Big River, Big Fish
Mar. 28th, 2005 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsBig River
If you're in the area, or if you can get to the area, y'all come on down and get tickets for the signed/sung production of Big River at Ford's Theatre. The regular run is March 18-May 1, although I'll let you in on a secret - they've told the ushers to be ready for a 2-week holdover.
What a fantastic performance!
The stage was ripped from the book, quite literally; there were floating pages of text and line drawings along the back and sides, with characters entering and exiting through the pages. Doubly reinforcing the bookishness, sometimes scenes were changed by literally opening and turning a piece of the set. There were very few props, many of which were grabbed as required out of trap doors in the stage. For those familiar with Scott Wentworth's notion of staging, it was all quite familiar, particularly the sendoff to the intermission. The edge of the raft flipped up to form a page border around Jim and Huck frozen on the raft, with "169" writ large in the upper right corner. Mark Twain came out and admitted that he had gotten to this place and lost his inspiration. "I had to wait three years for my well to fill up again. But you only have to wait long enough to empty yours," he told the audience. Although they redressed the scene in the "page" over the intermission, everyone stayed frozen until Twain kicked off the action by ripping off the 169 to show 170 - and with that turn of the page, the story started up again.
About half the performers were deaf, including Huck, who was played by Christopher B. Corrigan. Corrigan's headshot in the program book was going for the Latino Pimp look, all greased hair and mini moustache; degreased and shaved he was stunningly good looking and moved with a dancer's whole-body grace. Judging from the few times he vocalized (grunts of pain when grabbed or threatened & one yap of sheer exuberance), I'm betting he's been profoundly deaf for life. I'm hoping I see him onstage again, because he rocks.
Now, the last time I saw a production with a deaf actor (Shakespeare Theater of DC's "King Lear"), they worked it into the show. Whenever the Fool couldn't translate for Cordelia, she stared in puzzled concentration at the mouths and hands of those addressing her. Here, though, Huck's narration carries the play and he has several songs. So Twain provided Huck's voice, and no line was drawn between the speaking and singing actors and the deaf ones - almost everybody signed, and whenever a silent actor had a speaking role, someone else provided the voice. Once you got over the disconcerting effect of someone "speaking" downstage right while their voice came from upstage left, you could roll with it. (And in a lovely twist, during the imposter scene it was the speaking actor who got stuck playing the mute uncle, while the deaf one "spoke" with confidence.) Pap was played by two actors acting as one, to the point that when one drank, the other wiped his mouth. It's hard to describe, but onstage it worked.
I'm a soundtrack slut; I've had the original Broadway tape of Big River since it was available, although I've never seen a production until now. (Sometime between then and now the excruciating song "How 'Bout a Hand for the Hog?" quietly disappeared, proving that there is a God.) So sometimes I had some mental expectations that just didn't jibe with what was onstage, particularly the moment in "Waitin' For the Light to Shine" when both singing and orchestra cut off and you're left with the entire cast signing in unison. The critics raved, but I just felt like a rug had been pulled from under me.
On the other hand, the new fusion worked wonderfully for some other songs. There were a lot of two-handed signs in "Muddy Water," for example, a duet between Jim and Huck. By the last verse, each actor was contributing one hand, so that they were signing as a unit. That was incredible.
Also incredible was the handling of some of the music - deaf cast or not, this is still a musical and will live or die on the songs. Michael McElroy (Jim) didn't quite put the strength behind some of his early songs that the music called for, but by "Free at Last," he found his voice. On the other hand, Jeanette Bayardelle (Alice the slave) belted "How Blest We Are" with such power and confidence that the audience couldn't wait until she was finished for her ovation. Little "American Idol" moment there (which put me much in mind of the NY Times article about Broadway "losing its voice" to pop singers, a theory I disagree with and I think was disproven handily yesterday, thank you).
But although today's weather has put "River in the Rain" on infinite loop in my mind and "Waitin' for the Light to Shine" is always an earworm, the song that really raised chills was "The Crossing." Huck and Jim pass a slave ship in the night and listen to the captives sing. On the tape I have, it's a full 4-part chorus doing a slow hymn style: "We are piiiiiiiilgriiiims, on a joooooooourney, crooooooossing toooooooooo the oooooooother siiiiiide..." This production keeps the minor key but has a single singer (Bayardelle again, I think) in chains next to a chained signer, with a much tighter staccato style: "We are pil-grims! On a jour-ney! Cros-sing to! The o-ther side!" What rose the gooseflesh was the punctuation of each phrase - a chain clanking to the stage. Not just swinging against the wood, but being completely dropped, so every few beats it's hammered home EXACTLY what that noise is. Ironically for a deaf production, it was that sound more than any scene that hammered home the powerlessness of slavery, and if you make it through the first verse, the conjunction of that hopeless sound and the hopeful lyrics in the second will get you - "Jesus will *chink*slither*CLANK!* be there to greet me *chink*slither*CLANK!* and take me to *chink*slither*CLANK!* the other side..."
It's redundant but accurate to say the book follows the book fairly closely (I think; it's been a while and I remember the feuding families better than I remember the part with the Royal imposters; the rest is right on, though). So the show begins and ends on exactly the perfect image - Huck stretched out on his back, head on arm, one knee up, puffing contentedly on his corncob pipe in front of the front cover.
Folks, this is well worth the ticket price. Any ticket price.
Big Fish
Big Fish was one of those many movies that I thought "eh, I wanna see that, maybe" that got skipped in the theaters and dumped onto my Netflix list. (I barely go to theaters anymore.) One problem was that I couldn't tell from the previews or the ads or even the reviews what the frick it was about - was ever a movie this poorly advertised?
And the sad thing is, it's such a simple and beautiful story. A pragmatical son has never communicated well with his fanciful father; now that the father is dying and the son's wife is pregnant, the son comes home one last time to try to make a connection and to find out the truth of his father's life.
And what does he find? That the truth is, his father gave magic to all he touched.
It's a sweet, heartbreaking, beautiful movie - I watched it twice and it made me cry both times, especially when the son finally learns to spin one fantastic story as a gesture of love as his father dies... only to watch it almost literally come true at the funeral. A rewatch was definately in order, as there are hundreds of little details that you don't know to look for on the first time around.
It kills me that this gem was overlooked because nobody would give it a fighting chance. Rent this movie, y'all, you'll be glad you did. And I'm going to put it on my next mass video purchase list.
(side note: It is simply not worth running spellcheck on an entry that has words like "piiiiiiigriiiims" in it.)
If you're in the area, or if you can get to the area, y'all come on down and get tickets for the signed/sung production of Big River at Ford's Theatre. The regular run is March 18-May 1, although I'll let you in on a secret - they've told the ushers to be ready for a 2-week holdover.
What a fantastic performance!
The stage was ripped from the book, quite literally; there were floating pages of text and line drawings along the back and sides, with characters entering and exiting through the pages. Doubly reinforcing the bookishness, sometimes scenes were changed by literally opening and turning a piece of the set. There were very few props, many of which were grabbed as required out of trap doors in the stage. For those familiar with Scott Wentworth's notion of staging, it was all quite familiar, particularly the sendoff to the intermission. The edge of the raft flipped up to form a page border around Jim and Huck frozen on the raft, with "169" writ large in the upper right corner. Mark Twain came out and admitted that he had gotten to this place and lost his inspiration. "I had to wait three years for my well to fill up again. But you only have to wait long enough to empty yours," he told the audience. Although they redressed the scene in the "page" over the intermission, everyone stayed frozen until Twain kicked off the action by ripping off the 169 to show 170 - and with that turn of the page, the story started up again.
About half the performers were deaf, including Huck, who was played by Christopher B. Corrigan. Corrigan's headshot in the program book was going for the Latino Pimp look, all greased hair and mini moustache; degreased and shaved he was stunningly good looking and moved with a dancer's whole-body grace. Judging from the few times he vocalized (grunts of pain when grabbed or threatened & one yap of sheer exuberance), I'm betting he's been profoundly deaf for life. I'm hoping I see him onstage again, because he rocks.
Now, the last time I saw a production with a deaf actor (Shakespeare Theater of DC's "King Lear"), they worked it into the show. Whenever the Fool couldn't translate for Cordelia, she stared in puzzled concentration at the mouths and hands of those addressing her. Here, though, Huck's narration carries the play and he has several songs. So Twain provided Huck's voice, and no line was drawn between the speaking and singing actors and the deaf ones - almost everybody signed, and whenever a silent actor had a speaking role, someone else provided the voice. Once you got over the disconcerting effect of someone "speaking" downstage right while their voice came from upstage left, you could roll with it. (And in a lovely twist, during the imposter scene it was the speaking actor who got stuck playing the mute uncle, while the deaf one "spoke" with confidence.) Pap was played by two actors acting as one, to the point that when one drank, the other wiped his mouth. It's hard to describe, but onstage it worked.
I'm a soundtrack slut; I've had the original Broadway tape of Big River since it was available, although I've never seen a production until now. (Sometime between then and now the excruciating song "How 'Bout a Hand for the Hog?" quietly disappeared, proving that there is a God.) So sometimes I had some mental expectations that just didn't jibe with what was onstage, particularly the moment in "Waitin' For the Light to Shine" when both singing and orchestra cut off and you're left with the entire cast signing in unison. The critics raved, but I just felt like a rug had been pulled from under me.
On the other hand, the new fusion worked wonderfully for some other songs. There were a lot of two-handed signs in "Muddy Water," for example, a duet between Jim and Huck. By the last verse, each actor was contributing one hand, so that they were signing as a unit. That was incredible.
Also incredible was the handling of some of the music - deaf cast or not, this is still a musical and will live or die on the songs. Michael McElroy (Jim) didn't quite put the strength behind some of his early songs that the music called for, but by "Free at Last," he found his voice. On the other hand, Jeanette Bayardelle (Alice the slave) belted "How Blest We Are" with such power and confidence that the audience couldn't wait until she was finished for her ovation. Little "American Idol" moment there (which put me much in mind of the NY Times article about Broadway "losing its voice" to pop singers, a theory I disagree with and I think was disproven handily yesterday, thank you).
But although today's weather has put "River in the Rain" on infinite loop in my mind and "Waitin' for the Light to Shine" is always an earworm, the song that really raised chills was "The Crossing." Huck and Jim pass a slave ship in the night and listen to the captives sing. On the tape I have, it's a full 4-part chorus doing a slow hymn style: "We are piiiiiiiilgriiiims, on a joooooooourney, crooooooossing toooooooooo the oooooooother siiiiiide..." This production keeps the minor key but has a single singer (Bayardelle again, I think) in chains next to a chained signer, with a much tighter staccato style: "We are pil-grims! On a jour-ney! Cros-sing to! The o-ther side!" What rose the gooseflesh was the punctuation of each phrase - a chain clanking to the stage. Not just swinging against the wood, but being completely dropped, so every few beats it's hammered home EXACTLY what that noise is. Ironically for a deaf production, it was that sound more than any scene that hammered home the powerlessness of slavery, and if you make it through the first verse, the conjunction of that hopeless sound and the hopeful lyrics in the second will get you - "Jesus will *chink*slither*CLANK!* be there to greet me *chink*slither*CLANK!* and take me to *chink*slither*CLANK!* the other side..."
It's redundant but accurate to say the book follows the book fairly closely (I think; it's been a while and I remember the feuding families better than I remember the part with the Royal imposters; the rest is right on, though). So the show begins and ends on exactly the perfect image - Huck stretched out on his back, head on arm, one knee up, puffing contentedly on his corncob pipe in front of the front cover.
Folks, this is well worth the ticket price. Any ticket price.
Big Fish
Big Fish was one of those many movies that I thought "eh, I wanna see that, maybe" that got skipped in the theaters and dumped onto my Netflix list. (I barely go to theaters anymore.) One problem was that I couldn't tell from the previews or the ads or even the reviews what the frick it was about - was ever a movie this poorly advertised?
And the sad thing is, it's such a simple and beautiful story. A pragmatical son has never communicated well with his fanciful father; now that the father is dying and the son's wife is pregnant, the son comes home one last time to try to make a connection and to find out the truth of his father's life.
And what does he find? That the truth is, his father gave magic to all he touched.
It's a sweet, heartbreaking, beautiful movie - I watched it twice and it made me cry both times, especially when the son finally learns to spin one fantastic story as a gesture of love as his father dies... only to watch it almost literally come true at the funeral. A rewatch was definately in order, as there are hundreds of little details that you don't know to look for on the first time around.
It kills me that this gem was overlooked because nobody would give it a fighting chance. Rent this movie, y'all, you'll be glad you did. And I'm going to put it on my next mass video purchase list.
(side note: It is simply not worth running spellcheck on an entry that has words like "piiiiiiigriiiims" in it.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-28 02:11 pm (UTC)It's on my mental "must own" list.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-28 02:31 pm (UTC)As for Big Fish, I wasn't sure what to expect either, but was incredibly glad I decided to see it in the theatre Just Because It's Tim Burton. And you're right, it really is ultimately simple. Unfortunately, it's also easy to confuse some people with anything but strict chronological order and a bright-line delination between "reality" and "fantasy". The son being apparently one of those people, ironically enough. But I still wonder -- was it the marketing people who were that clueless, or did they just assume the audience would be?
no subject
Date: 2005-03-28 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-28 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-29 02:57 am (UTC)