Oxford, London, Stratford: Theatre in 2008

So, I do realize that this post is more than two years too late.  But better late than never, right?  So here is a look at the shows I saw the last time I was in Oxford, partially recovered from an unpublished post, and partially written looking back from the present.  I have to say, I may have only been here for a semester, but I saw some fantastic theatre. 

I went to England about a week early, to have some time to hang out with Kohleun before school started. We spent some time in Scotland (in a B&B on the coast -- so beautiful), a couple of days in Carlisle with one of my best friends and her family, and then our last day in London. We walked around in Leicester Sq., ate lunch in front of St. Paul's (and waited for my migraine to go away), took a double-decker bus past parliament and Big Ben, visited the Tate Modern, took pictures in front of Shakespeare's Globe, and ate in a pub. Then we did what everyone must do when they visit London: we went to a show!
 
Specifically, we went to see Chicago. It seemed like an appropriate choice for a girls' night out, and all our other picks were a bit out of our price range. Although the storyline isn't my favorite, it had great dancing (better and more often than the film -- with the exception of Billy's role [after all, how can you beat Richard Gere tap dancing?]), and the woman who played Zelma was great. We also enjoyed Roxie's: "Think big Roxie! I'll have lots of boys!" (maybe it was one of those moments that you had to be there for . . . ).

Then, when Mommy came to visit, we went to see Wicked. I'd seen it once before, with a good friend in the States, but I really wanted to share it with her. It's a great show. Everything a musical should be. =)

Then, my amazingly talented older brother secured us seats to the sold-out production of Ivanov, with Kenneth Branagh! It was amazing. Definitely one of my life dreams fulfilled. I've wanted to see Branagh live since I first saw Much Ado About Nothing when I was nine.

That weekend, Jordan, Marisa, and I went to see Blood Brothers. Jordan and I had seen it before, in London during his senior year of high school, but it's one of our favorite shows, so we were really excited about seeing it again, and sharing it with Marisa. It's an incredible combination of music, story, and acting, and is known for reaping standing ovations -- every single night.

 
That next weekend my dad was in town, and we took a chance on a show neither of us had ever seen (or really heard about): The Lady in Black.  Turned out to be one of the most incredible pieces of acting (and remarkable shows) I've ever seen.  The crazy thing about the play is that it's meant to be scary . . . and it is.  I'm pretty sure I even remember people screaming.  Yet there are only two actors and a few boxes on stage.  Everything else (other than a few well-placed light and sound ques) is pretty much in your head.  An incredible exploration of the limits (or non-limits) of the medium.  Yes, you're constantly pulled back to the realization that you're sitting in a theatre seat, watching an empty stage with a room full of other people, but the remarkable thing is that there are moments in which you forget.

I saw The Last Five Years (which I've written about elsewhere) in Oxford with some friends, and Zorro by myself in London to celebrate my first completed tutorial.

And then there was Stratford.

 
During the first few weeks of our program, a visiting lecturer talked to us about Shakespeare.  An expert in her field, who had talked and laughed with the likes of Sir Ian McKellen, she informed us that Shakespearean history was being made at that very moment: the Hamlet of our generation was being performed in Stratford-upon-Avon.  She said it was the performance future students of Shakespeare (actors and academics alike) would study, and that whether we had to beg, borrow, or steal, we had to get ourselves there.
 

Easier said than done.  
 
Needless to say, it had been sold out for months, and without my brother's awesome eBay skills we were stranded . . . almost.  Luckily for us, the RSC believes in student tickets, and they reserve ten, priced at five pounds each, that can only be bought on the day of the show.  So we did what any committed fans would do, we jumped on a bus down to Stratford, pretended to be hobos in the RSC courtyard, spent the night shivering in the rain, and secured our tickets bright and early the next morning.

It was incredible.  The show, and the experience.  There was a matinee of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the same day, so we went to that too (also for five pounds).  Never my favorite Shakespeare, it was nonetheless excellently executed, and since the RSC is an ensemble, it was fascinating to see the actors perform such different roles.

Hamlet itself was nothing to look at.  No spectacle (other than a cracking mirror), on a nearly empty stage.  Which simply highlighted the fact that the acting was phenomenal.  I have never been to a show (especially a Shakespeare) where there was so little confusion over language.  Every line was pristinely clear, and not because I'm overly familiar with Hamlet (I'm not), but because the actors connected every line so irrevocably to intention and thought.

And who were these actors?  Only the incredible Patrick Stuart and incomparable David Tennant (who, I have to admit, I had never heard of before the play, but I quickly learned to laud his wonders, and will be seeing him in Much Ado About Nothing this summer with the fantastic Sara Kelm).

All-in-all, nine shows in fourteen weeks -- not bad for a semester in which I also wrote over 34,000 words and read who knows how many pages of Greek tragedies, modernist novels, and secondary criticism.  It makes my current achievements look rather half-hearted.

Sweeney Todd [or the mystery of theatre]

Theatre is a strange, mystical, and unquantitative experience.

No matter how confidant I feel in my knowledge of the difference between good theatre and bad, there is always an elusive element -- something that avoids description and categorization.  That aloof presence that my high school drama class so hautighly rejected in their disdain for viewpoints -- a tangible energy that radiates from the actors to the audience and back, forming undeniable connections.

Case in point: I went to see Sweeney Todd at Pembroke College on Wednesday night, and by the end of the first fifteen minutes I was so disheartened that I contemplated walking out.  And I never walk out -- not from theatre, and not from something I've paid for.

What you have to understand about Oxford theatre is that -- while I'm constantly surprised by its level of excellence -- it is a product of hasty craftsmanship.  This is not George Fox, where I spent my undergrad, and where theatre is taken seriously as a holistic experience -- where props, costumes, and stage (not to mention sound and lights) are all utilized as aspects of storytelling.  As intrinsically connected to the development of meaning and theme.

Oxford theatre, thrown together in a matter of weeks, with no supervising faculty, no costume shop, no prop teams, and no stage to be carefully converted, doesn't have the time or the means to take the visual aspect of theatre seriously.  And so it relies, heavily, on the acting.  On the ability of the performers to transcend the tacky props and problematic costumes and transport the audience into a world of the imagination.  And, perhaps surprisingly, they succeed much more than they fail (I wonder sometimes if it this heavy reliance on the quality of acting that has led Oxford and Cambridge to produce some of Britain's greatest performers).

The problem with Sweeney Todd, performed in the college's dining hall, on a cluttered makeshift stage, was that neither the acting, nor the singing, were compelling (though I have to admit that the lighting was surprisingly excellent).  And without that entry into the world of the musical, we were just a bunch of random people sitting on uncomfortable chairs in a glorified dining room listening to bad music.  And I decided that I had neither the time, nor the energy, to make that worthwhile.

But no matter how much you aren't enjoying a show, you can't just get up and walk out in the midst of performance.  I have far too much respect for the hard work of actors and director to even contemplate it.  So I waited for intermission to make my escape palatable.

And that was when that strange, mystical aspect of theatre kicked in.  

 
Did the acting improve?  Probably.  The actors warmed up to each other and to us, and allowed themselves to actually inhabit the characters (and relationships) they were creating.  Did the singing improve?  Possibly.  Though certainly not on the part of Anthony and Johanna (the young sailor [i.e. stalker] and his love).  But whatever it was that happened between those first fifteen minutes, the intermission (when I didn't walk out), and the curtain call -- which left me energized, mesmerized, and (somewhat) shaken -- was the core of what makes theatre so mysteriously and indefinably wonderful.  And so very difficult to describe.

Spring Awakening

One of the amazing things about Oxford is the theatre.  With 38 colleges, six private halls, and two professional theatres in the city, there is never a week (or day) without more theatre happening than I (or anyone else) can possibly fit into their schedules.  One of my biggest regrets about last term was that I let this amazing opportunity pass me by, and only went to a grand total of one play.  And that one wasn't even that great.  I've been trying to rectify this failure by making a conscientious effort to see theatre this term, aiming for one show a week.  While I haven't completely succeeded, I have quadrupled my show-numbers from last term, and it's only the end of sixth week.

Today I went to Spring Awakening, and while not my favorite of the shows I've seen this term, it was definitely interesting.  A musical set in 19th-century Germany, it was advertised as a kind of period Rent -- a coming-of-age story about sex and death and loss of innocence.  As the show was played, however, it was considerably more innocent than Rent, and I think that innocence would have clung on even with traditional staging (which involves considerable nudity).

The thing about Rent is that it's a play about despair and hope -- the search for meaning among individuals who have lost faith in society, and long for something, anything, that can give significance back to life.

Spring Awakening, on the other hand, is a story about "purple summers" -- the innocence of childhood, and the (unthinking, unintentional?) cruelty/stupidity of those (in this case adults/parents) who have the power to crush their dreams.  Yes there is sex, and maybe even rebellion, but it is still, in many ways, very innocent -- the uncertain attempts of young adults to find their way forward into a world that no one has been willing to explain.  When the main girl gets pregnant, she honestly doesn't know what she's done.  Despite her persistent questioning at the beginning of the play, her mother refuses to tell her the "facts of life," leaving Wendla in a place, by the end, where all she can do is demand, "Why didn't you tell me the whole truth?"

But an unplanned, unexpected pregnancy is not the tragedy of the play.  It's the way that optimistic hope is crushed, consistently, irrevocably, by "the real world" of the adult community -- a community that can't bend it's rules, whether those involve only allowing 60 students to advance (no matter how hard the 61st has worked to pass) or the moral imperative that declares a young girl evil and sinful if she is carrying life outside of marriage, regardless of the circumstances.  It is these rules that refuse to allow Wendla and Melchior to have a future, even though they want one, and that leaves the children wounded and hurting by the play's end -- not looking forward to the uncontained potential of the future, as they should be, but aching from the past and dreading a world that seems to offer nothing but bitterness and closed doors.     

However, despite the interesting themes and incredible acting on the part of Melchior (a good friend of one of my lovely college-mates, who also wrote a critique of the show, which can be looked at over here), the play itself was flawed.  Not quite what a musical should be.  To be honest, it reminded me too much of Glee, where songs are sung because they're pretty (or perhaps reference a relevant theme) rather than as an effortless continuation of the narrative or outflowing of a character's emotional state (or soul).  The music was nice-sounding, but out-of-place for a small town in the 1800s (as was the set and costume design), and therefore jarring.  But even if this discontinuity is ignored, the music was still hard to follow, and definitely didn't tell a story -- not in the same way that the dialogue did.

What annoyed me most, though, was the way in which thematic elements were thrown in even though they had no grounding in the actual narrative.  The parts of the play that worked were the stories: the times when we saw concrete pain and abuse in the lives of characters we knew and cared about.  When that theme of abuse (which was clearly what the writer was going for, and hitting us over the heads with) was simply thrown in for the heck of it, without relevance to actual characters (and sometimes actually contradicting information we knew about them) it just became too much.  You don't add a song about sexual abuse for the heck of it.  It has to matter.  And it didn't.  Not to the story, and not to our understanding of the characters (who were actually, for all I could tell, dealing with the issue of physical abuse, not molestation). 

But perhaps part of it was the way the play was performed.  The very innocence of it.  Because there are definitely hints of a darker interpretation.  Not simply kids being abused by "the system," but the ambiguity of a violence that is contained both within the imposed innocence and within the imposed awakening.  In response to learning that her friend is beaten, Wendla demands that Melchior hit her, so she can know what it feels like.  And he does; and he goes too far.  Later, when they are in the hay-loft, it is far from clear whether Wendla actually wants to have sex.  Although her consistent refusals were downplayed in this performance, leaving the audience to feel that she is unsure, but ultimately convinced, and every-bit the willing partner, there is definitely room for a different interpretation.

Is it possible that the ashes we are left with at the play's end (or the dead leaves, if you will) are as much Melchior's fault as they are the fault of the authority figures who tried to impose an oppressive control?  If so, what has Melchior learned, how has he changed, and what does his promise to remember his friends' dreams really mean?  In this production he doesn't have to change -- not really.  His eyes are opened to horror, and he is certainly less sure and less optimistic, but he can still be single-minded in his righteousness.  He was right, and the world was wrong.  But what if he is as guilty as the lies he hates?  What then?   

Our Melchior didn't face any such questions, and as such, the play itself felt a bit abusive -- like it had violently imposed a viewpoint of the world that I'm not sure I'm wholly willing to accept. 

On a side-note: what's up with creating lighting so dark you can barely see characters' faces for all the shadows?  And a side-side-note: the original Broadway cast included Rachel and Jesse from Glee. 

The Last Five Years: a Musical

Tonight, I went to watch the closing performance of The Last Five Years at Keble College. I had heard the music before, but never seen the show. So good. So powerful. So heartbreakingly tragic.

A two person musical, it's the story of the characters' marriage, told forward from the moment they meet (by Jamie), and backwards from the moment it ends (by Cathi). They sing together only once, at the very middle, when they decide to spend forever together.

Though heartwrenching, I actually find the show incredibly hopeful. Their love, and joy in each other, is so palpable. So real. And though it is SO painful to watch them reach out, and draw back, and fail over and over again to truly connect, the potential for reconciliation is potently present. And even though they fail to ultimately save their marriage, the play is in no way a testimony to the inevitability of that failure. Nor is it a trivializing of heartbreak, or a cheapening of love.

This particular rendition was performed in a tiny black box theatre, and we had incredible seats (front row of a balcony that was maybe 10ft off the ground). The actors were great. So full of energy. They drew you in and became the characters -- melding their reality with your own. Their vocals struggled a bit (at times), but they were so real that it was hard to mind. We were also right next to the musicians, who were great, but tended to drown them out a little.

Overall, such a full experience. And I can't get it out of my head. How, oh how, do I concentrate on my Aristotle, Oedipus, and Bacchai essay?

And Keble, like all colleges at Oxford, is beautiful behind its stone facade.

Adventuring in London

I took myself on a date yesterday, and went to wander London alone. The Oxford Tube (a popular coach company that runs between Oxford and London, with buses leaving every 10-20 minutes throughout the day) had given out 1 pound vouchers at Freshers Fair (an event that will probably require a post of its own -- basically, a HUGE university club fair). An amazing deal, since tickets are normally about 13 pounds for students. The voucher was about to expire, and I had just finished an amazingly stressful week, so I decided to take a break and explore.

(the V&A courtyard)

As tradition dictates (my own tradition, not necessarily the tradition of humanity at large), I started off at Leicester square (after spending two hours reading Virginia Woolf on the bus) and visited the wonderful half-price ticket stands. Most shows were sold out for the day (I had been hoping to see Rain Man, with Josh Hartnett), so I ended up caving, and getting a ground floor ticket to Zorro -- a new show about (you guessed it!) that amazing hero in the black mask.

I then bought myself some coffee (a significant and necessary component for any adventure), and sat on a bench to enjoy.

Then off to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which had been highly recommended by my brother and sister in law. There I saw real samurai armor (Brendan and Thany -- how cool am I?), and an amazing display of fashion development. I also sat by a fountain in a central courtyard, enjoying the gorgeous architecture of the building, and the strange sensation of solitude.

(the V&A courtyard)

And then on to Zorro. What to even say? The stage was amazing. The lighting magnificent. They obviously had a large budget, and a talented artistic director. Some scenes were exquisitely blocked [blocking refers to position and movement on the stage], and visually stunning. So it had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the acting, singing, and general story line were not very good. Which was hugely unfortunate, given the amazingness of what they were dealing with (how can anyone beat Zorro for style?).

But the dancing! The dancing may have redeemed it regardless. Everything that was true and heartfelt in the entire show was conveyed through the dancing. They weren't just good dancers, they WERE dancers. Movement was in their souls. It was the way they conveyed hate and love and experience and freedom. Dancing was life, and joy, and pain, and reality. It was community and it was power. (And by dancing, I mean that strange and beautiful realm of Spanish dancing, which captured my heart one summer in Minnesota).

I especially loved how dance became synonymous with resistance, especially for the women. They had no power to physically fight injustice, but they could dance. So they did. In one scene, three men are sentenced to death by hanging, and their wives (joined by women from the town) dance their protest, and their pain, beneath the scaffolding. The raw power of this scene, and the wordless vocals used in mourning (reminding me of Beowulf -- hair torn, crying to high heaven), could have made this a phenomenal show. But the creators kept trying to wrestle the script back into a traditional lyric-filled musical format. Which made a bizarre combination of eerie, primal emotion, and broadway-ish cheese.

However, the curtain call was so energetic and passion-filled they had the audience dancing in the aisles. And I was almost tempted to give in, and give them a standing ovation regardless (here's some footage from the experience). Alas, integrity must be upheld.

But the sword-fighting was INTENSE. =)