that's it.
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Post by Steve on Apr 5, 2024 17:05:08 GMT
Had an email from LoveTheatre saying more seats have been released to them… front centre of the Dress Circle… £275.00!!! ARe they ticket resellers like stubhub or are they a legitimate theater organization where by paying that crazy amount one can think of it as a donation to their company. But deep down -- are these real legitimate tickets? I ask because I'll be in London in late May and might actually buy one ticket as long as it's a real ticket (unfortunately I'm not eligible for the 25 pound tickets.) Lovetheatre.com is a completely legitimate arm of ATG, the primary ticket sellers.
Those are not resale tickets. Lovetheatre.com is typically used by ATG to farm off either higher-priced tickets or lower-priced offers.
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Post by Steve on Apr 5, 2024 9:41:47 GMT
RIP to the most wonderful actor, who was the heart of everything I saw him in.
My thoughts are with his family and friends. </3
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Post by Steve on Apr 5, 2024 9:07:46 GMT
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Post by Steve on Apr 5, 2024 8:29:01 GMT
To be fair (not that anyone has to be fair with the DM or the Sun) they’re making it very clear that this isn’t Sheridan’s fault. They’re specifically saying or quoting people saying her performance is good. Slagging off the production/concept is exactly what most people here have been doing since it opened and indeed saying way more critical things than the press have said. Double standards? As for The Telegraph saying it should stay open after giving it two stars and calling it a “pretentious convoluted mess” is a bit rich. It’s behind the paywall so I can’t see his justification for it staying open, what’s his rationale? I loathe The Sun, and wish Liverpool's defacto boycott would expand to the whole United Kingdom. And I loathe The Daily Mail as well. But you're right that they're not saying anything about this that hasn't been said here first.
Also, Cavendish's article doesn't actually live up to his headline.
For example, he writes: "How many of those who walked out of Opening Night will be returning to the West End any time soon?"
Taking Theatreboard's votes as representative of the General Audience, you've got 61 votes in 1 and 2 star territory and only 14 votes in 4 and 5 star territory, so you've got 4 people disliking the show for every 1 that likes it. That suggests that the sooner it closes, the fewer people will be put off from "returning to the West End any time soon." Thus Cavendish's headline is contradicted by the substance of his article.
What he is actually saying is that "No one wants a West End stuffed with tried and tested “safe bets” or old-fashioned star vehicles," and he is sad that this production makes that more likely.
He argues that "the blunt fact is that Opening Night wasn’t ready to open; and I’d argue that many of its flaws are remediable."
I'd probably take some issue with that in that I think the Cassavetes source material would throw general audiences for a loop even more than this show.
But assuming he is right, his prescription is that "We need dramaturgs to be more astute and hands-on. Writers’ egos notwithstanding, we also need people in the room early on, perhaps not even allied to the production so that complacent assumptions can be blasted, early decisions queried and group-think avoided."
So what he is actually saying is not what the headline says but that Ivo Van Hove should have hired a proper writer, just like he hired a proper songwriter, and that critics (in the broad rather than the narrow sense) should be allowed in early to warn creatives, of innovative material, where things might be going wrong before such shows open on the West End.
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Post by Steve on Apr 4, 2024 22:25:04 GMT
Saw this last night and LOVED it! Lydia Higman, who is a historian who can play the guitar, plays herself as a historian who plays a guitar, rocking rock music with resonant reverb and strumming folk with feeling, all while telling a compelling little known historical story. She's the most fun teacher since Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society," and he wasn't real. And she's joined by a folk singing threesome of actors, who, through youthful, studenty, genuinely clever and joyous mucking about, tell an original story about an English witchcraft trial in a way that makes it feel ever so meaningful. Some spoilers follow. . . This is a real story about a witch trial in England, what happened before and what happened after, to the extent that it's known. We enter the Royal Court Upstairs to a continuous loop of screen clips of football violence, historical and recent, with last year's Atherstone Ball game, which devolved into mob violence outside a William Hill, the most prominent of the video clips. This sets up a status quo mood of ultraviolence as the play begins, and the historian and narrator of the play, Lydia Higman introduces us to the villain of the piece, Brian Gunter, uber-wealthy landowner with an ultra-violent soul, but with all the best words and remarkably good at rallying folks onside. I can't possibly spoil how Gunter, played with sociable menace by Hannah Jarrett-Scott (Bingley and Charlotte Lucas in the West End's "Pride and Prejudice Sort of") gets into the position of accusing someone of illegally bewitching his daughter, Anne, but he does, and he's "The Crucible" level committed and scary about it. As Anne, the daughter who says she's bewitched, Norah Lopez Holden (a terrific Ophelia to Cush Jumbo's "Hamlet,") is the secret ingredient that lifts this scatty history story from good to great (eat your heart out, Horrible Histories, I think this is more fun). Lopez Holden is at times wild and uncontrolled, mischievous and wicked, but also pained and sympathetic, like a winged and caged bird. While Lopez Holden and Jarrett-Scott do the heavy lifting in the acting stakes, Julia Grogan, as the accused "witch," is also incredibly free and funny in her performance, and together with Higman, actually created this piece. She has a Sarah Hadland comic vibe (think Miranda Hart constantly humiliating the diminutive but endlessly resilient Hadland in the sitcom, Miranda) about her, someone who can be comically humiliated and equally comically resilient. She's especially funny running about with an animal head covering her face lol. The storytelling veers from such super silly comedy to ultra freaky horror to documentary like accuracy with facts projected on a screen, all powered by propulsive rock and ethereal folk. Its like everything in the play is at war with everything else: folk versus rock, men versus women, father versus daughter, silliness versus seriousness, accuser versus accused, liberation versus imprisonment, and in the anything-goes chaos, a resonant true story is brilliantly and originally told. The overall feel is of music and facts raucously melding with something very studenty and silly to make seriously original fascinating theatre. One savage wit at my performance said it was "the best play about witches [he'd seen] all day." I guess it's the studenty silliness that wasn't to his taste. But I felt it was one of the best and most fun plays about witches I've ever seen. 4 and a half stars from me.
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Post by Steve on Apr 4, 2024 21:27:25 GMT
Saw this tonight and LOVED it. I agree with the positive reviews above that it's superb storytelling superbly told. Crudup captivates throughout, and I found the story gripping, though whether it actually amounts to anything is another thing entirely. Some spoilers follow. . . In a way, this is a little similar to the Dorian Gray play, with no technology lol. In both, an actor plays a character without a firm grip on identity, and the actor assumes many different characters and identities through the course of the story, all while you worry that the increasing sense of liberation, that the central character the actor is playing feels, will lead to an almighty crash at some point. The difference is that the Dorian Gray play has a meta-subtext about technology taking over and erasing our lives, whereas this piece is more surface, less deep. On the other hand, this piece is much more human and warm, in that all the excitable characters (and they are all delightfully excitable) are played live by a human being, and that human being, Billy Crudup, oozes charismatic daring and possibility constantly and compellingly. Like others in this thread, I was surprised (and ultimately really pleased) that this is not as dark a piece as I was expecting, given that dark pieces like this have been done to death. And the only dark piece like this I currently want to see stars the world's most flexible, brilliant and unpredictable actor, Andrew Scott (in an adaptation of the high priestess of dark, Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley") on Netflix. Compared to what I expect that to be like, this is more like a joyous coming out story of one lonely man, like "Heartstopper," though it follows thriller-like tropes as a kind of tease. Crudup is a joy from start to finish, relishing the excitability of his characters, and while the story itself may not be a comedy, there is some marvellous meta-comedy and genuine humour in all the occasions Crudup is ostensibly playing two characters flirting with each other but is in fact flirting with himself. He is peak funny when playing the coyness of a female character deeply attracted to the macho male character his timid male character is pretending to be. He nails every layer of this complex comic scenario. So, although the meaning of the story never really amounts to much, the beats of the story are about as fun as a story gets. I had 4 and a half stars of fun.
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Post by Steve on Apr 4, 2024 12:30:17 GMT
Has anyone seen this yet? I'm thinking of booking... I saw it yesterday matinee and felt Greg Hicks was very good, the adaptation perfectly adequate but its Dostoyevsky that didn't really do it for me. Some spoilers follow. . . Dostoyevsky's story bears some similarities with Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol:" both are about an unbearable misanthropic grump who goes on a journey of self-discovery and gets the feels. Both are attempts to convince us that humanity is worth it. But where Dickens does drama (going to war with ghosts and the actual past), Dostoyevsky does dreams: the grump in this story dreams of a utopia which proves the potential of humanity to him, with some surprises along the way. Anyway, I did not end up with that warm feeling about humanity that would prove to me the play worked. There isn't enough drama in a dream and some of the dream actually works against its own thesis. By contrast, every year at the Old Vic, as some old grumpy actor starts doing good deeds, actors tinkle beautiful bells, kids shriek as fake snow drops on their heads, I get a brief warm feeling that all is well with humanity despite the endless crappy news bulletins that usually suggest the opposite. I thought Greg Hicks did mighty work bringing Dostoyevsky's dream (adapted to the London of now) to life, going through myriad mood states of the dream, but I wished he was bringing his skills to the Old Vic this Christmas instead lol. Probably just me. 3 stars.
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Post by Steve on Mar 31, 2024 0:04:30 GMT
Roar with approval? Umm, I’d love to know if anyone who has seen the show has roared with approval (unless the roar was in response to the knowledge that the show was coming to an end). Lol. Obviously, the roar of approval in the original movie is a fixed-in-aspic cinematic roar. Since the material is about making a play, its actually more exciting that the reaction isn't fixed in aspic, and the reaction from the live theatre audience could be anything, from roars of approval to boos to mouths gaped in astonishment. Its even more meta than the original meta movie its based on, and it's exciting whatever the reaction.
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Post by Steve on Mar 30, 2024 23:57:40 GMT
You could even buy a t-shirt from the sad looking merch stand by the front door. I really wish I’d bought one for myself actually (or a fridge magnet at the very least). I bought a T-shirt. I was the only one at the merch stall at the end of the show. I wanted evidence for future theatre-goers that I saw this. I proudly wear my "I can't sing" t-shirt for exactly that reason. I must have this t-shirt!
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Post by Steve on Mar 30, 2024 23:43:18 GMT
Saw this tonight, and for me, it's a mixed bag. This is NOT a comprehensive account of the Brontes, but rather a consideration of whether or not Charlotte Brontë betrayed the sisterhood and shafted her sister, Anne Brontë, to get ahead? Thus, the two actors that carry 90 percent of the storytelling (that matters) are Gemma Whelan (Charlotte) and Rhiannon Clements (Anne) and both are fabulous. Tonally, I felt the show was wildly variable, with dramatic bits very effective but some of the raucously rude comedy bits veered into try hard unfunny territory, while others hit the mark, boosted by Whelan's comic commitment and timing. Some spoilers follow. . . This is Charlotte Brontë as I haven't seen her before. Instead of the mousy practical one with pinched glasses (see Sally Wainwright's magnificent drama, "To Walk invisible," for the BBC), now she's in rock and roll red, a scarlet woman with a filthy mouth. The one I thought was rock and roll (and who is usually depicted as such - see Kate Bush lol), Emily, is thinly characterised and barely features in this, bar some moaning. Branwell, the debauched dissolute brother, whose shameful escapades are usually the tragic and principal focus of Brontë dramas (see the Wainwright drama or the Wasted Musical that played at Southwark Playhouse) is an afterthought in this show. Anyone who saw that "Upstart Crow" play will know that Gemma Whelan was one of the funniest things in it, and anyone who watched "The Tower" cop show (still on ITVX) will know that Whelan can even make po-faced seriousness ultra-likeable, which is even more remarkable. Thus, you've got one of the best and most likeable actors in the country in the central role. Heck, I even liked her when she was killing homeless people in a Philip Ridley play, she's that likeable. And that's important, because this play does a LOT to make Charlotte Brontë look bad. Even Elizabeth Gaskell's biography (which was commissioned by her Dad and written after her death) is presented by this play as a crass call for attention by Charlotte herself (which is pretty prejudiced against Charlotte, if you ask me). Further, taking Charlotte to task for writing about being a Governess, as if it was to steal Anne's thunder, when Charlotte was a governess before Anne, also felt a bit cheap to me. Though to be fair, this play always gives Charlotte a right to reply, while casting aspersions on her. I am fine with all the rudeness in this play (Charlotte uses the F-word about as often as Sheila Hancock in "Barking in Essex"), though I know the folks who walked out of "Jerusalem" for language will be twisting their undergarments frantically. As I see it, though, the coarse language is a dramatic device that helps us see Charlotte now the way that the hoi polloi of 1850 felt about the supposed unfeminine "coarseness" of Charlotte then. In Whelan's mouth, her irreverence is plain funny, and yes, likeable. But the script forces everything one step too far. This sort of thing is all well and good when you are only going for maximum laughs, like in "Upstart Crow," but when you are trying to make serious dramatic points as well, biasing your script against Charlotte to the max (the poor 9 year old Charlotte practically brought up her baby sister, Anne, after her mother died, but she doesn't get much credit for that here), having her come across almost as narcissistic and inconsiderate as Trump, some of the comic caricaturing of Charlotte feels like overkill, too vitriolic and caustic for light humoured laughter. Nonetheless, the play boldly tells a story of sibling rivalry that I haven't seen before, that is rooted in reality and that is effective dramatically and sometimes comically. As Anne, the butter-wouldn't-melt object of Charlotte's jealousy, Rhiannon Clements is gently spoken, kindly oriented, and winning in the extreme. If Gemma Whelan wasn't so damn brilliant at both humour and drama (her second half speeches had me welling up), it would be hard to like this Charlotte Brontë at all. That said, a directorial flourish of having Whelan's Charlotte play one scene from a glass cage (similarly effective as a statement of imprisoned feminism when Gwendoline Christie and Fiona Shaw got in glass cages in other plays) paid off brilliantly for me, adding a layer of complexity that made sense of the play. All in all, the two principal actors are terrific, and the play tells a worthwhile story, even though sometimes it strains too far to be funny and too far too make a point. 3 and a half stars from me. PS: Tonight, the running time was 2 hours, 5 minutes (including an interval), concluding at 9:35pm.
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Post by Steve on Mar 30, 2024 18:00:40 GMT
There’s little to be said that hasn’t already been expressed by board members and most of the critics. Perhaps a question about how the play they were rehearsing seemed like a Mamet-type drama, but when it was supposedly on stage morphed into a Neil Simon type of script complete with Vaudeville gags. Some spoilers follow. . . What you observe is lifted directly from the Cassavetes film:- Myrtle goes off script because she just can't face the "Mamet-type drama." Her ex-husband Manny goes along with her improv and they totally change the script into a "Neil Simon type comedy."
The audience doesn't know that the writer's script has been totally changed, but like what they see, and roar with approval.
The other creatives know their vision has been compromised by Myrtle, but most of them are just happy for the claps, and they're overjoyed they survived another night. Much like how the real creatives of this must feel every time they survive a night of this. Forgive me, but I really hope I can go to this again lol.
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Post by Steve on Mar 28, 2024 0:19:23 GMT
Saw it tonight, and thought it was great. Patricia Clarkson is an astonishing actress, and central to everything and everyone, but all the superb actors get their moments. The show finished at 10:25pm, so the running time is a long 3 hours and 25 minutes, including an interval, but it didn't feel like it because the play becomes exponentially more involving as time progresses. Some spoilers follow. . . With Patricia Clarkson in the play, and her role so pivotal, it really is like she is the sun and the other actors are in orbit around her. I didn't find the play quite so Mary-centric when I've seen it before (with Lesley Manville and Laurie Metcalf). The play is so well named, taking place over one long day, starting in the morning and ending in the night, and since night is when inhibitions are generally at their lowest, it is in the second half that the play really soars. Similarly, a great irony of the play is that the more drinks the characters have, the more entertaining the play, because it opens them all up, even though drink is one of the things destroying them. Even Cathleen, the family maid, played by Louisa Harland (so brilliant in "Ulster American") gets a great scene with the demon drink (the only one with a significant amount of humour, rare and welcome in this dark play). Laurie Kynaston, playing the unwell younger son, smouldered like Montgomery Clift, a living ghost existing in a state of heightened awareness and perpetual distress. As the older son, Daryl McCormack is like embers, generally subdued but constantly threatening to come alive when the dramatic wind blows, and when it does, he's fire. As the patriarch of the family, something about Brian Cox's dreamy storytelling in "The Weir" at the Donmar remains, but now the dreams are no longer wonders but obfuscations, and as his assertive exterior deflates over the course of the play, he movingly comes more and more to resemble Munch's "The Scream," open-mouthed despair personified. But it is Clarkson's moment-to-moment aliveness, and emotional quality of unstable-ness, like a nuclear reaction, veering from smiling resting face to determined plotter to living in the past (like Blanche Dubois) to genuine expressions of love to disingenuousness to despair to cruelty to self-hatred, all turning on a dime, one emotion flowing into the next, that is so involving and so brilliant. From a start that was a little cold for me, I found myself heated up to a full 4 and a half stars of rapt involvement by play's end.
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Post by Steve on Mar 27, 2024 8:18:28 GMT
Timeout review reviewed: "Sheridan Smith is superb" says the opening headline, directly addressing the concerns of likely ticket buyers. But does the reviewer warn those punters that they won't get the typical genre gratifications from this show (aka no dramatic impetus)? Yes. The reviewer helpfully classifies this show as a "leftfield European musical" plonked in "the middle of London’s glittering West End." He, again usefully, elaborates that the show is "entirely unshackled by genre niceties." Perhaps, he should have spelled out what that means: no addictive story dramas building to predictable thrilling climaxes, but still, it's clear, this one's different. And the reviewer illuminates the positive in this absence of traditional drama, the uniqueness of the show: "there is truly nothing else like ‘Opening Night’ in Theatreland at the moment – not even close." After all, you miss a "Heathers," there's a "Mean Girls." You miss a "Thriller Live," there's an "MJ." But there is NOTHING like this. And this is the one in 10 years time you'll kick yourself for missing, even if you want to diss it till you die lol. The reviewer steps out of time to acknowledge that value. Further, the review is specific about the tonal oddness of the show, which spurns typical tragic drumbeats, and "thrillingly pulls away from that, as Myrtle literally changes the script of her life and ‘Opening Night’ drifts into a euphoric final fantasia." "There are no dance numbers, power ballads, lavish sets, or cute romantic storylines" warns the reviewer, but there is, he points out, "a buoyancy and belief in humanity that’s lacking in the original film." And here it becomes clear that the heir to Michael Billington's compassionate embrace of both bracing theatre and embattled humanity is Lukowski, a critic who centres helping audiences decide whether something is to their taste, while remaining open to works that bravely break the mould. 4 stars for this helpful review.
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Post by Steve on Mar 27, 2024 7:40:49 GMT
Review of Reviews: The Telegraph This review reads like it was written by Sheridan Smith's healthcare professional: "She had a much publicised mental health episode during the 2016 West End run of Funny Girl, which saw her withdraw from performances for over two months. Since her return to the theatrical fold, fans have rallied, as has she; her ace turn in Shirley Valentine, which comically treats the woman-in-crisis trope, was a signal that she would bravely face her demons, and take risks." The audacious cod psychology of the reviewer, who seems more like a celebrity stalker than a reviewer of a West End show, renders the overfamiliar reference to Smith as "Shezza" even more galling and appalling, as in: "Shezza will live to fight another day." Such an atrocious reviewing approach is slightly redeemed by its observation that "although [Van Hove] pioneered the use of live video on stage, here he barely bothers to justify, dramatically, his use of a roving film crew beyond the basic steer that the company are being trailed for a fly-on-the-wall documentary." It is certainly true that the documentary crew is a thin device, equally thin in "MJ the Musical," but better used there. Overall, 1 star for the cod psychological hogwash.
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