Going to the theatre

[Frances]

The Gigli Concert

I have the last half of that play photocopied somewhere about, the only edition I could find was from a nearby University who wanted it back. I feel like I haven't finished it. He wants to be a great Opera singer and goes knocking at a failed shrinks door, but is reticent to actually discuss anything?

How does it end? I feel like the shrink is digging his scene.

Anyway, the parts I actually read were great.

[philipchevron]

The Gigli Concert

I have the last half of that play photocopied somewhere around, the only edition I could find was from a nearby University who wanted it back. I feel like I haven't finished it. He wants to be a great Opera singer and goes knocking at a failed shrinks door, but is reticent to actually discuss anything?

How does it end? I feel like the shrink is digging his scene.

Anyway, the parts I actually read were great.

The property developer trying to get his soul back doesn't literally want to sing like Gigli, he wants Gigli's spirit, or something approaching it. Yesterday, Mr Murphy described the dilemma thus: Do you want to listen to Gigli or do you want to sing like him? It's a question he poses to himself when he becomes too consumed with hearing great work to the point that it imperils his own imagination and then "Gigli goes into a drawer". It was in many ways the most enlightening section of the discussion with Mark O'Halloran because the genius of The Gigli Concert is not just its provocative content but - and here is the source of O'Halloran's comment that the play is "deeply mysterious" - the fact that in execution it blurs form and content so that you feel you have seen not so much a play as a symphony. Murphy believes that Music is the condition to which all other Art aspires and Gigli is personal testament to that credo.

[Frances]

The property developer trying to get his soul back doesn't literally want to sing like Gigli, he wants Gigli's spirit, or something approaching it. Yesterday, Mr Murphy described the dilemma thus: Do you want to listen to Gigli or do you want to sing like him? It's a question he poses to himself when he becomes too consumed with hearing great work to the point that it imperils his own imagination and then "Gigli goes into a drawer". It was in many ways the most enlightening section of the discussion with Mark O'Halloran because the genius of The Gigli Concert is not just its provocative content but - and here is the source of O'Halloran's comment that the play is "deeply mysterious" - the fact that in execution it blurs form and content so that you feel you have seen not so much a play as a symphony. Murphy believes that Music is the condition to which all other Art aspires and Gigli is personal testament to that credo.

Okie dokie.

[Frances]

Spider-Monster:The Musical
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR1DdMeVqTw

[philipchevron]

The Rest is Silence (Riverside Studios, London) June 22

No author is credited, but we don't fool so easy, those of us who follow Mr Shakespeare into the most unlikely venues. The immersive Hamlet.......the deconstructed Hamlet...........the site-responsive Hamlet. We put up with a lot of variation on the Moody Dane in particular, some of it exhilarating or provocative or even exciting. Some of it, like this witless, poorly spoken and dreary attempt to enclose us within the world of the play as a series of action panels fill with light reminding us not so much of something site-responsive as something that was once better drawn by Stan Lee or else the reptile house at Dublin Zoo but with nothing like as much vibrant life on display. And that's when we know we're watching the yer-avin-a-laff-arentcha Hamlet.

[Heather]

Table Manners,
part of The Norman Conquests Trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn.
Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.
Saturday 2nd June 2012, 11am (Preview).

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy of three plays, set at a family gathering in three different locations in the same house over one weekend in July 1974.

The Norman Conquests Trilogy stars Philip Cumbus as the rather irritating Norman, Laura Howard as Annie (who I thought was very like Felicity Kendall in The Good Life, it was only after studying the programme notes I found out that Felicity Kendall played Annie in 1974 at The Globe Theatre), Oliver Birch as Reg, Tom Davey as Tom, Sarah Tansey as Sarah and Emily Pithon as Ruth. It runs at the Liverpool Playhouse until 23rd June 2012.

Living Together.
Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.
Saturday 23rd June 2012, 11am.

Round and Round The Garden.
Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.
Saturday 23rd June 2012, 3pm.

Two plays from the Norman Conquests Trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn.


I'm still not an Alan Ayckbourn fan, however I will say this is one amazing piece of writing. Ayckbourn has managed to do something I've never seen before, fit three plays so as they work side by side. I know I couldn't do this, and I don't think many writers would even attempt it.

The Everymanplayhouse have done a really fabulous job with this, the set is stunning and swivels round between scenes so as you can see what is happening in the other rooms and the actors have done a fine job of remembering all their lines for all three plays, quite a feat in itself or that's my opinion anyway.

Norman continues to be as annoying throughout, but still manages to charm Annie and Sarah, his sister's in law and his wife Ruth. He is the sort of man you couldn't live with although as an outsider watching in, he is very funny. At times the trilogy is funny and other times it can bore you to tears. It is a fascinating piece to watch. I was shattered by the end of it all, that was some marathon, and thoroughly enjoyable. Now I'm off to speak to Gemma Bodinetz and claim my I Conquered Norman badge (she has offered me one even though I did not see the whole trilogy in one day).

[philipchevron]

Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten, libretto by E. M. Forster & Eric Crozier (Coliseum, London) June 23

I have read Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad only under duress: I get why they have elevated positions in the literary hierarchy (though Melville's eminence and riches all came decidedly after his death) but my dear, all those boats. All that technical jargon and uber-masculinity and endless turbulent oceans. Queer theorists have always had their angles on the lure of men at sea, of course. Take Britten cohort W. H. Auden, at his most toshlike and repressed-Victorian: "It is not an accident that many homosexuals should show a special preference for sailors, for the sailor on shore is symbolically the innocent god from the sea who is not bound by the law of the land and can therefore do anything without guilt".

T. G. Rosenthal has a more provocative view: "[Britten] sanitized George Crabbe's original poem "The Borough" [the source of the sublime Peter Grimes] and changed Grimes from a sadistic, homosexual, paedophile and parricide into a merely short-tempered fisherman as much sinned against as sinning, and, therefore, a tragic hero. With Melville's Billy Budd this process was more or less reversed. A novella of extraordinary complexity and allusiveness, despite its brevity, is stripped down and its understated homo-erotic undertones become a study of more or less overt homosexual longing, tinged with wholly overt sadism. This is, in a way, ironic not simply because it is the opposite of what happened in the adaptation of Grimes but because, in 1945, Britten had no choice but to exclude homosexuality from the stage."

And so, once again, we have to look at the opera of Billy Budd in terms of the complicated balance Britten struck within his twin worlds of homosexual twilight and establishment darling. He was not, of course, the only artist of his time to arrive at such an accommodation with the Queen Mother and the queens of Chelsea, but in many ways, Britten remains the most interesting because the conflicts are worked through in his artworks more than his life, arguably to a considerably more substantial extent than Noel Coward or John Gielgud.

And this alone, never mind that he is the greatest British composer who ever lived, is the reason why he should be meriting entire Summer festivals in Britain, like Shakespeare in Stratford or Wagner in Bayreuth. His operas inform each other, but are seldom seen close together. With English National Opera's recent new versions of his great works, mostly directed by either David Alden or his twin brother Christopher Alden, the company has fully earned its worldwide status as Home of Britten and the case has been made for its authority. Though I loved David Alden's masterful Peter Grimes and can hardly wait for the return of Deborah Warner's Death In Venice to the repertory, Christopher Alden's superb "schoolyard" A Midsummer Night's Dream from last year is the one that most keenly supports ENO's brave willingness to offer something more than Heritage Britten, a certain kiss of death.

All that said, the new David Alden Billy Budd falls inexplicably short of the standard previously set. It has to be said this is not the consensual view, which appears to have embraced the new show as another feather in the ENO cap, but I remember liking the opera (in its last Covent Garden version some years ago) a lot more than this production allowed. Though in many ways, the brutal dynamism of the Grimes triumph is echoed here, and by much the same design and creative team, and though Edward Gardiner controls the orchestra and Francine Merry the Chorus with unimpeachable integrity (and Britten's writing always merits the best of both), something has gone wrong in the casting. In particular, Benedict Nelson is never convincingly charismatic enough as the young seaman "beautiful angel" who must be sacrificed for the sins of lust and loathing perpetrated by his superiors. At the very least, he is not in the same class as Stuart Skelton in the 2009 Peter Grimes.

[Frances]

Coincidentally, The Kennedy Center is hosting Tom Murphy's Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming. Druid Theatre Company Oct. 17, 18, 19. Non members Aug. 8.

http://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=XNDMC

If this could magically coincide with a game...

[philipchevron]

GATZ by Elevator Repair Service, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Noel Coward Theatre, London) June 24

"Fitzgerald's work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption. It was his rite of passage; it is our bridge to the time before "dreams" were slogans.......It remains "the great" [Gatsby] because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism, and finds the defeat unbearable, and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly. With The Great Gatsby, American letters grew up" - Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair (2000).

It should come as a surprise by now to no-one that the book with an ever-mounting claim to be the Great American Novel of the 20th century was written by an Irish Catholic drunk.

Less clear is why that 1925 novel is so resistant to adaptation in other media. A Broadway adaptation in 1926 was shortlived, left almost no critical traces and a single typed carbon copy of the play in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC is apparently all that remains of it. It has been adapted for the movies three times, the first lost, the second languishing in copyright hell, the third (in 1974) a major and unloved studio flop which nevertheless generated a two-year long wave of Jazz Age nostalgia, numerous fashion disasters - high-waisted bottle green "baggies", anyone? - and a warm, fuzzy return to the era's music which made it all seem not great and historic but just camp and decadent. And now we hear of a fourth movie, due for release later this year and our heart sinks in advance because the logo fetshizes Art Deco and in one of the most dismayingly predictable pieces of movie casting in decades, Leo DiCaprio will play Jay Gatsby.

It's been an opera too, and several recent and upcoming theatrical versions exist, including an immersive version at Wilton's Music Hall and a musical version which will also be produced in London this year. And when Elevator Repair Service [ERS], an innovative New York theatre group set out on their long journey to do it in 1999, usually against resistance from the Fitzgerald Estate, they too thought in terms of "adaptation". But, as ever, Francis Scott Fizgerald's masterpiece, written in his mid-20s, appeared to resist adaptation.

But then ERS had an idea: what if you put the whole novel on stage, every one of its 49,000 words, including every "he said" and "she announced" and have it "read" and lightly "enacted" by characters (in a seedy modern-ish office) from cover to cover? Well, it's nuts, of course. I mean even if you could do it, it would be what, four hours? Ten hours? [Actually, just over six, plus intermissions and dinner break, so let's call it 8 hrs 15 mins]. But as ERS explored the idea further they realised, as their production so spectacularly illustrates, that if The Great Gatsby really is the Great American Novel, that could just be because it's the greatest American storytelling. What are you going to subtract or add or "adapt" or paraphrase to tell its story more perfectly? The novel's style, its writing, its era is The Great Gatsby, as much a part of the Jazz Age and of American Modernism as those Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern melodies themselves.

I'm so glad I finally got to see this. I first had to abandon my tickets in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2008 when, in recovery from the unpredictable medium-term effects of chemotherapy, my body was unable to commit to eight hours of anything, much less a piece of theatre; then in 2010, when the Estate finally allowed a New York production, the Public Theater put it into the auditorium least suited to it, a tall-walled room whose harsh acoustics, in combination with the aural defects that were aggravated by that same chemo threatment made it impossible for me to grasp the text at all and, I had to leave, deeply frustrated, after half an hour. Third time's a charm. The Noel Coward auditorium has been sympathetically adapted into a more intimate space and discreet miking is in place to combat any vestigial acoustic issues.

But boy was it worth the wait. It is unlikely there are many, if any, more masterpieces of literary fiction which would lend themselves to this treatment but the magical inspiration of GATZ (Jay Gatsby was born Jim Gatz) is that it finds pure theatre in those words. As director ERS director John Collins explains, "the prose is so delicately and expertly constructed that even the omission of a single adjective is rhythmically disappointing". And it takes a courageous adaptor to take that into account.

[Frances]

And now we hear of a fourth movie, due for release later this year and our heart sinks in advance because the logo fetshizes Art Deco and in one of the most dismayingly predictable pieces of movie casting in decades, Leo DiCaprio will play Jay Gatsby.

Based solely on What's Eating Gilbert Grape DiCaprio should play anything he likes. You'd think he'd be rather unconvincing as Howard Hughes, but I actually liked him in that crapfest The Aviator. Especially when he goes completely crackers at the end.

It sure beats creepy, dumb fuck Bradley Cooper. Who else was actually up for the role?

[philipchevron]

And now we hear of a fourth movie, due for release later this year and our heart sinks in advance because the logo fetshizes Art Deco and in one of the most dismayingly predictable pieces of movie casting in decades, Leo DiCaprio will play Jay Gatsby.

Based solely on What's Eating Gilbert Grape DiCaprio should play anything he likes. You'd think he'd be rather unconvincing as Howard Hughes, but I actually liked him in that crapfest The Aviator. Especially when he goes completely crackers at the end.

It sure beats creepy, dumb fuck Bradley Cooper. Who else was actually up for the role?

Yes, I liked him as Hoover and he was great as Hughes but Gatsby is an iconic figure too far. This reductive notion of Jay Gatsby as blue-haired blond-eyed All-American capitalist (see also Robert Redford) misses the point of the character. Leo is rapidly becoming the male Meryl Streep.

[Doktor Avalanche]

The Columnist by David Auburn (Samuel J. Friedman Theater, New York) June 22

The changing culture of the United States during the 1960s has been portrayed in its music and art numerous times. Most of us are familiar with the changes in approach from the early 60s hits (Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Chubby Checker) to the late 60s (Beatles, Stones, Marvin Gaye), and likewise through the rising counterculture of hippies, Warhol and the anti-war movement. That the journalistic world also changed dramatically is less popular a discussion. In fact, for someone of my age (born in 1967), I was largely unaware of how journalism held sway as it did prior to the Kennedy Administration.

The Columnist takes place in the decade of 1960 and focuses on what seems today as an implausible sway one man can have on politics at the highest levels. Joe Alsop was a syndicated columnist from the 1930s through the 1970s, covering foreign affairs. His high point of influence was during the 60s and his obsession with the Vietnam War. The drumbeat for the war and fear of the Domino Theory (a phrase he coined) was funneled through the megaphone of his column that reached upwards of 190 papers in the US. Such power and influence is almost beyond belief today. The closest modern example one can cite as far as reach might be Rush Limbaugh, but he is nowhere close to being as influential.

Having no prior knowledge of Mr. Alsop, the character that is put forward seems entirely believable and I can imagine no-one better suited (pun accidentally intended) that the blustery John Lithgow. His ability to behave in a pompous , boisterous fashion is a no-brainer in casting and he delivers beautifully. As the culture changes around him, Alsop is aghast at what he sees as a dumbing down of everything from fashion to writing. He is particularly troubled by the new breed of journalists reporting from Viet Nam, notably David Halberstam, played convincingly by Stephen Kunken.

This is a portrayal of one man’s inability to come to terms with his surroundings and it is done very well. You can sympathize with Joe while he is appalled by the debasing of culture, conversation and language, but in the end he is defeated by his own inflexibility. It is a well done play (Lithgow was nominated for Best Actor in this year’s Tony Awards) and worth catching if you are able – the run has been extended through July 8th.

[Frances]

Yes, I liked him as Hoover and he was great as Hughes but Gatsby is an iconic figure too far. This reductive notion of Jay Gatsby as blue-haired blond-eyed All-American capitalist (see also Robert Redford) misses the point of the character. Leo is rapidly becoming the male Meryl Streep.

We have a cat named Gatsby Catsby and she is nuckin' futz.
She actually belongs to my (lit major) niece, but it takes a village...

Apparently Ben Affleck was considered for a supporting role. Like wow. Dodged a bullet there.

Yeah, blonde on blonde.

[philipchevron]

Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz, libretto by the composer after Virgil (Royal Opera House, London) June 25

OK, so it's Berlioz and so, as Wagner and Lizst did, you lower your expectations and hope for the best. And it's not often you're offered the full 6-hour version [yes, it's one of those weeks] in a new production by David McVicar, with Pappano at the baton and a cast as able as Eva-Maria Westbroek (Dido), Hanna Hipp (Anna, sister of Dido), Anna Caterina Antonacci (Cassandra), Barbara Senator (Ascanius, son of Aeneas) and, especially, Bryan Hymel (Aeneas). Covent Garden can also be relied upon, probably, to do a decent enough job with the Trojan Horse. Which is more or less how it comes to pass, and very nice too.

I'm glad, for Wagner's sake and for Music's sake, that Berlioz existed, if only because, if he hadn't, it would have been necessary for Wagner to invent him in order to learn from his shortfalls. When Wagner reduces the entire history of the world down to a heated family squabble which ends in sacrificial immolation so that the world can start over, maybe fail better this time, you believe it, because Wagner glimpses some primal and unpalatable truth about the universe, confronts you with it and leaves you feeling cleansed from the experience. Whereas when Berlioz nutshells the Aeneid as an impassioned love affair - between Dido and Aeneas - turned to shite, you can only feel appalled that the silly girl has clambered atop her own funeral pyre at the end because of, well, because of him. The future king of Italy. The Promised Land. No offence.

That Gatsby Cat rocks.

[philipchevron]

Dr Dee by Damon Albarn (composer/co-creator) and Rufus Norris (director/co-creator) (Coliseum, London) June 26

Rufus Norris describes Albarn's second opera as "a contemporary eulogy or song cycle based on Damon's understanding of Englishness and English melancholy and a yearning for the spiritual exploration and free-mindedness that Dee encapsulated."

I rate Damon Albarn and I take him seriously as an artist. Always did. When he was Mockneying about in "Parklife" and predicting a cheesy future for his bass player who "lives in an 'ouse, a very big 'ouse in the country" (Chipping Norton not yet mentioned by name), I was being beguiled by such Britpop glories as "The Universal" and "This Is A Low" and "To The End", work of great beauty and integrity which made a complete mockery of the supposed "feud" between Albarn and the neanderthal Gallagher Brothers. His voice is uniquely suited to the sort of English melancholy Norris refers to: only Robert Wyatt's instrument makes a sadder sound.

So it's a source of great frustration that, on this occasion, he has not really found himself equal to the challenge he and his collaborator have set themselves. Norris's insight is right on the money - if Jez Butterworth and Mark Rylance (Jerusalem) uncovered and voiced a new and benign sense of ethnic Englishness, stripped of imperial and nationalist horrors but rooted in an alternative history at once both fiercer and more bucolic, for sure the man best equipped to give it musical expression is Damon Albarn. We hear a great deal at the moment about the New Elizabethans - well, we do on Radio Four, at any rate - the English artists who might be considered worthy contemporary successors to the great figures of Good Queen Bess's era. This in itself seems to tap into this rebranding of Englishness (as opposed to, even, Britishness, always a problematic national paradigm), a yearning for a time when The Only Way Was Not Necessarily Essex.

We know enough about John Dee to know that he was a sort of Elizabethan Galileo, an astronomer and alchemist destroyed by some suspect beliefs and practices attributed to him; that he was almost certainly the chief model for both Marlowe's Faust and Shakespeare's Prospero. Albarn and Norris argue that he neverthless represents a time when the hungry pursuit of intellectual and scientific knowledge, always allowing for the possibility of spiritual enlightenment if that should occur too en passant, were both honourable and desirable conditions of Englishness. But a piece of music theatre needs to do a little more than just abstractly sketch the central character and his cohorts and there is no really coherent journey within Dr Dee, just a series of impressions.

Though Albarn employs excellent legit soprano, countertenor and tenor singers, the opera is paradoxically, at its most evocative, its most - yes - melancholy, when Damon is himself singing the score. With Albarn regulars like drummer Tony Allen and Mamadou Diabante (on blisssfully delicate kora) close by, he is no more or less intelligible than the "proper" singers [surtitles, now commonplace even at the exclusively English language ENO, would have helped] but he does seems to embody the spirit of the piece and in this alone, it is a big step up from his own merely whimsical-sounding Dr Dee album.