troisoiseaux

FINALLY saw Maybe Happy Ending, which is as good as everyone has said and definitely deserves all of its Tony noms! It's charming and funny - very Pixar, rom-com vibes - and just melancholy/bittersweet enough to stop short of being twee.

In a futuristic Seoul, Oliver (Darren Criss) is an early-generation Helperbot whose beloved owner, James, is definitely going to pick him up from the home for retired Helperbots any day now; Claire (Helen J. Shen) is a comparatively newer model but, as the iPhone to Oliver's Nokia, model-wise, is suffering the effects of planned obsolescence more quickly. After Claire shakes up Oliver's twelve-year-strong routine of puttering around his room waiting for James and talking to his plant, they decide to sneak out and road trip to Jeju Island, so Oliver can reunite with James and Claire can see the world's last remaining fireflies. On the way, Claire makes Oliver promise that, even though they're pretending to be a human couple, they won't fall in love; Oliver is like, "we're robots! we can't fall in love!" If you have consumed any media ever, you can see where this is going.

I loved the physicality of Criss' performance; he moves like a Disney animatronic come to life, emphasizing the difference between Oliver as a Model 3 and Claire as a more lifelike Model 5. (3 vs. 5 is a whole thing, plot-wise, but also sets up the joke that got the biggest laugh: when they stop at what turns out to be a "love motel" to recharge (literally), pretending with varying degrees of success to be A Normal Human Couple, they run into another guest who makes a comment along the lines of "where did you find a 10 like her?", to which Oliver cheerfully chirps, "actually, she's a 5!") Shen is also fantastic; she and Criss play well off each other, and their voices are gorgeous together.

Besides Criss and Shen - and not counting the understudies/stand-bys, or the two additional actors appear as Claire's former owners in pre-recorded flashbacks, or the orchestra - the rest of the cast consists of one actor who plays Oliver's favorite jazz singer, appearing whenever Oliver plays his albums (this musical has diegetic and non-diegetic numbers!) and another who plays James, James' son, and all of the bit parts. (There's a tongue-in-cheek nod to this in the running joke that Oliver thinks all humans look alike.) And also Oliver's plant HwaBoon, who's the third lead, really, and gets its own bio in the playbill.

The set and effects were fantastic; watch this trailer, which also shows what I mean about Criss' physicality. The moving shadow-box set pieces and neon reminded me a bit of National Theatre's Angels in America, actually, although the set pieces were lush with detail where AIA was minimalist. The scene with the fireflies was absolutely breathtaking: up until that point, the stage was very segmented in terms of what you could see, but after the first firefly appears as a little light on the tip of a conductor's baton wielded by the aforementioned jazz singer, they "open up" a full view of the stage to reveal a forest grove of full of "fireflies" and the orchestra performing on stage, and there were little blinking firefly lights along the balcony railings, etc., as well as the stage!!

Anyway! 10/10, definitely worth taking a 6 am train to NYC, I hope this wins all the Tonys.

Saw Schmigadoon! at the Kennedy Center, a new stage musical adaptation of the eponymous short-lived Apple TV+ show, which is itself a parody of Golden Age musicals: NYC couple Josh and Melissa, whose relationship is on the outs, take a wrong turn on a hike, stumble across an old-timey town where everyone sings, and can't leave until they find True Love. (Their respective side romances on the way to realizing that True Love Was In Them All Along put Josh into the plot of The Music Man and Melissa into The Sound of Music.)

This show was SUCH a blast. Really great energy from the cast— I want to say especially the skirt-swishing, high-kicking, cartwheeling and backflipping ensemble, but then I keep thinking of all the individual actors who absolutely killed it with their respective Big Numbers; the most low-key (but still very funny) performance was, ironically, Alex Brightman as the musical-hating boyfriend, Josh, who spends most of the show looking increasingly martyred as people around him keep bursting into song— and from the audience, which was perhaps the most noisily engaged I've been in since actual audience participation improv show The Twenty-Sided Tavern. Cheers! Boos! Someone loudly saying "NO" in the most disgusted "you idiot" voice when Captain Von Trapp uptight widower Doc Lopez turns away a pregnant teenager, insisting that as a doctor "he can choose his own patients"! (It's okay— OBGYN Melissa helps the young couple, including with some belated sex ed to the tune of "Do Re Mi.")

I'm really glad I watched the TV show last weekend; it would have been just as entertaining to go into this completely blind, but I enjoyed seeing what stayed the same and what got changed between the show and stage. Broadly, the answer is that they cut out the flashbacks to Melissa and Josh's relationship - the musical starts with their vending machine meet-cute (here a set piece that immediately flips down into a bed) followed by a "SIX YEARS LATER" screen projection and the two of them arguing in the woods - and pretty much everything else was kept the same, other than some new songs (mostly added to replace a spoken scene, but sometimes swapped in for songs from the TV show— this video has a clip of Betsy's new song for the picnic scene) and one or two big plot changes:

( Biggest changes )

ETA: clips from the Kennedy Center!

Watched Young Marx (Bridge Theatre, 2017), which is kind of like if Hamilton was about Karl Marx, except not a musical and more cheeky than sentimental. But there was a duel, and an affair— the plot was basically "did you know that Karl Marx's personal life was a mess?", although from my Wikipedia dive afterwards, it seems like they took creative license with the details— and the loss of a son, and revolutionary meetings, and the writing of a historically significant work, so the comparison isn't not apt. Really enjoyed this! I don't think I've seen Rory Kinnear (Marx) in a role that let him be as loose and funny as this one - he tends to play buttoned-up types? - but he was great; I didn't know of Oliver Chris (Engels) before NTaH, but I've seen him in a few shows now - as Orsino in Twelfth Night and Oberon (role-swapped with Titania) in A Midsummer's Night Dream - and he was also great.

Watched Prima Facie (Harold Pinter Theatre, 2022), a harrowing one-woman play with Jodie Comer as a defense barrister who finds herself experiencing the legal system from a different angle, and questioning the system she'd always believed in, after she is the victim of a sexual assault. I can see why Comer won both an Olivier and a Tony for this. As a random detail that stuck out: I don't have a great ear for different English accents, but I could tell that Comer kept slipping between two of them - her character, Tessa, is a London barrister from working-class Liverpool - as both intentional code-switching and as a facade dropping in moments of high emotion, which was a nice touch.

Watched Underdog: the Other Other Bronte (National Theatre, 2024), which was especially interesting to watch with osprey_archer's review in mind because I was coming at it from a completely different background: I love Jane Eyre, but I'm otherwise a total casual when it comes to the Brontës - it's only a slight exaggeration to say any preconception I had was just that one Hark! A Vagrant comic - and so I was perhaps more open to being sold on Underdog's take on the Brontë sisters and their respective literary legacies. It's also just a very fun play to watch! Great energy from the main actresses, clever use of a small ensemble cast playing both bit parts and Greek chorus and of weaving scenes from the Brontës' works into the narrative about their lives, and very fun effects. (I liked the one where, when the sisters send their first works off to publishers, they put their manuscripts into a basket that's pulled up out of view, only for the rejection letters to literally rain down.) What Osprey's review had not prepared me for was to be emotionally wrecked by the last ten minutes or so: ( ... )

Watched As You Like It (National Theatre, 2016), which was charming. I've seen this play before, but even beyond the fact that particular production was a Beatles jukebox musical, it was cool to see what the two stagings did differently. The 2023 STC production tried to make it make sense by grounding it in a particular time (1960s) and place, while this production was a very vibes-based staging: for example, the 2023 one played Duke Frederick's court as a sleazy Vegas club with a wrestling show for entertainment/profit; this production also went the obvious WWE-style wrestling route for Orlando's fight with Charles the Wrestler, but set it inexplicably in the middle of an open-plan office, because why not. The set was very cool! When the action shifted from the court to the forest of Arden, the orderly rows of desks and chairs became a giant's mobile of furniture hanging from the ceiling. Celia stole the show in this one - with the melancholy Jaques as a close second, particularly for his dramatic "kill me now" interpretative dance during Amiens' song - but I was also surprised and delighted to recognize some of the actors in smaller roles: Fra Fee (one of the revolutionaries in 2012 Les Mis) as one of Duke Senior's courtiers-in-exile and Siobhán McSweeney (Sister Michael in Derry Girls) as the shepherdess Audrey (whose courtship by Touchstone is, I must say, much cuter when done as a duet of the Beatles' "When I'm 64").

Watched Present Laughter (Old Vic, 2019) with Andrew Scott as a flamboyant light comedy actor in the 1930s careening towards a mid-life crisis and a love triangle heptagon, which is in fact a great role for Scott, who does "guy trying to mask that he's achingly lonely" very well. (Interesting to watch this one after Vanya, since there's some similar... core to Scott's version of this character, Garry, and his Ivan.) This production genderswapped a couple of characters (and, presumably, some of the references to Garry's past flings?) to make it queerer: in the original, both Garry and his manager Morris have an affair with Joanna, the wife of Garry's producer Henry; here, Joanna is Joe and Henry is Helen (whose own extramarital flings, as referenced, are not genderswapped, and who is styled with shades of Dorothy Arzner).

STC artistic director Simon Godwin directed two different productions of Much Ado in 2022: I saw the one in DC, which was set in a modern cable newsroom with Beatrice and Benedick as sniping co-hosts of a daily news show; this was the one in London, set against the backdrop of an art deco Hotel Messina in a version of 1930s Italy without the encroaching fascism.

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Saw Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty Sided Tavern in NYC last weekend, which was a blast— it's an interactive improv comedy show built around D&D mechanics, drinking game rules, and polling the audience to determine what happens next.

THE CAST: a GM, a Tavern Keeper (basically the assistant GM/audience-participation technology wrangler/on-stage bartender), and three players, loosely classed as a Warrior, a Mage, and a Trickster. One of the first audience choices is to pick from one of three character options for each class/player; at our show, we ended up with a "peacocking paladin," a breakdancing bunny artificer, and "a 'real' wizard," respectively. (Everyone in the audience is assigned to one of the three character classes via a sticker as you walk in, and some polls/interaction were class-specific; I was on Team Mage.)

THE GAMEPLAY: most, if not all, actions are driven by audience survey (via a browser you pull up with the QR code in the playbill) followed by rolling the dice; e.g., the player-actor comes up with two undefined but funny-sounding moves (memorably, "I can give 'em a bird in the hand or two in the tush"), the audience votes on which to use, the player rolls to see if the hit lands, and then they act out their move. The "Drunk Shakespeare"-esque twist was that if a player or the GM rolled a nat 20, they drank a beer; if they rolled a 1, they drank a "punishment shot" (the poor GM's choice of poison was Malört; apparently the sober option is pickle brine). Each player got one (1) re-roll, by team vote; this involved the player doing some sort of minor physical challenge (push-ups; balancing a cup of beer on their head while standing on one leg) and a giant cardboard D20.

THE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: as well as the audience-choice-driven plot/gameplay, there were a few times when the audience was given their own puzzles/challenges that impacted the game: the chance to solve a riddle that gave "your" character a boost; at one point, a few audience volunteers were pulled onstage to play darts, with the winning team's character receiving a boost to their next roll and the losing team getting a handicap. At another point, they brought a volunteer onstage to play an NPC (they had a great way to handle this, imo: the survey on your phone asked if you wanted to volunteer or not, and one willing volunteer was chosen at random). There was also just a lot of shouting of suggestions, e.g., to pick names for NPCs. Lots of shouting/cheering in general; this was D&D as a spectator sport! Oh, and before the show, they had everyone write a noun or an adjective on a slip of paper, which is how our heroes ended up fighting a "sour, gregarious water buffalo."

THE PLOT: our brave heroes (recently converted from a life of crime, in two of the three cases... or, well, mostly converted) are recruited by a wizard to find magical artifacts for and participate in a ritual to re-bind an evil chaos wizard trying to break out of his magical prison. (I'm not sure how many plot scenarios they have to work from, but apparently this also differs from show to show.) A series of unlucky rolls towards the end resulted in a bittersweet ending: they stopped the wizard, but his accomplice - and a certain amount of chaos - escaped, and the paladin accidentally killed the artificer because he rolled a 1 during the final boss battle. (The Mage finished the show as a ghost.)

James Ijames' Fat Ham is a modern, queer, Black, Southern, meta, and outrageously funny adaptation of Hamlet; I saw it this weekend at DC's Studio Theatre. Plot-wise, the first half tracks closely onto Hamlet— the ghost of a murdered father demanding revenge; the mother's too-soon wedding to her husband's brother; the son's scheme to test his uncle's guilt— while the second half diverges, changing certain plot points and adding new ones. The fundamental difference is that it's a story about breaking The Cycle instead of a revenge tragedy, where The Cycle breaks everyone involved.

Instead of the throne of Denmark, the main character, Juicy, is heir to a family-owned barbecue joint and generational trauma ("Your pop went to jail, his pop went to jail, his pop went to jail ... and what's before that? Slavery!"); he's doing an online degree in human resources and quotes Shakespeare ("You quote that dead ass white man one more time," his mom snaps, at one point; "You watch too much PBS") and spends most of the show wearing a t-shirt that reads mamma's boy in rhinestones. Juicy's father, Pap,* and uncle-turned-stepfather, Rev, are played by the same actor, as swaggering men who like to make him flinch and say "soft" like they're saying the other F-word; his mom, Tedra, makes an effort but is torn between being able to stand up for Juicy and the fact she's "not built to be alone." Laertes is now Larry, a closeted Marine who longs to be soft, the very thing that Juicy's father and uncle despise him for; Ophelia is Opal, a brash young lesbian who chafes against her mom's expectations; and Polonius is Rabby, a church lady who handles the climactic reveal** that both of her kids are gay surprisingly well. The Horatio stand-in is Juicy's stoner cousin, Tio, who misses most of the plot but steals the show with his recital of— to quote another review***— a "gonzo stoned fantasy involving fellatio and gingerbread men." The entire play is set at Tedra and Rev's backyard wedding cookout; Juicy's "mousetrap" scheme involves a game of charades.

In a tangent I promise is relevant, the first production of Hamlet I saw live staged his first soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2) in a way that's stuck in my head for years: instead of Claudius et al. exiting the stage, everyone froze and the lights changed to indicate that this was Happening Inside His Head, and Hamlet fell to his knees and just screamed in grief and rage before going into the whole bit about too, too solid flesh, pacing through the frozen tableau as he spoke. This show basically did the same thing— using purple lighting and the live-theater version of a freeze-frame to, like, flip a switch from the Action to Soliloquy Mode— in a way that broke not just the fourth wall but the second or third one, too. Other characters unfreeze to converse with Juicy when he's still in Soliloquy Mode (or, in the case of Pap, to rage silently in the background); twice, when the Action resumes, the parent he interrupted a conversation with demands, "what you tell them?". The best use of Soliloquy Mode occurs halfway through Juicy's karaoke performance of Radiohead's "Creep", when he goes from half-hearted, please don't make me do this mumbling to heartfelt belting that brought the house down.

Juicy's monologues, delivered in Soliloquy Mode, are mostly Ijames originals, but Fat Ham includes two Hamlet speeches wholesale: one ("I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play...") delivered straight (at least until ending with "...wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king— preacher. He's a preacher in this play") and one ("what a piece of work is man") in a wildly different context, expressing Juicy's admiration of Larry after a tender moment between them, with a slight but significant twist on the last line ("man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by my smiling I seem to say so").

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Saw The Tempest at the Round House Theater, which was SO COOL. Seeing this show has been a long time coming: I had seen photos of director Aaron Posner and magician Teller's co-produced Tempest online years ago (2015?), so I was over the moon when I discovered it was coming to DC, and then I had to wait for two years to even get tickets, because the pandemic happened. (The venue also ended up being moved from the Folger to the Round House, in the meantime.) It was absolutely worth the wait.

Everything about this play was the literal coolest thing I have seen on a stage, and unfortunately, I am not going to be able to explain it in a way that does it justice; this video, from a prior staging of this production in Chicago, gives a suggestion of the overall vibe, and you can see production photos from the Round House staging here, but believe me when I say it was so much cooler in person. The set evokes the the deck of a steamboat, with touches reminiscent of both the ocean and a vaudevillian stage; as you can see in the video, there was a group of musicians on the "top deck," providing both songs and sound effects. The overall aesthetic was very steampunk, with an extra shot of surrealist Victoriana— the spirits of the island looked like the anthropomorphic animals from a Victorian Christmas card, but like, super unsettling. Caliban was played by two actors who moved together, kind of like Chinese lion dancers, but again, way more weird! Ariel was so freakin' cool, styled with albino-pale skin and white hair and contact lenses that made his eyes all white except for the pupils, and did card tricks the way that people talk with their hands. THERE WERE MAGIC TRICKS.

I studied The Tempest in a literature class I took in undergrad, but actually seeing the play performed made it click into place for me in a way that just reading it - and reading Margaret Atwood's retelling, Hag-Seed - hadn't. In that class, we mostly discussed the play in the context of colonialism, and it was interesting to watch with that in the back of my mind, especially in the earlyish scenes that present the shipwrecked characters' different visions for the island and in their interactions with Caliban. I might go back and dig into my notes from that class, actually; I know I wrote an essay on one of the scenes with Ferdinand and Miranda, and I'm curious to see what I think of it now, because that was one of the things that actually seeing the play performed illuminated for me— just reading the text, I was inclined to roll my eyes - like, okay, sure, Miranda grew up on a deserted island and just saw a young human man for the first time, but what's Ferdinand's excuse, ya weirdo? - but when it's two people in front of you, it makes sense! And just, in general... okay, look, this is going to sound really dumb, as I type it out, but, the fact that the characters are people who have relationships with each other?? Knowing that Prospero was betrayed by his brother is one thing; seeing the reunion play out is another. There was one moment, slipped into the scene where Prospero gives his blessing to Miranda and Ferdinand, where Prospero and Miranda do a levitation trick— and, I can't fully explain it, but there was something in the way that he took her hand, or in the way that she smiled as she got into her place, that spoke volumes about the story of a father and daughter learning to do magic on the island where they'd been shipwrecked. Maybe acting was the real magic all along??

Gonzalo and Stephano were both cast as women, and the language of the play was tailored in the former case but not the latter. In terms of Gonzalo, I found myself thinking of the Folger's Henry IV from a few years ago, which had a female Earl of Worcester, and this casting had an interesting impact on the vibe of some scenes— to borrow from my own post, "being kicked out of the court discussions by King Henry reads differently when she was the only woman present in a room full of men, as does the scene where she's trying to tell Hotspur about her plan but he keeps interrupting her to pitch a fit about how he was treated by the king." (x) Here, similarly, Gonzalo is a character whose attempts to look on the bright side are dismissed as frivolous by the king's other counselors, and who had taken pity on Prospero and Miranda when the others did not, but wasn't brave enough to try and stop the murder plan outright— it reads differently when Gonzalo is a woman with a political position to maintain, and asshole colleagues to deal with. (The sense of deja vu wasn't just in my head: when I got home, I compared playbills, and it actually was the same actress, Naomi Jacobson, in both roles.) In Stephano's case, they kept Caliban's references to the character as a "man" and a future "king" of the island, and Stephano leaned into the mistake by hamming it up, like, "yes! I am a man! watch me do manly things, like spitting!"

One thing that's been on my mind since I left the theater is a comparison between Ariel and Puck— both fairy servants, but such different characters?? The obvious difference, of course, is that Ariel is a prisoner, and not so much a servant as enslaved, but I think it also matters that Ariel is the servant of a human rather than a fairy king. I keep thinking of Ariel's line about how he would feel pity, if he were human ("[I]f you now beheld them, your affections would become tender" / "Dost thou think so, spirit?" / "Mine would, sir, were I human"), both on its own and in conjunction with "Do you love me, master? No?"......I may come up with more coherent thoughts about this, at some point, but right now I'm just, like, jennyslateNASAscream.jpg about it.

...I think The Tempest might be my second-favorite Shakespeare play, now. It's never going to beat Hamlet, though, sorry.

Saw Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory, which was incredible— this was an import of the production, directed by Robert Icke, that starred Andrew Scott in London a few years back, with about half of the cast intact: not Scott, unfortunately, although I could see shades of his style in Alex Lawther's performance (at least during the second half, once things start to get murder-y) and it added Jennifer Ehle (1995 Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett) as Gertrude. The Armory has been running this concurrently with Robert Icke's Oresteia.

This was probably the most elaborate staging of any play that I've ever seen; the Armory isn't actually a theater, and this production made fantastic use of the (massive!) space it had to work with. The stage was... slightly hard to describe? It was like there was the stage, and a glass-paneled hallway stretching across/behind it, and behind that was a "room" where, e.g., Claudius and Gertrude's wedding reception went on while Hamlet soliloquized. This production also incorporated a lot of multimedia elements: there was a big screen above the stage, where the ghost first appeared as a glitch on Elsinore's security footage, where taped "news segments" covered Claudius' coronation and Fortibras' military excursions into Poland, and which occasionally played a live feed from the stage: e.g., during the "mousetrap" scene/play-within-a-play, Hamlet et al. sat in the front row of the audience rather than on stage, and were filmed/live-streamed onto the screen.

Here's the thing: I really, really, really love Hamlet. One of the things I love about it is that - maybe more than other Shakespeare plays? - there's a lot of... flexibility, I guess, in how to stage it?? The STC's most recent production played Hamlet as a political thriller; this one was, like, a psychological horror-drama. An actor's inflection on this line, the way he holds himself when talking to that other character— different choices by the actors or director can bring such different emotions or implications to the same scene, even if not a single word of the text is changed or omitted.

Alex Lawther's Hamlet is waifish and slouching, all quick wit and small, languid motions, and somehow he feels more dangerous than other Hamlets I have seen. I've seen more than one review throw around the word "incel," and that checks out: something about Lawther's performance drew attention to the particularly incel-y flavor of Hamlet's venom towards Gertrude and Ophelia - wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners; his obsession with Gertrude's incestuous sheets - and, in this production, Guildenstern, who was played by a woman and as (in a truly *chef's kiss* example of how creative staging/acting can interpret the text) Hamlet's ex.

( Thoughts about other staging choices )

While Macbeth probably isn't the weirdest Shakespeare play to see with your mom on mother's day, it's... definitely up there. (This wasn't planned; the tickets were actually a birthday/Christmas gift from my parents.) This was also one of the odder, if not the oddest, stagings of a Shakespeare play that I've ever seen...? Where do I even begin.

So, this is the Macbeth at the Longacre Theater, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. It also featured Amber Gray (of Hadestown and The Great Comet fame) as Banquo— which was rather an odd bit of genderbent/-blind casting, since by having the witches declare that Macbeth will be king, but Banquo will be the mother of kings... look. There's a much more obvious interpretation here that, while troubling for Lady M., would not necessitate Macbeth jumping straight to murder...? So I found that a bit of a staging-induced plot hole (akin to the time I saw a modern-setting Romeo & Juliet and found the ending rather undermined by my brain yelling why can't she just text him???).

The production itself was very stripped-down— minimalist set, costumes that were just, like, normal clothes and went largely unchanged even as actors swapped between characters (Macbeth and Lady M. were both more styled/got more costume changes, but not that much more), a (purposeful?) sense of DIY to a lot of the lighting and smoke effects. A lot of the acting was, uhh, minimalist as well (with some notable exceptions, which I will discuss later, so I can end this on a positive note). Things got unexpectedly flashy for the final battle, which was not necessarily an improvement. For most of the play, the most notable setpiece was a table with a working(?) hot plate, which was used by various characters throughout the play, from the witches to Macduff's wife.

I was trying to write this in a fairly coherent narrative, but dear readers, I need to talk about the soup. The soup?, I hear you ask. I... don't remember there being soup in Macbeth? You would be correct! Regardless, all the weirdest stuff in this production involved soup.

( Warning for gore )

To end on a positive note: Ruth Negga was AMAZING as Lady Macbeth. The actor who played Macduff did an incredible job with the second half of Act 4, Scene 3. The porter scene was creatively done; they took the scene's inherent weirdness and ran with it. Daniel Craig played post-second-witch-encounter Macbeth very well: simultaneously overconfident and twitchily paranoid. (On a related note, my mom, and apparently also the NY Times, noticed shades of Putin in the way Craig's Macbeth was styled, held himself, etc.) It was also just really cool to see live theater again!!

tl;dr