Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

adrian_turtle came over here today, and we had lunch and watched Hamilton. (This is the recording of the Broadway play, made in 2016, which Disney just released on Disney+.)

We all enjoyed it, and I will probably go back and listen to the cast recording to make out more of the lyrics. (Between the loud orchestra, and some buffering glitches, there were lyrics I literally didn't hear, and others I couldn't make out clearly.)

I found myself crying near the end, in part thinking about people I've lost, and letters I didn't keep, or discarded in what now seems like an excess of post-move tidying some years ago. We paused the show until I stopped sobbing, wiped our eyes, and watched the last bit.

At the curtain call, the entire cast next to each other, I was thinking that this show looks more like New York than anything other live theater I've seen, on or off Broadway. Not at all surprising -- Lin-Manuel Miranda lives, or lived, in Washington Heights -- but I hadn't thought of it that way during the show.

Cattitude got the TV a few weeks ago, and set it up in the basement, which lets him watch things on a big screen instead of a tablet, and gives me a bit of time/space to myself while we're staying home because of COVID. This is the first thing I've watched with him; if I was more interested in television we wouldn't have lived without one for so long.

Given my general feeling that almost everywhere, including Massachusetts, is reopening too soon and/or too fast, I doubt I'll be going to the theater for a while after that becomes possible again. (Broadway has announced that nothing is reopening until at least January, and I don't know when anything else, including college productions, will resume.)

rysmiel and I had tickets for two Fringe shows Sunday night, but the first one, "Checkout 606," was cancelled due to wind. (The venue for that seemed to be a bit of street next to a food truck.) So we went to Frits Alors! for dinner, then walked back up St. Laurent and saw The Passage, a play about the Yukon Gold Rush, told by a woman who is trying to make her way to the Yukon. It's very effective—simple staging, mostly a lantern and a handful of other props, while the actress tells her story in an otherwise-darkened room.

The story starts with the expedition Nelly is part of losing their horses; she loops back a bit to talk about joining the group and the departure from Edmonton, and then tells about the ongoing journey and what goes wrong, and her interactions with the men and boy in the group, and theirs with each other.

My program says the performer [sic] is Jen Viens, and the writer/director is Adriana Bogaard, both originally from B.C. "The piece was inspired by the true story of Nelly Garner - the first woman to travel to the Klondike via Edmonton. However, many creative liberties have been taken."

Thursday night, cattitude and I saw the current Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, starring Bernadette Peters and Elaine Strich (and Alexander Hanson, but it was Strich and Peters that made me want to see this).

It was as good as I'd expected, which is very: I'm a Sondheim fan, but had never seen this show, only listened to the cast album. Sondheim's songs are excellent, but they gain from the context of the rest of the show). I'd wanted to see Elaine Strich act since we saw her one-woman show Elaine Strich at Liberty a couple of years ago, and Bernadette Peters is as good as I'd heard. (I suspect I've seen her before, but I'm not sure.) Her "Send in the Clowns" was almost heart-breaking, as well as technically very good: a bit of my brain was detached enough to notice the skill involved in putting those pauses, as if to catch her breath, in without ever actually losing her place.

We had a very good time; this was worth waiting for. I continue to be impressed that Strich and Peters are the replacement cast; this is the production that originally had Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (There aren't enough good roles for older women, or maybe there aren't enough directors and producers willing to put on those plays.)

Strich, as Madame Armfeldt, has only one song to herself, "Liaisons," which she did well. And I caught on one bit of the lyric, and wondered if it was meant as characterization: Mme. Armfeldt, reminiscing about her past, sings about having been the mistress of the King of Belgium. The play is set "at the turn of the last century," or around 1900; the timing suggests that this was likely Leopold II, the infamous creator and ruler of the Congo Free State. The musical is about (heterosexual) romantic/sexual relationships, and there's definitely political text there (for example, Count Carl-Magnus's jealousy and treatment of his wife and his mistress); I don't know whether Sondheim or Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book, thought about the implications of "In the palace of the king of the Belgians," rather than picking it for scansion. But it sheds a less flattering light Mme. Armfeldt, though I don't know how much the king's mistress would plausibly have known about goings-on in the Congo around 1870. (I can imagine her having learned about it years later, been glad to no longer be involved with him, but also still glad of the villa and money he gave her, and determined to play up the romance or status of a king, any king.

The choreography is also very good, both larger things like the way Frederika is mostly excluded by the adults in the opening waltz, and small things like the way several of the actors mime riding a train or bus (a slight anachronism, perhaps, but it works). The Playbill lists an "associate choreographer," suggesting that at least some of the choreography is from the original Hal Prince production.

[I don't have a lot to say about the play as a play, except that it works; I'm glad not to be anywhere near anything like Count Carl-Magnus's possessiveness and double standards, or in the sort of milieu where that kind of thing is normative; and that I think it's technically a comedy.]

Raoul Bhaneja's Hamlet (solo) is exactly what the title says, and better than you'd probably expect: Shakespeare's Hamlet done by one actor, alone on a stage, wearing basic black clothes, with a black curtain behind him, with no props whatsoever unless you count stepping behind the curtain a few times. cattitude and I saw it last night at P.S. 122; the small theater there suited it.

Bhaneja uses his voice and body extremely well (though I will note that he often spoke quickly): he shifts from character to character within conversations effectively and without visible effort, including scenes where he is thus effectively arguing with himself, such as Hamlet and Ophelia in the scene that ends with "Get thee to a nunnery, go!" Almost all the scenes involve him switching personas in a conversation, but the shift is a bit less startling when it's Horatio talking to Hamlet about the Ghost; that argument between Hamlet and Ophelia requires him to alternate Hamlet deliberately saying cruel and dismissive things with Ophelia reacting to hearing those things from someone she loves.

On the way home, Cattitude commented that the actor playing Polonius had stolen the show. I don't think so: Polonius was excellent, but so were Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio.

Cattitude had wondered if going out two Wednesdays in a row was a good idea for me, but I pointed out that this was a 7:00 curtain, and there was a 9:00 show listed, so we wouldn't be out all night. (Given that Hamlet can run 3.5 hours, it was a reasonable concern.) Obviously, Hamlet in under two hours means a lot of cuts; I think the choices were good, including keeping in the earthy, disrespectful humor of the gravedigger scene.

The program included a synopsis of the play, but this performance is definitely for people who know the play at least moderately well, and possibly some of the things around it; Stoppard was there in the timing every time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were on stage, for example. It was subtle enough that someone who doesn't know Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead might have missed it, or might have thought that particular uncertainty was either Shakespeare's or Bhaneja's. Indeed, when Cattitude and I were discussing the play and the choices Bhaneja made, it occurred to me that there don't really need to be both of those characters, especially given the size of Elizabethan acting companies, and he suggested that there might have been jokes about the inability to tell them apart four centuries ago.

That familiarity let Bhaneja deliver some lines with his back to the audience: it's easier to hear what someone is saying when the words are familiar, and the characters and plot equally so.

I haven't been down to P.S. 122 in years; we went to see this on rysmiel's strong recommendation. Thank you, rysmiel. I vaguely wish it had made sense for us to go last weekend, so I could have posted this while there were performances left in this run. This was the U.S. premiere, but with any luck Bhaneja will keep doing the show.

As bonuses, I got to meet daharyn, though only long enough for a quick hello, and when Cattitude and I went to Veselka for supper afterward, it turned out that they had blueberry pierogi. Even better, they're now offering the blueberry pierogi fried as well as boiled. I had been thinking, idly, of the more ordinary potato or meat pierogi. When we walked in, I noticed beef bourgignon on the signboard, contemplated it for a couple of seconds, then saw the blueberry pierogi, and settled down to thinking about what to have with it. Fried blueberry pierogi with sour cream and a glass of milk is definitely a "life is uncertain, eat dessert first" dinner.

I saw Spamalot last night.

The show is cheerful silliness. A lot of it was familiar from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but there's a bunch of rather self-referential new material about the knights being told to put on a musical, and
"Once in every show there's a song like this" and a character listed in the program as "Diva" singing "What happened to my part" There is a distinct shortage of female roles, though lots of scantily clad dancers there to give a Vegas feel to things and because there are people in the theatre audience who like looking at pretty young women.

We also got quite a bit of joking about Lancelot being gay, definitely on the flaming/queen side of things (including references to "YMCA"). Similarly, a running joke about how the Round Table couldn't make it on Broadway because none of them were Jewish.

Some quick jokes were clearly dropped in recently, and may be gone in six months.

The show ended with an audience sing-along of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

One of our party needs to be reminded that even if he's seen the show before and a lot of it is taken from a movie, I don't want to hear the lines from beside me a few seconds before they're spoken on stage.

TDF, probably about half price, orchestra seats but fairly far to one side. My only complaint about the seats is that they keep making them smaller, and soon nobody old enough to attend the theatre alone will be able to sit comfortably.

On the strong recommendation of xiphias and cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and cattitude for the Actors' Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, transferred from Boston to La Mama E.T.C. It's a theatre-in-the-round (well, rectangle) production, and takes the approach to Shakespeare that I tend to like, namely very minimal scenery. I do wish the actors, particularly those playing Lear and Cordelia, had enunciated better.

The company used the space well: not only were entrances and exits frequently up and down stairs, but some of the action was on the stairs between the seats. In particular, at the beginning, when Edmund is told to step back, he simply sat down on the stair, about six feet from us. By the time everyone else had exited and he spoke, I'd forgotten he was there.

I not only hadn't seen Lear live before [1], but if I ever saw a filmed production, it was a long time ago, and I didn't remember details. More precisely, the details I remembered were the lines everyone quotes, not turns of the plot.

The emotional shape of the play is odd; the first half is a lot closer to comedy than Macbeth or Hamlet. It's not just that the Fool, as Cattitude pointed out, has the best lines, it's that everyone has comic lines. Then there's a storm, and everyone and everything turns a lot darker. By the end, I was thinking "if he [Edmund] survives the battle, we're in trouble." He does, of course.

A good production, if not quite as good as my Boston reviewers led me to expect, but I don't know if that was me or the play; transfers are always potentially iffy, and 3.5 hours is a long time to sit in a metal folding chair even with a fifteen-minute intermission during which I found space to do most of my shoulder and heel stretches.

I think I want to track down a good filmed Lear and put it in our Netflix queue, for a few weeks from now. Good defined for these purposes as minimal cuts, good acting, and clear speech. Period/costuming aren't important, and while I know there's no film equivalent of a bare stage, the focus should be on the language, not the landscape or the storm effects. Recommendations, please.

[1] Lots of Hamlets, multiple Macbeths, Tempests, and A Midsummer Night's Dreams, some very good variations on Romeo and Juliet, from West Side Story to Shakespeare's R and J, a four-man production set in a boys' boarding school, an assortment of histories and comedies, even Cymbeline, courtesy of the completists at the Public Theatre. Some of that is fashion: The Tempest was very popular about ten years ago. And some is probably chance.

I meant to write about the Japanese production of Pacific Overtures when I saw it--but that was the same day as the job interview, and I was rather overwhelmed.

There is something surreal about the familiar tunes, sung in a foreign language, with Sondheim's clever, complex, multi-rhymed words projected overhead.

I'd say "go see it" but the company has gone back to Japan; they did five performances in New York, and will be doing five in Washington later in the summer, and that's it. The show ended its run in Japan a while ago--but Sondheim was there for the last two shows, and decided that it should come to the US.