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All About Eve: Fasten Your Seatbeats, It’s Going to be a Bumpy Night Because This Show is Terrible

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It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is All About Eve at London’s Noel Coward Theatre, playing until May 11. Watch the movie instead! 

A few years ago, my family gathered together on Christmas morning to do one of our favorite things: watch a new Oscars screener. The movie was ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, which would kickstart the career of the incredible Oscar Isaac. Because we are movie people – and because we are decent human beings who know how to behave – we watched in silence for about an hour. But at that point, my sister-in-law broke the silence and asked the room, to hilarious effect, “So, this is terrible, right?” It didn’t matter that some disagreed; for me that line was better than the movie and one of the funniest moments ever. If I were willing to talk in the theatre, I would have quoted her recently when I saw the new production of All About Eve at London’s Noel Coward Theatre. After the sheen of seeing its famous stars wore off, it was absolute torture to sit through, and it took all my might not to say to my husband, “So, this is terrible, right?


As you probably know, the movie “All About Eve” is a classic Best Picture winner about two headstrong actresses, one an established Broadway star and one yoot trying to take her place. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen the movie, but I remember that, although the two women were devious (one more than the other) and determined and like not great people, they weren’t fully out of their minds batshit crazy. ENTER: Ivo van Hove, London’s favorite theatre director who is known for his visually striking takes on reworking classics but who is arguably a misogynist. What a perfect show for Ivo to destroy so he can continue showing off his hatred of women while also displaying his love of stark staging and cold projections! Instead of the actresses being strong women, one of whom is determined to a fault and kind of scary, both are now outrageous lunatics who may as well be clawing at each other the entire time and screaming like babies and tearing each other’s hair out while Ivo sits in a chair offstage smoking a cigar and muttering ‘yes this is women.’

What makes it all worse is that it stars the great Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing, the big Broadway star, and the world’s new favorite blonde Lily James as Eve Harrington, the young upstart. These are two huge actresses right now and this classic work with the two of them? it should be EPIC in its greatness, not in its failure. To make matters worse, because this stars these two giant celebrities, tickets are astronomically expensive. So we paid more than we have paid for any other tickets in the past six or so months to see this steaming pile of dog shit, except worse than that because at least a pile of dog shit necessitates a doggo being nearby. There were no dogs!

So, let’s do a quick plot overview. Margo Channing (Anderson) is a Broadway star, currently in a play written by her friend Lloyd, who is married to her friend Karen, both of whom are cast so strangely that there is no forking way they would be married in real life. After the performance one evening, Karen brings a young woman, Eve (James), who was waiting for Margo at stage door into Margo’s dressing room. PROBLEM #1: Who in tarnation lets a random fan come backstage to meet the actress? As someone who stagedoored mm let’s just say a lot, I can tell you right now, that shit does not and SHOULD NOT happen. So, right off the bat we got some bullshit. To increase the crazy quotient, Margo hires Eve to work as her assistant, which also means living with her. Cool guys, yeah, this is a thing, I am also Lin-Manuel’s personal assistant and I live with Kelli O’Hara, this is the result of stagedooring.

So Eve ingratiates herself into Margo’s life but Margo starts to distrust her, which she should have done when she first met her, but she was too busy worrying about being old. Her main character trait is being insecure about her age because she is over 40 (gasp!) and her boyfriend, Bill, is younger, so to make her feel better, Bill says to Margo “You’re not old! You’re young! You’re six!” which is DISGUSTING ughhh men are gross. We see her birthday party happen pretty much in real time, and it’s a bad party, and everyone is in the kitchen, which is hidden from our view, so it’s worse than your average shitty party. I can’t believe this show. Eve weasels her way in more and more and somehow becomes Margo’s understudy in the current play, which is definitely what happens when you stage-door stalk celebrities, you get cast in the Broadway play mm hmm sure sure, I am a multi-Tony winner yes. And here is my biggest problem with this story: Everyone says that Eve is utterly fantastic at her first reading, so we know that she is actually a great actress. Meaning, she doesn’t have to scheme anymore. The most powerful people in the theatre now know that she is excellent and are ready to hire her…so…that’s that then, right guys? I don’t understand why there can’t be two great actresses in NYC in this universe. They know there are like, lots of them, right? WHY CAN’T THERE BE TWO? Everything after Eve gets hired has zero force because there’s literally zero reason for her to continue being a crazy beeyotch. Things are slow and boring for a while and then boom, out of nowhere the whole ending is so nonsensical it actually hurts. The playwright was going to leave his wife for Eve? Since when? Since they met like the day before and talked once? Eve was gonna just put up with Addison forever and let him blackmail her? She could have easily gotten her good review out of him and then told him to fork off. I don’t get her being submissive after all she has done. And the whole tidy wrap up with another girl in Eve’s room wanting to be like her to show that what, women operate in a cycle of trickery and dominance? Physical pain.

Is the writing or the direction worse? Ivo tried to be clever but everything looked messy and busy. It was like Ivo thought up a hundred new tricks and instead of picking one or two to focus on, he threw them all in and hoped for the best. There was creepy music vamping the entire time that became excessive and annoying. There were long pauses that were supposed to be dramatic but were mostly frustrating. If they cut half of those long pauses, it would have been a 90 minute show. Most of all, the whole movie-camera concept was ill-conceived. If we wanted to see this story presented more like a movie, we would have watched the damn movie, Ivo, and we would have loved it and we would have saved hundreds of dollars and we would not have gotten AGITA from all the ANGER. There were literally cameramen with working cameras following the actors around, and their filming was projected onto the back wall for us to watch live. Sometimes important action was happening out of our view, like in the kitchen (the birthday party scene) or the bathroom (literally the climax of the show) and the only way the audience saw this, this important action, was because the cameraman was filming and we watched the projection. WHO STAGES THE MOST CLIMACTIC SCENES OF A PLAY OFFSTAGE. I mean, I get that you are going for some sort of expose vibe but this isn’t a FORKING MOVIE, IVO. If you want to direct a movie I’m sure someone would hire you to do that, but don’t take a stage show and try to make it your next film. Ugh the cameras so often settled on empty glasses and dishes and projected those for us to stare at and it’s like, ‘ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING DEEP, BECAUSE WE ARE JUST LOOKING AT GLASSES.’

But then the writing was so cringeworthy that with literally every other line, my husband and I were kicking each other. They owe me new stockings because of how bad this writing was! Not one line of honest or realistic dialogue is in the whole thing. There was a line about how every ticket holder to a play would ask for refunds if an understudy was on – this in a city (London) where they famously DON’T GIVE REFUNDS IF AN UNDERSTUDY IS ON! Don’t get me started about how shitty a policy that bullshit is, especially for a show like this when there is a 1000% price increase for these big stars.

I wish I could say that if they had a different director take this in a different direction, it would have been good. But nothing happening on that stage was salvageable. Gillian, who is often superb onstage, is not superb here. She spoke in a low gravely monotone that seemed bored and kept us from connecting. At least she still has a strong stage presence and is usually great. Lily, on the other hand, should not be a stage actress. Her climactic screaming breakdown evoked no emotions other than fremdschamen. She is winning onscreen but is simply not meant for the stage.

There is one trick that Ivo employed that works: when Margo stares at herself in the mirror (projected to us, naturally) and slowly sees herself morph into an old lady. That was cool. You know what wasn’t cool? Having the cameraman film Margo throwing up in the bathroom after drinking too much. That was not cool. I am so tired of Ivo’s misogyny. He made these two women into painful caricatures where they were once interesting women, flawed but recognizable as humans. This is more like cartoon version of what MRA men like to joke about women being like.

To add insult to injury, it is two hours long – WITHOUT AN INTERVAL. Most normal shows do an hour for Act 1, 20 minute intermission, and an hour for Act 2, but this one just skips the interval. It could be to preserve this utterly silly movie vibe, but I would bet you a million dollars that they did it because they knew people would skip out on the second half. Halfway through, there is even a very clear change in vibe that screams out to be the act break, and would have been a good one, but they simply pause and then KEEP TORTURING YOU while you now also have to pee. FIE. FIE UPON HOVE (also the name of a town in England, I’m guessing).

INFORMATION
All About Eve is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre until May 11. Programmes were £4.50, 50p less than normal because I bet the programme sellers felt bad about all the money everyone’s spending to see this monstrosity. In contrast to my usual thinking, I recommend the dress circle in this theatre and not the stalls, because the stalls are below ground level and they don’t let you leave through the main doors at the end so you have to exit onto the street which is some bullshit.

 I did not try to stage door – what was I gonna say, “hey you were really great in ‘Mamma Mia 2’ but not this”?? – so I can’t say if they come out or not but like do you care, don’t see this, it’s bad. 

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