NT at Home part 8
Sep. 23rd, 2022 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficAll four of these are legitimately good for once! At the moment, I only have eight more productions to watch. (Which I probably won't get through before they add more, but I can taste it I'm so close!)
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Oliver Twist
I saw this and was like—who needs a new adaptation of Oliver Twist? There’s already a very famous musical.
But—this is a production by Ramps on the Moon, which is a collaborative partnership dedicated to “normalising the presence of D/deaf and disabled people both on and off stage.” Therefore, this Oliver Twist reimagines the story with Oliver being born deaf.
This works so well it’s almost shocking it’s not the original story. In the original, Oliver is a bit of an object the story happens to. Here he has even less agency—born deaf, he’s raised by people who yell at him to read their lips then hit him when he “pretends” not to understand. The very first person to teach him sign language is the Artful Dodger. Fagin is a hard-of-hearing woman in this production, and her whole crew is disabled. It’s clear the Artful Dodger picked up Oliver because a deaf orphan makes a good beggar, but it makes the exploitation and abuse of that situation even more poignant since they are the only people in the whole play who accept Oliver for who he is and use sign language with him. When he is later taken in by a rich family, the father binds his hands together to keep him from signing and “force” him to learn speech. This reflects very real attitudes towards the Deaf and towards sign language at the time.
At the end of the play, the actors say, “Our hero is safe and happy. But what about all of us?” It makes sense for a book that was bald advocacy at the time to remain bald advocacy in a modern production. This is in its way more true to the original than the jarring dissonance of the all-singing all-dancing misery porn of Oliver! the musical.
The production itself has a screen that captions every spoken line. There is also usually a chorus that is both speaking and signing everything that happens. They also incorporate audio description, to make the production accessible to visually and hearing impaired audience members. It’s kind of genius. The only drawback is the pro shot usually doesn’t show the whole stage, so doesn’t show the screen, but in all such cases spoken lines are captioned.
I am super interested in the work of Ramps on the Moon—I can see from their website they continue to do productions. This is the only one I can find that’s available for viewing in the US, though.
The problem is—it’s Oliver Twist. It’s just endlessly fucking grim. It’s abuse to abuse to abuse. So everything they did with the production was genius, but in the end it’s not exactly a fun watch.
Faith, Hope and Charity
I did not expect to be interested by this. I put it on as background while doing some work, then ended up focusing on it anyway.
This is by the same playwright as Love (reviewed here), which I did not much like. Faith, Hope and Charity is about a community center/soup kitchen. Endless rounds of funding cuts have put them in a precarious position—the roof leaks, and the building is in danger of being sold and torn down. The play is a portrait of the various lives that intersect there, people who are barely holding on with the little they have, but for whom the community center is one of the last things keeping them together.
The main storyline is around a mother who has lost custody of her daughter. You don’t find out exactly why, though there are hints about an abusive boyfriend that she has since cut out of her life. She’s being wrung through the child protective system—eventually getting to the point where she can only regain custody if she gets mental health care. But the waitlist for mental health care is more than a year. So the courts decide to terminate her parental rights and put her daughter up for adoption. This is a woman we see be impulsive and have bad coping skills, but also someone who’s trapped by a system that won’t let her get her feet back under her. This culminates in her thinking about kidnapping her daughter. It’s a terrible idea—it will make everything worse, land her in jail—but then at least her daughter will know her mother loves her.
Another throughline in the play is an ex-con who runs a choir out of the community center. At one point, rains flood the center, destroying all the food. People show up and stay anyway, because even if they’re hungry, they still want to go to choir rehearsal. This leads to a scene where they sing “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals—badly—that had me absolutely bawling. Because it’s true that everyone needs things beyond food and shelter to get through every day.
This play is a clear piece of awareness raising and advocacy. Unlike Home or Love, though, I didn’t feel like I was being preached to, but instead being told a story with deeply empathetic characters.
The UK’s poverty situation is different than the US’s, but the same austerity and bureaucracies are in play that keep people in endless struggles they can’t overcome. I don’t know how effective a play is at leading to actual political action, but I can only hope.
No Man’s Land
I saw this production on Broadway (with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan) and HATED it. Primarily because I was not prepared for it. On a second go, I can appreciate the masterful performances and incredible chemistry of the leads without trying to figure out what is going on. Cause the answer is—there is no story. There are no characters. People say things, but they don’t connect logically. I’m not going to summarize this, because there isn’t a summary. You’ll see reviews that have a one sentence summary, but those are always…not really…?
I watched this with S, who enjoyed it more than I did. She was arguing that you could make a coherent linear story out of it—but only by assuming that some of the characters were lying for most of the play with no motivation to do so or that a lot of the dialogue is because of dementia. I’d argue that if an interpretation of a work requires you to think everyone’s lying for no reason all the time you can’t really argue that that is the only way to interpret the work. It’s *a* way, sure, but not the only way.
To me, I prefer to think of this differently. When I was trying to be an actor as a kid (I’m terrible at it—gave it up), I remember being told that I had to play the character as if they’d gone somewhere and done something while they were offstage. That is, an actor’s job is to embody a character as a full person with a full life we’re only seeing part of.
That is not true in No Man’s Land.
In No Man’s Land, these characters only exist in what they are doing currently on stage. There is no sense that they are people with lives beyond this. At the beginning of the play, you wonder what series of events have led to this moment, then you realize—none. Nothing. There’s no beginning before the curtain raises.
That being said, the play is full of brilliant bits of dialogue and monologue. I’ve seen excerpts from this that play as if you’re watching a Noel Coward. But in context—those pieces have no real impact on anything that happens around them. It’s all pieces. No whole.
Which makes the enjoyment, then, that the play definitely has themes and things it’s about, and the characters have continuity of self even while they have no continuity of biographical detail.
I mean. It’s Pinter. And it’s probably the best you’re going to see it played. But how you feel about this production is going to be how you feel about Pinter.
Peter Pan
Peter Pan was initially a play—the book came later. This production takes that original and updates a bit. Some of the updates work excellently, and some fell pretty flat for me.
Normally in Peter Pan, Captain Hook is played by the same actor who plays Mr. Darling. In this production, Captain Hook is played by Mrs. Darling. This works so excellently well it’s amazing it wasn’t the original vision. The whole play is about mothers, so re-envisioning Captain Hook as the bad mother to Wendy’s good mother works very well. The actor also just chews aaaaall the scenery, which is the way this role should be.
This production also attempts to resolve the problem of Tiger Lily. In this version, she is the leader of a group of wolves. There’s no Native American anything. If I’d never seen it before, that would deal with it pretty well. But knowing the history of the character, there’s still a little eeeehhhhhhh… So you’ve turned an awful Native American stereotype into a kind of savage, feral leader of wild animals? I mean, it’s better, but…..
The rest of the changes are more aesthetic. The stage is kept very bare, with the settings made out of makeshift objects, the way a child constructs a world of imagination. The flying mechanisms are not hidden, but clearly invisible, including being able to see the people on belay climbing ladders on the side of the stage. Peter even says you need “fairy strings” to fly, pointing to the rigging. All of the actors are adults, with Peter being a twiggy middle-aged man. As the play is framed as Wendy’s recollection of childhood, this works, including pointing to the arrested development of Peter Pan. Also, in a theater, you’d be far enough away to be able to de-age them mentally. On the pro shot, though, you can clearly see the sweat pouring off of Peter’s face.
What didn’t work for me—at all—was Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell is normally a reflection of light, and her voice is chimes. In this, Tinkerbell is played by an Indian man speaking, I don’t know, a kind of Eastern European gibberish? It’s kind of super yikes. Like the initial gag of Tinkerbell appearing is funny, but then you’re subjected to a whole lot of cringey Borat-like fake dialogue. Having Tinkerbell played by a man also makes Tink’s insane jealousy of Wendy…weird? I’m not saying it’s great that in the original the only three female characters are all obsessed with Peter and jealous of each other. I’m just saying this doesn’t resolve that, just makes it confusing.
The music was AWFUL.
In conclusion, this is still very much a piece of children’s media. I’d certainly go to this version before the Disney film, but less because this is good than because the Disney film is disqualifyingly racist.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Oliver Twist
I saw this and was like—who needs a new adaptation of Oliver Twist? There’s already a very famous musical.
But—this is a production by Ramps on the Moon, which is a collaborative partnership dedicated to “normalising the presence of D/deaf and disabled people both on and off stage.” Therefore, this Oliver Twist reimagines the story with Oliver being born deaf.
This works so well it’s almost shocking it’s not the original story. In the original, Oliver is a bit of an object the story happens to. Here he has even less agency—born deaf, he’s raised by people who yell at him to read their lips then hit him when he “pretends” not to understand. The very first person to teach him sign language is the Artful Dodger. Fagin is a hard-of-hearing woman in this production, and her whole crew is disabled. It’s clear the Artful Dodger picked up Oliver because a deaf orphan makes a good beggar, but it makes the exploitation and abuse of that situation even more poignant since they are the only people in the whole play who accept Oliver for who he is and use sign language with him. When he is later taken in by a rich family, the father binds his hands together to keep him from signing and “force” him to learn speech. This reflects very real attitudes towards the Deaf and towards sign language at the time.
At the end of the play, the actors say, “Our hero is safe and happy. But what about all of us?” It makes sense for a book that was bald advocacy at the time to remain bald advocacy in a modern production. This is in its way more true to the original than the jarring dissonance of the all-singing all-dancing misery porn of Oliver! the musical.
The production itself has a screen that captions every spoken line. There is also usually a chorus that is both speaking and signing everything that happens. They also incorporate audio description, to make the production accessible to visually and hearing impaired audience members. It’s kind of genius. The only drawback is the pro shot usually doesn’t show the whole stage, so doesn’t show the screen, but in all such cases spoken lines are captioned.
I am super interested in the work of Ramps on the Moon—I can see from their website they continue to do productions. This is the only one I can find that’s available for viewing in the US, though.
The problem is—it’s Oliver Twist. It’s just endlessly fucking grim. It’s abuse to abuse to abuse. So everything they did with the production was genius, but in the end it’s not exactly a fun watch.
Faith, Hope and Charity
I did not expect to be interested by this. I put it on as background while doing some work, then ended up focusing on it anyway.
This is by the same playwright as Love (reviewed here), which I did not much like. Faith, Hope and Charity is about a community center/soup kitchen. Endless rounds of funding cuts have put them in a precarious position—the roof leaks, and the building is in danger of being sold and torn down. The play is a portrait of the various lives that intersect there, people who are barely holding on with the little they have, but for whom the community center is one of the last things keeping them together.
The main storyline is around a mother who has lost custody of her daughter. You don’t find out exactly why, though there are hints about an abusive boyfriend that she has since cut out of her life. She’s being wrung through the child protective system—eventually getting to the point where she can only regain custody if she gets mental health care. But the waitlist for mental health care is more than a year. So the courts decide to terminate her parental rights and put her daughter up for adoption. This is a woman we see be impulsive and have bad coping skills, but also someone who’s trapped by a system that won’t let her get her feet back under her. This culminates in her thinking about kidnapping her daughter. It’s a terrible idea—it will make everything worse, land her in jail—but then at least her daughter will know her mother loves her.
Another throughline in the play is an ex-con who runs a choir out of the community center. At one point, rains flood the center, destroying all the food. People show up and stay anyway, because even if they’re hungry, they still want to go to choir rehearsal. This leads to a scene where they sing “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals—badly—that had me absolutely bawling. Because it’s true that everyone needs things beyond food and shelter to get through every day.
This play is a clear piece of awareness raising and advocacy. Unlike Home or Love, though, I didn’t feel like I was being preached to, but instead being told a story with deeply empathetic characters.
The UK’s poverty situation is different than the US’s, but the same austerity and bureaucracies are in play that keep people in endless struggles they can’t overcome. I don’t know how effective a play is at leading to actual political action, but I can only hope.
No Man’s Land
I saw this production on Broadway (with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan) and HATED it. Primarily because I was not prepared for it. On a second go, I can appreciate the masterful performances and incredible chemistry of the leads without trying to figure out what is going on. Cause the answer is—there is no story. There are no characters. People say things, but they don’t connect logically. I’m not going to summarize this, because there isn’t a summary. You’ll see reviews that have a one sentence summary, but those are always…not really…?
I watched this with S, who enjoyed it more than I did. She was arguing that you could make a coherent linear story out of it—but only by assuming that some of the characters were lying for most of the play with no motivation to do so or that a lot of the dialogue is because of dementia. I’d argue that if an interpretation of a work requires you to think everyone’s lying for no reason all the time you can’t really argue that that is the only way to interpret the work. It’s *a* way, sure, but not the only way.
To me, I prefer to think of this differently. When I was trying to be an actor as a kid (I’m terrible at it—gave it up), I remember being told that I had to play the character as if they’d gone somewhere and done something while they were offstage. That is, an actor’s job is to embody a character as a full person with a full life we’re only seeing part of.
That is not true in No Man’s Land.
In No Man’s Land, these characters only exist in what they are doing currently on stage. There is no sense that they are people with lives beyond this. At the beginning of the play, you wonder what series of events have led to this moment, then you realize—none. Nothing. There’s no beginning before the curtain raises.
That being said, the play is full of brilliant bits of dialogue and monologue. I’ve seen excerpts from this that play as if you’re watching a Noel Coward. But in context—those pieces have no real impact on anything that happens around them. It’s all pieces. No whole.
Which makes the enjoyment, then, that the play definitely has themes and things it’s about, and the characters have continuity of self even while they have no continuity of biographical detail.
I mean. It’s Pinter. And it’s probably the best you’re going to see it played. But how you feel about this production is going to be how you feel about Pinter.
Peter Pan
Peter Pan was initially a play—the book came later. This production takes that original and updates a bit. Some of the updates work excellently, and some fell pretty flat for me.
Normally in Peter Pan, Captain Hook is played by the same actor who plays Mr. Darling. In this production, Captain Hook is played by Mrs. Darling. This works so excellently well it’s amazing it wasn’t the original vision. The whole play is about mothers, so re-envisioning Captain Hook as the bad mother to Wendy’s good mother works very well. The actor also just chews aaaaall the scenery, which is the way this role should be.
This production also attempts to resolve the problem of Tiger Lily. In this version, she is the leader of a group of wolves. There’s no Native American anything. If I’d never seen it before, that would deal with it pretty well. But knowing the history of the character, there’s still a little eeeehhhhhhh… So you’ve turned an awful Native American stereotype into a kind of savage, feral leader of wild animals? I mean, it’s better, but…..
The rest of the changes are more aesthetic. The stage is kept very bare, with the settings made out of makeshift objects, the way a child constructs a world of imagination. The flying mechanisms are not hidden, but clearly invisible, including being able to see the people on belay climbing ladders on the side of the stage. Peter even says you need “fairy strings” to fly, pointing to the rigging. All of the actors are adults, with Peter being a twiggy middle-aged man. As the play is framed as Wendy’s recollection of childhood, this works, including pointing to the arrested development of Peter Pan. Also, in a theater, you’d be far enough away to be able to de-age them mentally. On the pro shot, though, you can clearly see the sweat pouring off of Peter’s face.
What didn’t work for me—at all—was Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell is normally a reflection of light, and her voice is chimes. In this, Tinkerbell is played by an Indian man speaking, I don’t know, a kind of Eastern European gibberish? It’s kind of super yikes. Like the initial gag of Tinkerbell appearing is funny, but then you’re subjected to a whole lot of cringey Borat-like fake dialogue. Having Tinkerbell played by a man also makes Tink’s insane jealousy of Wendy…weird? I’m not saying it’s great that in the original the only three female characters are all obsessed with Peter and jealous of each other. I’m just saying this doesn’t resolve that, just makes it confusing.
The music was AWFUL.
In conclusion, this is still very much a piece of children’s media. I’d certainly go to this version before the Disney film, but less because this is good than because the Disney film is disqualifyingly racist.