January 19, 2023
Volgograd, Russia: Significant, Tragic History of a Cool Modern Cityby Randi / January 24, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the best ballet ever, ‘Onegin’ at the Bolshoi. We’re back in Russia all over this website!
With all the theatre I see, I don’t have much time for ballets. I see them every once in a while but usually I’m like “this would be so much better if you were singing toooooo!” That’s why ‘An American in Paris’ is so good. And usually the plots are so alarmingly sexist that I just roll my eyes the entire time so as not to actually scream. I saw ‘Giselle’ last year the English National Opera. Do you know what that’s about? A peasant girl dies of a broken heart because her lover is a cheatin fool and then her ghost joins a ghost troop of all virgin girls who died before they were married and they dance/kill men who go through their forest. It’s forked up. Luckily, ‘Onegin’ is not actively offensive; in fact, it’s a pretty good tale of a woman actually standing up for herself, sort of, as much as you can expect in old-timey stories. More importantly, it’s the most gorgeous dancing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m including the ending of ‘Center Stage’ can you believe it? even the part where the camera pans down and then when it goes back up Jody is all of a sudden in a red leotard and she pushes everyone away and Jamiroquai goes ‘DANCE!’ and it’s the best. I was naively a little upset that the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow wasn’t playing something I was more familiar with while we were there, but I can’t imagine ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘The Nutcracker’ (now I’m out of ballets I know) being nearly as spectacular as ‘Onegin’ was. And since this week on the travel blog we are back in Russia, it’s time to talk about this Bolshoi production.
Written by Alexander Pushkin, the beloved Russian poet, the novel ‘Eugene Onegin’ inspired Tchaikovsky to write an opera about it. (I never read ‘Eugene Onegin…and I’m not sure I ever read any Pushkin actually. Sacre bleu! I mean blin!) Tchi tchi put some dance scenes in his opera, and he hired a choreographer named John Cranko to choreograph them. Cranko, cursed with an unhappy name but blessed with immense talent, crankily thought “this story merits its own ballet, not just secondary dancing in an opera! We’re gonna make a whole ballet bout this feller!” His stories are so inspirational! Everyone loves Pushkin, from all the statue makers all over Russia (so many!) to all these artists whose greatest works were inspired by his words. Fun fact, Pushkin is a classic, beloved Russian author as well as a cute nickname for a baby. Little Pushkin with that punim!
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
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“Everyman” at the National Theatre: Worth Seeing For Chiwetel, But Disappointing
The show “Everyman” is about probably every human’s nightmare – facing untimely death – but the first 10 minutes are literally my nightmare. It’s a loud rave in a dark, creepy, possibly swanky club with inst-inst-inst music and well-to-do assholes doing drugs and taking selfies of how messed up and fun and awesome they are while lights are flashing and people are drinking more than they’re breathing and tossing their garbage on the floor and it’s just all awful and that’s my nightmare.
But it’s an effective opening of indulgent horrors, showing how our main character, Everyman (Chiwetel Ejiofor), has a certain kind of unaware, boorish, privileged lifestyle, spending his money and not really caring about much else. He passes out at the club and wakes up as the cleaning woman (who turns out to be God, naturally) is mopping up the disgusting floor, and he offers her some money to apologize for her job. But then he meets a man in a white jumpsuit who introduces himself as Death (Dermot Crowley, so good), and announces that Everyman’s time is up. This play is about how Everyman, sometimes horrifyingly called ‘Ev’ like it’s his actual name, deals with his impending doom.
“Everyman” is an update of the 15th century morality play titled “Somonyng [Summoning] of Everyman”, an allegory about humanity and death and how you have to do good deeds to attain salvation. It sounds like a great piece prime for updating to our modern times, with the lesson that no matter what, all you are left with to present to God for final judgment is a recounting of your good deeds.
It’s such an overdone topic, man’s struggle with his own mortality, and so this update needed to be handled in a fresh way to be worth doing. I assumed that the revival of it would bring about a relevant reimagining that made it original. But despite the we’re so cool vibe of the opening, nothing Everyman did in the face of death was new or original. He freaked out, and that was pretty much it.
One interesting aspect was that the original 15th text was rhyming, so this modern update also rhymed. But oof. They should have called Lin-Manuel. Some of the rhymes were embarrassing. One line went something like “Ev, mate, we’re totally your fandom, but all of this is just…random.” I apologize to the person sitting in front of me for throwing up on you.
So Everyman was super upset, naturally, and tried to get out of it. He tried to get his family to vouch for him, then his friends, none of whom seemed to care that much.
Everyman’s mother was good but had awful lines. She made jokes about her daughter-caregiver (the good child, as it were) being a lesbian, and the audience loved it, which was super weird. How messed up is that? It didn’t even contribute any meaningful character development or anything, just cheap laughter. Another joke was about how the daughter was vegan and how at least Ev doesn’t have to cook for a vegan, thank his lucky stars, or eat tofu scramble. The audience DIED at the tofu scramble joke. Again, didn’t add anything, just was super lame and cringeworthy. I was really surprised that they took this ancient work and updated it not with worthwhile insights but with cheap jokes, especially when the play is about using your life as best you can, being a good person while you are alive, and yet the only person in the show being a good person is used as a punching bag. And the most bothersome part is that this wasn’t done intentionally! It wasn’t like the creative team realized at all what they were doing, as clever as that could have been – a show about shitty people wasting life while making fun of the only person trying to do good could send a really powerful message about how we treat and think of others. But that wasn’t what they were going for here, it was clear, because the very brief jabs were clearly just to make the audience laugh, not to imply any deeper meaning. Which is a missed opportunity for actual depth.
No, this show was all about Everyman’s reaction to his death, not about other characters’ interactions or reveals. He freaked out pretty consistently. After trying to persuade the people in his life to help him, he tried to use his vast material wealth as a thing that God would give a shit about; obviously that backfired. Finally, he befriends a homeless man and learns a tiny bit about being a good person? But not really. I mean he realizes that he wasn’t much of one.
The most promising scene came when Everyman says goodbye to the embodiments of all his senses and abilities (taste, touch, knowledge, &c.). It was like the human-live action version of “Inside Out”. That’s a really cool idea but I wish it was better done. After like 100 minutes of loud tearful desperate cries with no level changes, no variation, when he just continued yelling crying at his attributes it wasn’t as heavy as it should have been. Chiwetel was good, and it was wonderful to see this great actor live onstage (long ‘i’ live; he doesn’t live). But the performance and the show seemed pretty one note, trying to sustain an intensified level of energy that just felt flat with no variation.
Yet after Everyman exhausts all his avenues of redemption and faces Death for good, Death tells him that his struggle really touched him. I was confused. How was his reaction different from anyone else’s? It seemed textbook, to react to death with unhappiness and anger, freaking out, trying to make bargains, trying to get people in your life to stand up for you. Like what else do people do? I didn’t get why Death, and also God, actually, (the cleaning woman, remember, which was clever) were impressed by his reaction. They still killed him, but they maybe felt bad about it? It was weird!
A lot of people seemed to be really touched by this story, which surprised me. Like I think I heard crying. Maybe I just think about this dreary stuff more frequently than others, so it wasn’t a novelty? I’m way existential. But no, everyone thinks about it at least a tiny bit, and nothing in this show offered anything new to the subject. Be a good person, it said, do good deeds, but even if you don’t, we will be impressed with how much you don’t want to die? I think that’s what it was saying.
It’s such an overdone topic, man’s struggle with his own mortality, and so this update needed to be handled in a fresh way to be worth doing. I assumed that the revival of it would bring about a relevant reimagining that made it original. But despite the we’re so cool vibe of the opening, nothing Everyman did in the face of death was new or original. He freaked out, and that was pretty much it.
One interesting aspect was that the original 15th text was rhyming, so this modern update also rhymed. But oof. They should have called Lin-Manuel. Some of the rhymes were embarrassing. One line went something like “Ev, mate, we’re totally your fandom, but all of this is just…random.” I apologize to the person sitting in front of me for throwing up on you.
So Everyman was super upset, naturally, and tried to get out of it. He tried to get his family to vouch for him, then his friends, none of whom seemed to care that much.
Everyman’s mother was good but had awful lines. She made jokes about her daughter-caregiver (the good child, as it were) being a lesbian, and the audience loved it, which was super weird. How messed up is that? It didn’t even contribute any meaningful character development or anything, just cheap laughter. Another joke was about how the daughter was vegan and how at least Ev doesn’t have to cook for a vegan, thank his lucky stars, or eat tofu scramble. The audience DIED at the tofu scramble joke. Again, didn’t add anything, just was super lame and cringeworthy. I was really surprised that they took this ancient work and updated it not with worthwhile insights but with cheap jokes, especially when the play is about using your life as best you can, being a good person while you are alive, and yet the only person in the show being a good person is used as a punching bag. And the most bothersome part is that this wasn’t done intentionally! It wasn’t like the creative team realized at all what they were doing, as clever as that could have been – a show about shitty people wasting life while making fun of the only person trying to do good could send a really powerful message about how we treat and think of others. But that wasn’t what they were going for here, it was clear, because the very brief jabs were clearly just to make the audience laugh, not to imply any deeper meaning. Which is a missed opportunity for actual depth.
No, this show was all about Everyman’s reaction to his death, not about other characters’ interactions or reveals. He freaked out pretty consistently. After trying to persuade the people in his life to help him, he tried to use his vast material wealth as a thing that God would give a shit about; obviously that backfired. Finally, he befriends a homeless man and learns a tiny bit about being a good person? But not really. I mean he realizes that he wasn’t much of one.
The most promising scene came when Everyman says goodbye to the embodiments of all his senses and abilities (taste, touch, knowledge, &c.). It was like the human-live action version of “Inside Out”. That’s a really cool idea but I wish it was better done. After like 100 minutes of loud tearful desperate cries with no level changes, no variation, when he just continued yelling crying at his attributes it wasn’t as heavy as it should have been. Chiwetel was good, and it was wonderful to see this great actor live onstage (long ‘i’ live; he doesn’t live). But the performance and the show seemed pretty one note, trying to sustain an intensified level of energy that just felt flat with no variation.
Yet after Everyman exhausts all his avenues of redemption and faces Death for good, Death tells him that his struggle really touched him. I was confused. How was his reaction different from anyone else’s? It seemed textbook, to react to death with unhappiness and anger, freaking out, trying to make bargains, trying to get people in your life to stand up for you. Like what else do people do? I didn’t get why Death, and also God, actually, (the cleaning woman, remember, which was clever) were impressed by his reaction. They still killed him, but they maybe felt bad about it? It was weird!
A lot of people seemed to be really touched by this story, which surprised me. Like I think I heard crying. Maybe I just think about this dreary stuff more frequently than others, so it wasn’t a novelty? I’m way existential. But no, everyone thinks about it at least a tiny bit, and nothing in this show offered anything new to the subject. Be a good person, it said, do good deeds, but even if you don’t, we will be impressed with how much you don’t want to die? I think that’s what it was saying.
Anyone Can Whistle at the Southwark: A Star Turn, A Weird Show
Today’s show is Anyone Can Whistle, at the Southwark Playhouse in London until May 7, so hurry (or not)
It’s not often you get to see a new-to-you Sondheim show when you’re a Sondheim devotee! Or ever! But indeed the Southwark’s production of his insane musical Anyone Can Whistle, with book by noted goofball and apparent magic mushroom-lover Arthur Laurents (I’M JOKING) (am I), is my first full production of his lesser-known show. Sure I knew the score, especially those bangers “There Won’t Be Trumpets” (thanks to Mandy Patinkin) and “Everybody Says Don’t” (thanks to Sutton Foster). How could I have ever guessed that the fairly decent-to-great songs compose a show that would have us going ‘what’ ‘why’ ‘what’ ‘wait but why’ every few minutes?
Anyone Can Whistle tells the tale of a corrupt mayor (excuse me, ‘mayoress’) and her lackeys who need to get money into their very poor town, in which the only operating business of any sort seems to be the mental institution ridiculously named The Cookie Jar, with all patients (inmates) called cookies. (Is Paula’s nickname for Rebecca on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” Rachel Bloom’s little nod to Sondheim? I say yes.) They…they decide to pump a rock full of water? and have it be a miracle when much needed water comes shooting out of a rock. Pilgrims mfing FLOCK to see the magical water miracle. They’re all like (Lewis Black voice) ‘we gotta SEE the big fucking thing!’ Money pours in as the mayoral team sells tickets to see this water rock. I’m not saying I wouldn’t pay money to see a nice water feature but that’s just me I’m weird. As a town-saving gimmick, this shit’s A LONG SHOT. INTO THIS STORY SO FAR! KEEP UP THE NONSENSE IN A FUN WAY.
The nurse at the Cookie Jar (imagine going to nursing or medical school and being a professional healthcare worker and having to tell people your facility is called The Cookie Jar), Nurse Apple, wants to bring all her cookies to the miracle, either to prove it’s fake or just in case it’s legitimate, it’s unclear. This is where things started to get dicey and not in a ‘oh we’re all having fun!’ way. Apple’s only characterization from the book is that she’s skeptical and straight-laced, and I needed more/any further character development from the actress to make her make sense. She says she wants a hero to deliver the town from corruption, to save her cookies? And so she disguises herself as a French miracle inspector. It makes no sense if all we get is that this nurse is a no-fun-having idealist whose big idea is to dress like a French prostitute who just woke up to try to shut the miracle down. Could’ve done that in oodles of other ways that weren’t so nothing, Arthur. GETTING LESS INTO THIS STORY.
Meanwhile, a man named Hapgood shows up and the town is like ‘oh are you the new doctor for The Cookie Jar’ and he’s like OKAY SURE! and no one asks Dr Timothee Chalamet for like ID or anything, so immediately a thinking person would guess that he’s def NOT the doctor but he’s charismatic like a bright bone-free human version of the inflatable things outside car dealerships, and they tell him ‘okay you’re in charge of figuring out who’s crazy and who isn’t, just like, go through the town and tell us who gets locked up in the jar.’ NOT THE BEST SYSTEM. Then he and the disguised Nurse Apple meet and immeds try to seduce each other for very unclear reasons. From here, the last 10-15 mins of Act I (and then all their scenes in II) become tedious because it’s hard to know how to be onboard with whatever’s happening, because what is happening? Are they actually into each other? Did they have any clue who the other was? Why is she dressed like this? Is the abrupt change from the silly French joke song (which did have some funny lines) to the heartfelt title song supposed to be sincere?? How are we supposed to make that jump? It doesn’t have a payoff. And though they are both clearly talented actors, I felt they were both unforch miscast, at least when taken together. We need their chemistry to build support for the weak story, but they have no chemistry, so much so that it’s like a negative amount and made it hard to accept love at first sight (if that’s what we were supposed to take from it?). Like in a college play my best friend’s now-husband and I were voted Third Most Awkward Couple in the show but if this couple were in it we would have gotten Fourth, or even like Tenth because that’s how many places they would claim with their abundance of no-chemistry.
From here it gets confusing about what’s happening and honestly the wikipedia plot summary doesn’t seem to match what I saw, so maybe they updated things but it wasn’t clear. The miracle gets shown to be a fraud, yada yada yada, Hapgood is revealed to be a new cookie/patient, yada yada yada, Apple and Hapgood decide to be together. OFFICIALLY NOT A FAN OF THIS STORY.
So yeah it’s weird af and not in a fun ‘let’s ride this crazy train all the way to Kansas’ way, since the lack of strong character development made it hard to jump on board since you’re like ‘but where is the train, does this train know it’s a train’. But this production is entirely worth seeing for one reason: Alex Young as Mayor(ess) Cara Hoover Hooper. Even in her first performance with a sprained ankle and on crutches, she has the audience eating out of her hand, especially me, this supes old lady in the front row who was LIVING for her, and the young man in the front row who became one of the main characters. She has the comic timing and fully inhabited presence of an actor that understands the character she’s playing, which is rare. Every utterance and glance is hysterical and entertaining. I was giggling like a cookie at everything she did. She’s giving a masterclass in using the audience, too; everything she did with/to the aforementioned man was genius-level improv (even though drinking from his glass gave me the covid shivers, but no one cares about that anymore!). And while I think those two main characters were miscast, they and the rest of the cast overall were game and energetic.
MASK COUNT: 7
SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE PIZZA STATUS: STILL GREAT
