19 July 2019 Fried-day

[KathyB]

It feels like the inside of a frying pan outdoors, where it is about 100°F, and inside also, where even with the AC on, it's 32°C on the top floor in my office. It's too hot to work. I just declared that. Thank goodness we don't have humidity.

Happy birthday to Benedict Cumberbatch.

[DiveMilw]

Today was deceptively hot.  I would go out and think "this isn't too bad" and then 5 minutes later be overheated. 

Happy Birthday to my dad, whom I thought I bought a card for a month ago but can't it. 

[scenicdesign71]

Last night (I'm writing this on Saturday morning) I went and saw Moulin Rouge! on the broad way.  Disclaimer: this wretched heat, and the equally wretched glut of Times Square tourists (both outside and in the theatre), may have tainted my experience.

As I emerged afterward I remembered, for the first time in a long time, that one of my initial reactions to the movie back in 2001 had actually been deep irritation.  But Luhrmann's film had started to grow on me by its last act, and subsequent re-viewings further endeared it to me.  (I now own it on Blu Ray, though it's been a few years since I watched it).

My guess is that that change of heart is unlikely to occur with the stage version.  Partly because repeat viewings would be monstrously expensive even if I wanted to see it again, which I don't much.  And partly because of the paucity of imagination that saturates this production: the songlist has changed significantly from the movie -- not that that matters overmuch (though perhaps it should; see below) -- but in every other respect it's a pale exercise in secondhand kitsch.  Luhrmann's exuberantly inane vision has been overtaken by fussy mechanical ingenuity: book, score, staging and design all seemed like bloodless exercises in cramming as many borrowed bits of the movie's style and iconography as possible into the tight confines of a Broadway theatre.  (There have been some cosmetic updates -- perhaps calculated to justify the transfer between media, or to fend off charges of dated-ness, or who knows what -- but they're too arbitrary and ineffectual to be called improvements).  The result is an impressive technical feat, but a frustratingly pointless one.

About that music: there was a mildly interesting article the other day about the logistical morass of securing the rights to all those songs -- in fact, said article was (for reasons that now escape me) what inspired me to finally shell out a rather stupid number of dollars for a ticket.  But while "the producing team saying, 'This is the deal: We're willing to walk away.  Not one song has to make this show'," may indeed be a "badass" negotiating strategy, it also emphasizes the show's dubious position as the jukebox musical of jukebox musicals, with all the clap-along asininity that implies: it's less a story to be told than a puzzle to be solved, punctuated by laugh-pauses for name-that-tune recognition every minute or two.  And while that was, to an extent, true of the movie as well, it struck me as far deadlier onstage, especially after almost doubling the total number of songs/fragments as compared to the film.

The performers, alas, can't do much under these circumstances.  If Kidman, McGregor and Broadbent seemed a bit like 2D animated characters in the film, they're positively bursting with texture and dimension compared to what Olivo, Tveit and Burstein (through no fault of their own) manage here.  Olivo comes off best -- she and Tveit both sound great, at least -- but all three are at a loss to find characters or a story in this laboriously flimsy contraption, so all we see is a trio of seasoned pros going through their bland paces with all the slickness and professionalism they can muster.  And the movie's gallery of colorful supporting characters -- Christian's sidekicks, the villainous Duke, the hard-bitten Nini -- are all here reduced to altogether flavorless chorus-kid roles: stock characters drained of any actual, well, character.

As with the film, the show picks up some narrative and emotional energy in its second half.  But one of the main things that held the movie together -- Luhrmann's spastic, vertiginously swooping, sometimes headache-inducing camera -- is necessarily missing here, and precisely nothing has been found to take its place.  (Brantley's swoony review of the Boston tryout mystifies me utterly:  "captur[ing] the sensibility of a movie-loving movie in a theater lover's language" is exactly what this production fails to do; and I can only wonder whether he was hammered on absinthe when he wrote that "the glamour is still here, but there's a lot more grit.  And we're far more aware of the mortal flesh of the characters" -- which sounds like a great way to approach this material, but couldn't be further from the way it actually has been handled onstage).  While the movie's infatuation with turn-of-the-century (some century or other) artistic "revolution" and idealism -- all that nonsense about Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love -- was always fairly guffaw-inducing, here those totems literally just register as word salad.  However preposterous they sounded in the context of the film, Luhrmann appeared to believe in them rapturously, whereas in the show that Logan, Timbers et al have created from it, those words have lost not only their last vestiges of meaning but also any shred of conviction, no matter how far-fetched.  Indeed, on the evidence of what they've made, I wouldn't swear that the adaptors necessarily liked the film much -- or, if they did, what it was that grabbed them.  Evidently it wasn't the songs (though a handful of them, old and new, come across reasonably well as pure entertainment, divorced from story or indeed any other context).  Perhaps they were simply intrigued by the chance to spend, and/or potentially make, a fuck-ton of money?

About the design: it's clearly very expensive.  Not an inch of space at the Hirschfeld has been left unfilled, though Derek McLane has nevertheless also contrived to make his set strippable-back to an apparently bare stage for certain moments.  So that's... a thing, I guess.  A long-ago colleague of mine, Justin Townsend, keeps the lights as dazzling as can be expected, given the little space left to him amid the profusion of scenery.  Younger or hipper eyes than mine might find Cathy Zuber's costumes excitingly current; I just found them unflattering.

Finally: I do wonder whether this all would have been marginally less exasperating if I had seen it without ever having watched (and come to love, or at least reliably enjoy) the movie.  My best guess is... maybe marginally, but only just.  On the other hand, your mileage may vary: I got a strong sense that I might've been the only person in last night's audience who wasn't having an absolutely splendid time.  And who knows?  On the off-chance that I do ever see it again, maybe my history with the movie will repeat itself and I'll have a miraculously better time myself.

Then again, the film's improvement in subsequent viewings, for me, may be partly attributable to home video: when being asked to celebrate the deliriously dumb collective energy of pop culture, few things kill my buzz faster than having to do so amid an actual public audience of deliriously dumb consumers frantically eager to earn their collective title as the lowest common denominator.  Add to that, on Broadway, the spectacle of said audience skewing far richer, whiter and older than that for which any of this reheated pop culture was originally intended, and my resistance grows grimmer still.  There was always something unhinged about Luhrmann's use of mass-audience, corporate-engineered Top-40 hits to glorify (his notion of) a bohemian subculture, and of Pavlovian popcult cues to exalt nonconformity and free expression.  But when transplanted onto a 21st-century Broadway stage -- at ungodly cost -- as a selfie-ready icon of conspicuous consumption, the even-more-dizzily proliferating layers of unacknowledged irony start to make me feel a little urpy.

[scenicdesign71]

Just an update to note that, amid the avalanche of mostly glowing reviews, it was perversely heartening to see my own reservations about MR! reflected in Vulture's pan.  (As it turns out, I'm not entirely alone in that reassurance:  the review's handful of reader comments all heave a unanimous sigh of relief that SOMEONE else understands their -- our -- immunity to the show's synthetic pleasures).  Ever since reading her perceptive take on Prince of Broadway almost two years ago, Sara Holdren has become one of my go-to reads, theatre-criticism-wise.