psocoptera

A Midsummer Night's Dream put on by the Actors' Shakespeare Project at the Mosesian Center in Watertown. My MIL generously wanted to take the family out to a play - I think this was Q's first live Shakespeare? For me, it's always interesting to see what a different production will do with a very familiar text like this one. I did not love every choice this company made (it was very screamy and I had a moderately bad headache, and they had cast the young lovers with some of the older actors and the over-the-topness I can kind of deal with coming from young people gets creepier when they're all middle-aged, and they played the last bit of the play-within-the-play weirdly straightly-dramatic rather than going for comedy). But they were obviously having a lot of fun, and the 90s-club styling of the fairies was fun, and they made the interesting choice of casting Puck with an amazing breakdancer and giving some of his speeches to voiceovers (and the last bit to Quince, here a veteran theater director lady). And the kids thought it was funny and had fun, so, definitely a success as a theater outing.

Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard play at the Huntington Theatre (which seems to be going by The Huntington these days in their programs, perhaps to avoid the whole theater/theatre issue). I like Tom Stoppard, and I knew this would be heavy (it's about a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the 20th century, so you know how that's going to go) but I wanted to see what Stoppard would do with it. It's a very personal work - he's trying to imagine some of his own heritage and come to terms with his own family history - and it was powerful in exactly the way you'd expect. (While also sometimes pretty funny in the leadup, as Stoppard does.)

We had an interesting conversation afterwards about Holocaust art, about which I have many mixed feelings - in wanting to see this play, knowing it would be emotional and I would cry about it, is that, like, atrocity tourism of real historical suffering; does Holocaust art get used for justification of the modern state of Israel feeling they have infinite license to do supervillain shit you would normally spend two hours watching Batman or James Bond thwart (yes, I am talking about the pager attacks on Lebanon, which is not the only bad thing the state of Israel has done but is a recent and particularly shocking one); given that in the US one of our two major parties has high-office candidates who have called themselves Nazis or who are calling for the forcible deportation of 20 million people, do we conclude that Holocaust art is a failure at convincing people that holocausts are bad and we don't want any or would this shit be even worse if we weren't constantly turning off at least some potential fascists from fascism with timely application of Number the Stars or Maus or Diary of Anne Frank or Devil's Arithmetic or Schindler's List or or or. Probably nobody goes to see something like Leopoldstadt unless they're already anti antisemitism? Probably they are not going to generalize to "displacing and persecuting groups of people is bad in general" unless they already think that? I don't know.

I went back and forth all spring on whether I wanted to see the new Gatsby at the A.R.T. - this is the Florence Welch Gatsby not the Jason Howland Gatsby - until I finally decided in June that I did want to see it, because what if it was amazing.

(I still kind of wish I had seen Waitress at A.R.T. with J instead of only seeing it when it came back around in the post-Broadway touring production. I mean, there were solid reasons I didn't having to do with child care, and there are like nine or twelve other shows from 2014-2017 I also didn't go to that I've never regretted missing, so, like, the odds were reasonable and I just got unlucky with that one. But I'm also keen to spot the next Waitress and not do it again. Or, you know, the next Hamilton.)

It was not the next Hamilton. Probably not even the next Waitress. It was fine, it was fun, it was solid, it was interesting to see how they went about it, they made some choices I liked, I liked the music better in the second half, and I definitely think if you're fond of Gatsby as one of the Great American Novels or just really like The Broadway Musical as an artform, you might as well go, you'll enjoy it, it's an enjoyable show. But not a lot of "wow", and I'm struggling to remember any particular song well enough to write down what I should put on SDME if a cast recording comes out. (Was "Driving My Way" Myrtle's big song? I definitely thought she was the standout character, or had the standout songs, or something. (Or maybe it was Solea Pfeiffer's playing of her.) The musical is a lot more sympathetic to Myrtle than I remember the book being, including giving her and George Wilson a new backstory. "The Damage That You Do" was maybe the other standout song. And then of course it has to end on a big Broadway number, but I don't really feel like the end of Gatsby is a big Broadway moment, so that was a little odd...)

One last thought: there was occasionally something in the costuming or choreography of the ensemble, while being party guests, that made me think about the *other* classic American work about a self-made man who throws lavish decadent parties that draw in ordinary Americans, leading to tragedy for some and greater self-knowledge for others, while the couple from another world abandons everyone to escape back to their own world. I'm talking of course about Rocky Horror. Never occurred to me before to read these two works against each other, but, like, Frank/Rocky as a bifurcation of Gatsby? Frank's transvestism, Gatsby's shirts, Gatsby's invention of himself, Frank's invention of Rocky, Gatsby's fantasy of Daisy, Frank's "don't dream it, be it". Eddy and Columbia as George and Myrtle Wilson - George the lower-class-coded guy who just got unlucky, Myrtle who thought it was great when it all began but is a victim of Frank/Gatsby's pursuit of his fantasy. Riff Raff and Magenta the Tom and Daisy who kill and transit-beam off on their merry way. And Nick and Jordan, Brad and Janet, whose attempt at heteronormativity can't survive Gatsby/Frank and his gravitational pull. And I guess Wolfsheim is Dr. Scott. It's not perfect, especially not in how the various vectors of desire and jealousy flow, but I feel like there could be a fun fanvid in this concept, or something.

Hadestown! I enjoyed it but didn't love it. The "story of two marriages" layer vs the "capitalism vs union organizer" layer felt muddled; I know it's possible for things to mean two things at once, but it's also possible for those meanings detract and distract from each other, and I felt like they did here. Orpheus always being predestined by fate to fail (for no particular reason, either, like, they didn't play up the moment at all, he just turns seemingly at random because it's time for that to happen) also feels like a weird beat to go with for the capitalism layer? Like, not just "you will often fail" (clearly true) but "it is literally inherent in the story that winning is impossible". Without even a "but we bought ourselves one more day" or "but we can be proud or satisfied to have tried", just a "yup, this is how the endless doom cycle goes". Ok, sure, I guess, whatever, but I prefer to go to the theater to feel things. :/

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, at the Ahmanson in LA. Very funny - I think my favorite part was sitting next to Q as he cracked up, but I laughed a lot myself too. They're very good at setting up a gag, milking it, and then elevating it one even worse step further. There are some full episodes of the Goes Wrong Show available online if you like slapstick (or maybe it's farce? I don't really know how these things are classified).

Emma, 2020 film, on the plane. Fine! Great costumes and set design. Of course the whole time I was just thinking "what part of Clueless is this". I really liked getting to see a little bit of the endless labor of servants going into maintaining these people. I have gotten old enough that I can't tell what the young people find attractive, and so to me it seemed like there was maybe something interesting going on in the casting, where Knightley is the shortest and scruffiest and to my eye least attractive of the various men, which is a very different approach than, like, Clueless, where Paul Rudd is clearly The Aspirational Object. (I only mention shortest because it seemed unusual to me in film to show your ostensible lead romantic hero standing next to a series of taller dudes. I have a personal history of crushes on guys shorter than me, so I'm not trying to deny the attractiveness of shorter dudes here! Just not whoever that actor was.) Is this a subtle "look, everyone has ended up "correctly" sorted based on class/money and not looks" thing? Or maybe it is a looks thing, in that Anna Taylor-Joy is also honestly kind of weird looking... Junie says it's mean to say her interpupil distance is creepy, but it's certainly *striking*, let's say that. Or maybe the director and the young people do find this Knightley just as swoony as I found Paul Rudd in 199whatever, and I was not actually supposed to be thinking "Robert Martin is clearly the catch of the village if you take off the class goggles".

Gloria: A Life at the ART. The talking-to-the-audience framing didn't entirely work for me, or I wasn't in the right mood, or something, and there were some other bits that didn't land - the Wilma Mankiller role ended up feeling New-Agey-ancient-wisdom in a way I found kind of cringey - but, some neat history of the women's lib movement. I maybe wish it had been a documentary film rather than a theater experience, which I'm sure is not the hope of people putting on a play, but there you are.

Awesome show, neat work with lighting and chairs to evoke a lot of different settings, and costume elements to pick out particular recurring characters from the general ensemble. I didn't particularly notice until pretty late in the game the two broken-off trunks/poles and then I was like OH, that was nicely and subtly done. Powerful stuff pretty much from the get-go - I started to tear up pretty early and was like "uh oh", but it kept a really good balance of getting emotional and then lightening it up a little. It's a heck of a show... if someone had just said "yeah, they're making a new musical about 9/11!" I think the only possible answer would be WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FUCK, but it's coming at it on enough of a slant to really have a story to tell without feeling maudlin or exploitative. "Me and the Sky" is the song that stuck with me and works well even out of context (here's a studio performance by the original actress on YouTube) aaaand now I'm teared up again.