Sunday, 20 October 2024

[KathyB]

What I did this weekend:
1. Went to a symposium on Saturday morning. It was interesting in some parts and boring in others. This took care of breakfast and lunch.
2. Came home. Took a nap.
3. Went to a hockey game on Saturday evening, which turned out to be both the homecoming game and the game where they raised the championship banner from last season's Frozen Four.  This took care of dinner.
4. Found out Patti LuPone is coming in May with some very inflated ticket prices.
5. Did a load of laundry on Sunday.
6. Ordered a hand mixer that was on my wish list at Amazon, because it was 25% off its normal price.
7. Found two new pairs of underwear that were chewed up. 

[scenicdesign71]

I'm seeing Sunset Blvd. tomorrow night, and have been reading some of the reviews today.  There's a certain sameness: admiration for the flashily stripped-down production, and for Scherzinger's startlingly glamorous Norma, mixed with obligatory disdain for the show itself (as much, one suspects at this point, for the sin of its composer's name and resumé as anything else).  Many assume that director Jamie Lloyd's contemporary flourishes are meant to openly mock the purple material (by out-camping it?), and Green's not sure whether even that is enough to make it watchable ("[This] revival is not, like Cats: The Jellicle Ball this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it's a completely new way of not looking at one"). 

Once again, it's up to Sara Holdren — no fan of ALW, to be sure — to skip the rote Webber-bashing, take his opus more or less on its own terms without much need to pillory it afresh, and write intelligently about what's actually happening onstage at the St. James.  She earns my special affection for perceiving (as so few do, when it comes to this particular mode of tech-enhanced pseudo-austerity) that Lloyd's "seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing as it does millions of dollars".  Her review may ultimately be as mixed as Green's, even on some of the same grounds, but it tastes a bit fresher.

I have no particular love for the show myself (though its fidelity to Wilder's original screenplay gives it the minor distinction of being, by ALW's usual standards, a model of dramatic coherence).  But I look forward to seeing this production — and checking out the Ambassador Lounge, aka David Merrick's former office space, before the show.  Hopefully I'll be able to snap some pics of anything that looks like it might be original (I'm not holding my breath), and particularly of the view out over 44th St.

[DiveMilw]

Bobster saw Sunset Blvd a few days ago and said he liked it; so much so that he would see it again.  (did I use the ; correctly?)

[KathyB]

I want this badly. It's $330.

For some reason (probably user error) I can't insert the picture I want to.

[scenicdesign71]

Greenhouses and solaria and sunrooms always make me think of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady:

[A gnashing sound is heard from the conservatory.]

MRS. HIGGINS

Henry, please don't grind your teeth.

I probably wouldn't pay to see Sunset Blvd. again, but I might revisit it if a free ticket fell into my lap, especially if Scherzinger was on.  She wasn't last night, though in compensation I got to see Mandy Gonzalez instead, who was fantastic (and was reportedly being cheered on by someone named Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Big surprise (not): I think Green and Holdren, between them, pretty well hit all the nails on the head that were worth hitting.  I've seen two other productions of SB onstage: Lonny Price's 2017 B'way revival, with a skeletal unit set, a 40-piece onstage orchestra and Glenn Close reprising her Norma; and a traditional, if mediocre, 2011 staging at the summer theatre where I was designing Sweeney Todd at the time; plus a smattering of YouTube clips of all the major Normas, and one grainy full-length bootleg of Close's 1994 original.  Unfortunately, it's not a show that bears even that much repeat exposure, and after this one I may be all Sunsetted-out.

An observation: "we gave the world new ways to dream" is a great-sounding line, once.  Repeating it with minor variations ad nauseum all night long — including (but by no means limited to) making it both the title and the incessant refrain around which to build an entire song — invites scrutiny of the phrase's near-total lack of meaning; obliged to start supplying my own after its eighty-seventh reiteration, I couldn't help musing that our species has for decades been giddily racing toward extinction on a tide of delusional egomaniacs proffering "new ways to dream".  (By comparison, "I am/she is/was the greatest star of all," sung in a reverently ascending falsetto murmur, is so patently inane to begin with that it only gets uninentionally-funnier with repetition).  Despite its quartet of powerhouse performances and manifest willingness to subvert the material at least occasionally, even this production is stymied by those lines, leaving Ms. Gonzalez and David Thaxton to hammer away at them with numbing solemnity.  While director Jamie Lloyd allows us a few full-throated laughs at Norma's epic narcissism and Max's zombielike devotion, he never quite manages the central project of torpedoing the entire "dream factory" (and the culture at large) from which their respective obsessions arise, nor of denying them the dopey bathos in which ALW's score is singlemindedly determined to soak them.  In retrospect, I wonder whether it mightn't have been more effective to play the whole show as broad parody — on the extremely off-chance that Sir Andrew would have permitted such a thing — with moments of seriousness kept to a rigorously absolute minimum (i.e., brief; underplayed; only when they're least expected; and totaling no more than three, let's say) before yanking the rug out for the "animal... horror of the play's bloody finale," to borrow Holdren's phrase.  (Last night the ending was indeed hauntingly effective, staged — and played, by Gonzalez and Tom Francis — to the gut-churning hilt; but in retrospect, I'm still up in the air as to whether it accomplished much beyond upping the squirm factor a bit for 21st-century sensibilities — or whether that's enough).

We already knew that ALW only really has one approach to the topic of celebrity — slack-jawed fascination — and Lloyd, try as he might, may be unable to entirely resist that stance either.  (To quote Holdren once more, "despite their divergent aesthetics, both director and composer are Lloyds in search of effect.  They want an audience breathing hard, and they trust that feeling hard will follow; thinking hard is a distant third priority").  In any case, playing against this particular text in a sustained manner for two and a half hours would probably be a lot easier said than done; so it may well be that this slick but patchy update is the best we can hope for. 

[KathyB]

I've never seen any production of Sunset Boulevard other than the original movie. I think you've convinced me that it might be worth seeing if somebody else was paying for it. (I'd probably go see anything if someone else was paying--even that production of Hamlet. The worst show I ever saw that somebody else paid for was an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. I know I was prejudiced from the start with that one, but the person I went with didn't like it either.)

[DiveMilw]

I want this badly. It's $330.

For some reason (probably user error) I can't insert the picture I want to.

It reminds me of the Garfield Park Conservatory main building.  Although, now that I pause to think about it, I am not completely sure it has a building which looks like that.  My distant memory of seeing a Chihuly show there says it does but that was decades ago and I might be imagining it.  I love getting older.