Can someone who has seen it comment on the staging? I thought thsi was just to be a concert performance, and I pictured them standing at music stands with scripts. Apparently that is not the case. Is it a full production? Is there scenery? Costumes? Thanks for any info.
No, it is almost fully staged. Costumes, wigs, everyone is off-book. There are scenic elements but no scene changes. Beyond that, though, it is really very close to being fully staged.
"What are the script adaptations? Just cuts, or rewrites? I always wondered about this one- it seems as the years go by the "Billy isn't abusive, just misunderstood" plot rings hollower and hollower."
Hytner's staging certainly got away with it, when I saw it. I think even with the original script,if you perceive the message to be "Billy isn't abusive justmisundeerstood" you are seeing a terrible production. Yes the original script is uncomfortable to play, particularly as time goes by (though I suspect it always was--then again the 60s had a pop hit called He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss, so who knows,) but still I don't think there ever was a defence implied that "Hey Billy isn't abusive, he's just misunderstood".
But I'm also curious about the "adaptation"for this.
I didn't mean that Billy WAS misunderstood, more that he is perceived as such by the characters in the play. Billy is an inarticulate, immature man who resorts to brute force when nothing else can solve his problems. That sort of character wasn't as immediately demonized in the forties and fifties as it is today.
Perhaps the trouble is simply that Billy's "redemption," in which he cannot entirely overcome his tendency to use his fists instead of his heart, is played gradually as that- a redemption. The fact that he opens up and speaks words of love from his heart doesn't quite seem to make up for, or redeem, the fact that he occasionally beat his wife and came very close to beating his daughter- as a ghost, no less. It seems that the show knows Billy has a tragic flaw, but does not recognize what that flaw is. Perhaps it was simply "of its time," but as the flap over "Edwin Drood" showed (and in the guise of farce, at that), sometimes the change in sensibilities over time makes it harder to stomach certain relics and attitudes of the past, even when one dismisses it as "a different time."
I walked up to the Box Office at 1pm and got a single orchestra for tonight for $25 with my very old student ID. I had called this morning and spoke with someone who said they were selling them. Worth giving a call and stopping by. I couldn't be more excited to see it tonight!
Fell down a youtube rabbit hole in anticipation of the concert and I found this montage from the Lincoln Center Theater revival. So many great memories of that production, can't wait to create some new ones tonight!
Just called about a ticket for a friend about an hour ago, got a great discount orchestra seat! The woman at the box office was super helpful and had tons of info about all the various discounts/rush prices, so if you're confused or pondering, I suggest just giving them a call.
This sounds like a magnificent production. However, the memory of the brilliant Goodspeed production is far too fresh in my mind to see this one. (I saw it several times)
Tenorboyo, it's scheduled for April 26, though different PBS stations tend to broadcast it on different dates--but should be that week. Unfortunately often when they do full shows, they don't allow viewing of them online, but this may be an exception since more and more of thei recent shows are available that way.
Darque--I see your point, but, while I agree with it more nowthat you've explained it, I don't fully. I'm not sure the characters do see him as misunderstood--even Julie, and if he weren't dead but really alive in the ending when Julie says her lines, I'm not sure she would, well say those lines. But that's problematic I guess so--and given the time, maybe she would've. (I'm arguing in circles.)
I do think the Hytner staging managed to subtly get around this, however, so it's not impossible to do. (My only real complaint with that staging is cutting Highest Judge of All--I know it was done "in one" originally and is often cut, and perhaps some feel makes Billy too sympathetic as well--though I also know many simply dislike the song.)
The movie of course manages to make this worse--simply by sentimentalizing the story (even with small things, like opening in Heaven and doing it as a flashback, or, due to the movie code, making Billy's death an accident instead of a suicide,) so the film, which some people take as *being* Carousel does the work no favours.
Maybe they can just hire Douglas Carter Beane to rewrite it--or simply restore the original ending of Liliom and have Billy go to Hell at the end. :P
Seems like NYTimes review is not exactly a big fat rave since he had a reservation about Gunn's performance:
"Mr. Gunn seems to me a more natural Billy Budd — the doomed innocent in the Benjamin Britten opera from the Herman Melville novel — than a Billy Bigelow. Try though he does to act the sullen tough, he cannot quite keep his beaming wholesomeness in check (even wearing a black leather vest). The measure of any Billy Bigelow must be taken in the celebrated “Soliloquy,” and while Mr. Gunn sings it with impressive musical authority, I found his interpretation lacking in emotional dynamics. It felt studied instead of spontaneous, so we are not drawn into Billy’s conflicts as fully as we might be. Oddly — and fortunately — the ferocity that was missing here was in full display in Billy’s second-act solo, “The Highest Judge of All,” in which the now-dead Billy demands in the hereafter the chance he feels he was never granted in life."
...and if it should be revived, please hire a more efficient and inventive choreographer than Warren Carlyle ! He's been overrated and overused. He's clearly out of his league with Ballet dancers such as Tiler Peck And Robert Fairchild. The dances need to be both stunning and dramatically effective. Carlyle is all wrong !
"and the excellent John Cullum, in the dual roles of the Starkeeper and Dr. Seldon, who presides over the high school graduation of Julie and Billy’s daughter, Louise (played by the thoroughly enchanting Tiler Peck, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet).
Paired opposite Robert Fairchild, another terrific principal dancer from the same company, Ms. Peck all but stops the show with her radiant performance in the second-act ballet, choreographed skillfully if somewhat generically by Warren Carlyle."
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Posted: 2/28/13 at 11:26am