Young and Full of Fluff

I am extremely late to this train, but I finally saw Wicked on Broadway, through a work event. (Which also meant it was fantastic seats.) I read the book an age ago, but hadn't watched any version of it.

Wow that is an unfocused mess of a musical, isn't it? There is so much plot happening in every scene--and then you hit "Defying Gravity" or "For Good" and tears are streaming down my face and I'm like, this is the best musical ever written.

Also, wow is that incredibly gay.

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Part Seven
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Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve

I did it! I have watched every single play on NT at Home!* ** *** That is 84 shows, which is more than is on the service now, as some have expired.

( The Crucible )

( Blues for an Alabama Sky )

( Much Ado About Nothing )

( The Corn Is Green )

( Kerry Jackson )

( Hex )

( Henry V )

( Phaedra )

*Until they add a new one.

**There’s another Othello production. I’m not watching it. I’m done with that play.

***I’m also not watching Yerma, a play about a woman going insane after struggling with infertility. That one’s a FUCK NO.

A few weeks ago, I watched Camelot on Broadway. I grew up listening to the original cast recording. Seriously—grew up listening to it. I had tapes with this, My Fair Lady, and Man of La Mancha on them. Aside from being Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet, the Camelot score is dense with word play that I did not understand at the time, so I always have a double understanding—the actual lyrics and what eight-year-old me thought the lyrics were. (My mom once caught my brother and I singing “the musty month of May” and did not correct us. It’s lusty.)

I therefore was going to see the Broadway production no matter what it was, just for a chance to see this on stage. The original musical had a famously bad book (for those not in on the jargon, that means all the dialogue that’s not a song). At one point it was four hours long, what one reviewer called “a Gotterdammerung-esque bladder buster.” Therefore, having a new book was not in itself a bad idea. Having a new book by Aaron Sorkin, though, kind of was.

Last night I rewatched the film. I’d seen this as a kid and hated it. Now rewatching it—it’s okay. If it were an hour shorter (it’s three hours long) and had a different actor as Lancelot (he’s both awful and has a thick Italian accent), I could see really digging it. As it is, it can be enjoyed for the hats alone.

The original musical—or at least the film adaptation by Lerner himself—was flawed. The new version is a train wreck.

(I should preface by saying I know it’s based on Once and Future King which I tried to read and didn’t get past the first part of, so I can’t speak to how either version are as an adaption.)

( Let’s talk about the movie )

( Then there’s the new book by Aaron Sorkin )

Yeah, so that’s Camelot. A show that never really worked and still doesn’t. Um, I liked the sword fighting? Lancelot’s performance of “C’est moi” was fantastic. Maybe there’s a way to write a new book around the existing songs that would be good actually, but I doubt it’s going to get any new treatment again. It took sixty years to come back around to Broadway this time. Sometimes works are just flawed and that’s what it is.

Part 11 (!!!) of my reviews of NT at Home. Very nearly caught up with their upload schedule! I had one left when they added two shows for March. That means this time I got through the Othello production that's been sitting there since the start of the streamer.

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Part Nine
Part Ten

( All of Us )

( Our Generation )

( The Boy with Two Hearts )

( Othello )

( Ugly Lies the Bone )

I've been managing to keep my NT at Home watchlist at about 6-7 plays, which means watching 2-3 a month as they add new shows. Thing is, we're really down to the dregs here.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine

( The Beaux’ Strategem )

( The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage )

( King Lear )

( Romeo and Juliet )

( Antony and Cleopatra )

These are the last of the non-Shakespeare plays on the service (until they add more). Only four plays left! (All of which I already know I don't really like.)

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Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight

( Trouble in Mind )

( “Master Harold”…and the Boys )

( East Is East )

( A Taste of Honey )

Oh my goodness, we're already at part seven of this series. That's 51 plays watched and reviewed!

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six

( Rockets and Blue Lights )

( Young Marx )

( As You Like It )

( Paradise )

( Home )

( 50 Years on Stage )

Another round of reviews for NT at Home!

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Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

( Twelfth Night )

( The Habit of Art )

( Ian McKellan on Stage )

( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof )

( All About Eve )

( Love )

( Top Girls )

And now for the shows that range from forgettable to wretched. Content warning that Deep Blue Sea, Hansard, and Julie all deal directly with suicide. (There are a lot of plays about suicide/with surprise suicide? Why is that?)

Parts one and two of my NT at Home reviews.

( Everyman )

( Comedy of Errors )

( Chewing Gum Dreams )

( The Deep Blue Sea )

( Hansard )

( Julie )

( Julius Caesar )

( Angels in America )

( Treasure Island )

By my count, that leaves me with 14 plays on the service I haven’t watched, ranging from ones I’m looking forward to (another Arthur Miller) to ones I’m pretty much guaranteed to hate (Consent). Wish me luck.

This Saturday, I went to my first live theater since February 2020. I got a KN95 mask and a ticket that turned out to be on the far end of the front row—partly to limit how many people were around me, and partly because if I’m going to pay for the cheap seats, I’d rather be close with an occluded view (for a talky play) than way up in the balcony. (The couple next to me came in and the husband said—these seats are TERRIBLE! My dude. It says obstructed view when you buy the ticket.)

And for that honor, I chose…The Lehman Trilogy.

It’s a three and a half hour, three-actor play about the history of the Lehman family and the founding of Lehman Brothers. Or, if I’m not the target audience of this, I don’t know who is. Seriously—the theater was 90% full, and this has been running since 2018 (pandemic excepted) and I don’t know why other people would go to see it.

I give it a B-, and that’s entirely for saving me the trouble of reading a book about Lehman Bros. I’ve already read a lot of finance history, so learning about how this firm slots in was mildly interesting. And that’s about all the plus side?

Short version: actors doing THE MOST doesn’t necessarily mean it’s GOOD. I mean. I could tell this was hard. But to what effect?

Longer version: There was no theme. Like, why are you telling me about the Lehman family? Closest thing to a theme is that fathers get replaced by sons, and as you age, you become less relevant. Which—this is a family that made its fortune off of SLAVERY and the theme you chose was aging sucks?

It’s a three-act play (two intermissions and you better believe I was out of my seat and into the bathroom like a shot both times) structured around three generations of Lehmans. The first act held together the most, about the original three brothers. But it’s structured like a standard rags-to-riches immigrant story (the woman behind me, at intermission, said, “What a great immigrant story!”). It has montages where their business expands, etc. But—this is their business:

They started as fabric merchants in Montgomery, Alabama. A series of plantation fires devastated the local cotton crop. So they sold the plantation owners the tools and seeds they needed to rebuild for a cut of the cotton. From there, they went on to be cotton brokers, between dozens of slave plantations and northern mills. Basically, they engineered being the economic benefactors of the slave economy without having to own slaves themselves. What an amazing immigrant story!!

The first act ends with the Civil War, yes, but more from a perspective of the remaining two Lehmans not knowing how to function in the new, post-war economy.

Though the play includes the whole slave economy thing, it doesn’t comment on it at all, and the narrative structure makes us empathize with the Lehmans and their success. It being a three-person play only adds to this. There’s barely room to mention people that are not the Lehman brothers, and even as the actors are playing various other characters, because they are mainly playing Lehmans, you are ALWAYS looking at and thinking about Lehmans. This choice—I’m guessing born out of a combination of budget and bravado—entirely erases any other stakeholders from the narrative.

So as it progresses, you learn about them being railroad barons and investors in tobacco, and surviving the 1929 stock market crash by ruthlessly throwing other banks under the bus. And always you are only ever looking at the Lehmans, so there is no consideration at all given to any sort of statement about capitalism and exploitation, even when the narrative metaphor of Lehman Bros. as middle men, just like overseers are middle men between owners and slaves, is RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

Then the last act just sort of…peters out? The last Lehman to be involved in the firm died in 1969. So since the play is about the Lehman family, and the themes are about fathers and sons, they don’t really have anything to say about the eventual collapse of the firm. They gloss over an ENORMOUS amount of history and multiple sea changes in finance and don’t say anything at all about the causes of Lehman Bros. failing in 2008, just sort of skip ahead to it as a conclusion, even though it has no thematic tie to the rest of the work. I mean, it seems so obvious to have some kind of theme of arrogance and folly and the failure of Lehman Bros., but they don’t even hint at that. By the time we got to the death of the last Lehman, I just wanted them to end the play—I’d been sitting for a long time in a restrictive mask, and doing another half hour of extremely abbreviated summary was tiring.

The other main theme of the work was about AMERICA and about how subsequent generations lose their connection to the home country and become AMERICANS. They literally say that a few times about characters—that there’s nothing of Germany in them, they are AMERICAN. There’s a recurring motif of shiva, where the first Lehman to die, they sit shiva for a week (side note—there were enough Jews in Montgomery, AL in 1855 that you could do a proper shiva and not starve to death?), then for three days, then for three minutes.

The problem with this theme is that this play was written by an Italian (originally in Italian and five hours long—woof) and is presented by the National Theatre, with three British actors. I suppose it’s a blessing the whole thing is in third person, cause they just speak with their British accents except for rare occasions when they pop into atrocious American accents.

But to sit in New York City and have three Brits lecture me about what AMERICA is and what NEW YORK is was a bit much.

So that all seems like it should rate less than a B-? But I did enjoy being in a theater again, and with a live audience (the biggest laugh line came when a character said something about mask protests in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic).

When I told a friend about seeing this, she said her reaction on hearing about it was, “Why do we need to talk about these people?” And yeah. Yup.