West End diversity: Perception vs. reality

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7/10/19 (Wed)

I’ve previously written about the ethnic diversity in London theater here and here, including my impression that certain ethnicities appear on stage far too often to be blind casting or coincidental. Now there are statistics to back that up. Research by British theater magazine The Stage finds that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) performers account for 38% of musical performers as of April 2019, starkly higher than their 13% ratio of the UK population.

Black performers in particular account for 31.7% of all musical roles (i.e., 85% of the BAME total) despite being only 3% of the UK population. East and South Asians, who significantly outnumber blacks in the general population (7%), account together for only 3.7% of West End musical performers. The percentage for white actors is 62.2% (87.1% of general population) and other ethnicities 2.2%.

So the diversity problem is solved at least for black performers, right? Of course not, you insensitive hick. Continue reading →

Sweat

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  • Sweat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), West End

This searing 2015 work by Lynn Nottage, making its London premiere, is an extraordinarily powerful portrait of the devastation wrought by globalization, represented here by NAFTA, on small-town America. It opens (and closes) wearily with an unnecessary framework of two former friends speaking separately with a parole officer, making me think we were in for a didactic all-talk-no-show show. But it quickly gets into gear once the drama proper gets going and never looks back.

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The Lehman Trilogy

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  • The Lehman Trilogy, West End

From Anatevka to Alabama: by sheer coincidence, my matinee show Fiddler on the Roof ended with European Jews emigrating for America, while the evening show featured European Jewish immigrants arriving in America. The Lehman Trilogy, written by Hebrew-speaking Italian playwright Stefano Massini (adapted and translated by Ben Power), is a phenomenal history of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers over a 150-year period, taking on the history of capitalism in the West and gradual erosion of the titular family’s life as Jews since its immigration from Germany in the 19th century – a continuation of Fiddler in its way. The fictional musical explored the gradual breakdown of tradition in the lives of individual families. This epic drama looks at where that leads.

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Fiddler on the Roof (Trevor Nunn)

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  • Fiddler on the Roof, 6/12/19 (Tues), West End

I had no intention of seeing this show for the umpteenth time, especially so soon after the magnificent Yiddish version on my last New York visit. But I was attracted by the rare Tuesday matinee, and the Trevor Nunn production and this cast had been very well received.

The show is indestructible and works beautifully here as always. But the acting is variable and overall not very Jewish, at least by the Yiddish-theater-inspired standards as conceived originally. Continue reading →

Orpheus Descending

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  • Orpheus Descending

6/9/19 (Sun), London Menier Chocolate Factory

Revival of an infrequently produced and much-rewritten Tennessee Williams play of 1957. A hunky 30-year-old wanderer and troubadour named Val finds his way into a general store run by the hard-minded Lady, a woman trapped in a small-minded Southern town and a loveless marriage. She is haunted by the death of her father, an Italian immigrant, at the hands of racist townsmen twenty years earlier, who set fire to his beloved establishment after he served black customers. Something inside of her having died as well, Lady has remained in the town unemotionally running the store with her callous husband. The husband is now dying of cancer, and Lady, though wary of the young Val, agrees to hire him to help mind the store. His presence reawakens her repressed passion, as things go in these plays, and her feelings are sharpened further by the revelation that it was her husband who led the riot against her father that caused his death. Lady, with a new life literally growing inside her (after an apparent night of fun), asks Val to take her away. The result is not pretty.

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Encores! and… Millie??

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  • Encores! and… Millie??

What is Encores! thinking? New York City Center’s celebrated limited-run concert series of rarely performed Broadway musicals, offering starry casts and an onstage orchestra playing the original orchestrations, is either running low on imagination or falling victim to some serious governance issues. Its three shows for its 27th season next year include two eminently worthy choices in cult musical Mack & Mabel and the Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner curiosity Love Life, along with – wait for it – the 2002 show Thoroughly Modern Millie, a limp adaptation of the limp 1960s film spoof.

What a letdown. Continue reading →

Bitter Wheat

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  • Bitter Wheat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), London West End

O, Mamet, where is thy sting? A show satirizing the Harvey Weinstein affair should be a breeze for the ever-caustic playwright David Mamet, who has had plenty of experience skewering Hollywood on stage (Speed the Plow), page (Bambi vs. Godzilla) and screen (Wag the Dog) and has presumably dealt with Weinstein himself at some point. So what happened?

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Gate of Hell (地獄門)

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  • 地獄門 (Gate of Hell)

5/18/19 (Sat)

I watched Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1953 film after the death of its star Kyo Machiko a few days earlier. This was apparently Japan’s first color film to be distributed worldwide, and it made a huge impression, winning major awards at Cannes, the Oscars and elsewhere. Coming shortly after Rashomon, it cemented Japan’s place on the map of world cinema, a position that was to be further enhanced over the decade to follow. (Some have suggested that the title in Japanese, Jigokumon, was aimed at riding the coattails of Rashomon (mon = gate), but that seems far-fetched.)

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The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

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  • The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

5/6/19 (Mon), Tokyo

Who knew dystopian theater could be so much fun? A rundown tenement somewhere in what looks like pre-war Europe (the creators call their group 1927, so I’ll go with that) becomes increasingly unmanageable, and the deprived children are becoming dangerously restless. A well-meaning mother brings her daughter to the area in the belief that all the kids really need is art classes and pasta sculptures. She gradually gets caught up in reality as the situation worsens and her daughter is kidnapped. The kids go a step too far when they kidnap the mayor’s cat, prompting authorities to turn to, let’s say, chemical means to quell the problem.

What could be a depressingly heavy-handed story is presented in a subversively light-hearted manner that makes its point much more subtly. Continue reading →

“Man problem” at NY Times

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The NY Times has printed yet another theatrical essay bemoaning the male supremacist content of classic Broadway musicals (“The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem”, May 2, 2019). The author, one Amanda Hess, states,

“In 2019, a central obsession of American culture is the reassessment of all of its previous obsessions. We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.”

Really? And who is this we, Tonto? Continue reading →

Le Marie-Vison (毛皮のマリー )

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  • 毛皮のマリー (Le Marie-Vison)

4/2/19 (Tues), Tokyo New National Theatre

This is one of four Tokyo productions in recent months of Terayama Shuji’s classic underground work from the late 1960s. This production stars Miwa Akihiro, the cross-dressing television and singing personality who was the inspiration for the show and its original star back when he was young and cute. He was so impossibly campy in Mishima’s Black Lizard a few years back that I walked out, but given his close association with this role, I figured I’d give him another chance. The direction follows that of the original hippie-era production. The Japanese and French titles (taken from a song popularized by Yves Montand) translate to something like “Marie in Mink”.

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