Given that my husband and I often watch live theatre 3-4 times each month and occasionally even 2 or 3 times within one week, I have to work hard if I want to complete my blog about the latest show before I attend the next one. I usually feel more motivated to blog about shows that I enjoyed over ones that I didn’t. This is probably because I feel more invested in these shows, finding them more interesting and memorable, which provides me with more that I want to write about. Unfortunately, in the past few months, I have watched several shows that I did not particularly relish, and so I have put off discussing them. Now with a bit of gap in my theatre schedule, I decided to write a few paragraphs about my issues with each of them. I usually love musical theatre and especially book musicals with original score and songs. It is rare that I attend such a show that I don’t enjoy. Unfortunately, I recently watched two such musicals back-to-back.
I was tempted to watch
Funny Girl at
Shaw Festival because of the rave reviews it was getting. Since I had never seen this show live before, as a self-proclaimed musical aficionado, I felt obligated to add it to my repertoire. I was further encouraged when I learned that tickets all Shaw shows in September and October were 40% off. Little did I realize that since the show was so popular, mostly sold out, and near the end of its run, it was subject to “surge pricing” which meant that our almost last row tickets cost more than a much better seat earlier in the season, even with the steep discounting.
Based on the life and career of Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice and her ill-fated marriage to charismatic gambler Nick Arnstein, I knew that this 1964 show starring then newcomer Barbra Streisand was old-fashioned and outdated. But I thought we would be watching a version of the 2022 Broadway revival which purportedly tightened up the script by fixing the pacing to focus more on Fanny’s narrative while giving Arnstein more emotional depth. That version also modernized the score, orchestrations and staging, as well as rearranged songs and added the ones from the 1968 movie also starring Streisand including the iconic song “My Man”. This was especially appealing to me given all the press regarding the replacement of Beanie Feldstein with Lea Michele of Glee fame in the starring role.
Unfortunately, Shaw’s version was based on the original musical and felt every bit of its age. I was annoyed by Fanny’s debasement of herself to try to prop up her useless husband and wanted to slap her mother when she blamed Fanny for causing Nick to leave her. I also was not thrilled with Sara Farb’s portrayal of Brice. I found her put-on Jewish accent to be grating. And although she is a good singer, she was not a true belter in the vein Barbra or even Lea. When I got home, I watched a Youtube Video of Lea Michele singing the signature song “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and her delivery was what I was expecting. It confirmed how I felt in the theatre, when I found Farb’s rendition to be lacking in energy and passion.
Whereas Funny Girl was a huge success and mostly sold out throughout its run, based on the performance that we attended of
Karate Kid the Musical, this was definitely not the case. The Princess of Wales theatre was more than half empty and it felt like only the season subscribers who had already prepaid for their tickets showed up. Once the show started, we understood why.
Something felt off about the musical right from the start. Although the major plot points from the movie were all there, somehow the show did not click for me or anyone else in the group that I watched this performance with. The songs were forgettable, the choreography felt clunky and uninspired, and the acting, singing, and dancing performances by the actors felt mediocre. The actor playing Daniel seemed too big and tall to play the bullied underdog, and the villainous Dojo master John Kreese felt over-the-top and cartoonish as he spewed anger and hatred both at Daniel and Mr. Miyagi, and at his own Cobra Kai students. The accent and broken English used by the actor playing Mr.Miyagi sounded fake and almost stereotypically racist to me. Perhaps that is how Pat Morita came across in the movie as well, but somehow, it was more annoying in the musical. Rather than feeling nostalgic about familiar scenes and dialogue from a beloved movie, the story felt tired and once again, had not aged well over the years.
Five ensemble dancers acted as spirits that gave Miyagi, and later on Daniel, their power. It was not clear in the first scene when they appeared whether they were real or not. Then, throughout the show, their presence just felt hokey. At one point, when Miyagi was executing a martial arts move, the 5 spirits spread out and echoed him to accentuate the motion. In my head, I heard the “da-da-da-da” sound of the Six-Million-Dollar Man as he used his bionics. And in the climactic scene when Daniel performs the iconic crane kick, the actor had to be lifted by the spirits to execute the kick. So much for acrobatics and choreography. It felt like the ultimate cop-out.
Have I complained enough? I really wanted to love these two musicals, but sadly, I did not. I am getting tired of remakes of movies or books or other known sources to create new musicals. I crave watching something original that I can appreciate and enjoy on its own merits, rather than comparing it (often not favourably) to the source material.
The most recent show that I could not totally relate to or enjoy while watching it is Ann Marie MacDonald’s 1990 feminist play
Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). To be fair, this is a totally personal bias so this show did not have much of a chance of appealing to me from the start. I typically do not like watching Shakespearean plays since I have trouble understanding their archaic language. Macdonald’s play very successfully mimics the Bard’s style of prose, writing blank verse in “unrhymed iambical pentameter” and using obscure, old-fashioned words that I was not familiar with. While this was an impressive feat that I appreciated intellectually, it hampered my comprehension and enjoyment of this work. I read the synopsis of the play on Wikipedia to give myself a chance and this is what I discerned.
Constance (played by MacDonald herself) is a meek, middle-aged assistant professor at Queens University who is fixated on the premise that the Shakespeare’s plays Romeo and Juliet and Othello were actually comedies written by an anonymous author before the Bard co-opted the works and turned them into tragedies. She has an unrequited crush on her narcissistic boss, professor Claude Night who manipulates her into writing papers which he takes credit for, advancing his own career before stealing her opportunity for a promotion and abandoning her for a younger female student.
Experiencing an existential crisis over his betrayal, Constance figuratively goes down a rabbit hole (or literal wastepaper basket) and ends up in scenes from Othello and then Romeo & Juliet where she interferes with the respective plots at the critical moments that prevent the deaths of Desdemona and Juliet. Freed from their predetermined tragic ends, these two heroines become archetypes who represent different suppressed facets of Constance’s own personality that surface through her interactions with them. While Constance is all about intellect, Desdemona is a fierce, courageous warrior who represents the assertiveness and self-assurance that Constance lacks. The romantic and passionate Juliet represents Constance’s repressed sensuality and desires, giving Constance the confidence to let herself be vulnerable and experience love. By the end of the play, the three sides of Constance’s psyche integrate into a single strong, confident woman, solving the riddle posed to her of how “Two plus One makes One, Not Three”.
This play deals with some ambitiously complex themes that went over my head while I was watching it, mostly because I did could not follow the prose. I therefore could not grasp the underlying messages and missed most of the clever word play. I later found a copy of the play and slowly read the text, looking up the words that I did not recognize and asking AI about plot points that I did not understand. This allowed me to appreciate the work more, but I still don’t think I would enjoy watching this play, even with my newly acquired knowledge. I am sure that those who like Shakespeare would really like this play. Unfortunately, it was not for me.
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