#7 Attachment - Reviews

When I was in New York, I did manage to get to one Broadway show, Miss Saigon. My reactions to it, and to Kenneth Branagh's (then) latest film, are below. Remember, this is still 1993.

MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS

Call me old and crusty, but when I was in the States, I did finally go to see Miss Saigon – and I was singularly unimpressed. I had good seats, I was in a good mood, and the word “shallow” kept coming to my mind even before the first act was over. As I reflected on the show afterwards, it continued to seem a most appropriate description of the whole event. Everywhere I looked, I fond the show wanting – acting, music, choreography, set, script – there was nothing that had the richness, the depth, the complexity that one looks for, that one hopes for in a “Broadway Musical”.

To start with, the people on stage weren’t so much acting as emoting – with great energy, or sometimes with less energy, but they told us what they were feeling or thinking. They never showed us, they simply told us. There were no subtleties of emotion here, no development of feeling. Passion was always on the surface, love was instantaneous, the decision to commit suicide was made without struggle, and major choices and changes of point of view were made in the course of 14 measures of music.

Music – ah yes, constant. Following the trend of other musicals of the age, very little spoken dialogue. Which is probably just as well, I guess, but the amorphous quality of much of the music makes it difficult for me to specifically remember precisely when or if spoken dialogue intruded. There is lots of singing in Miss Saigon and very little melody.

An interesting aside – during the intermission, a group of young Black men set up a boom box and amplifier outside the theatre on Broadway, and presented a well-rehearsed and enthusiastically performed (and received) dance routine. It was enlightening to watch the crowd in the lobby flock outside to watch this “Intermission Feature.” It may have simply been visitors to New York anxious to experience another facet of life in the Big Apple. But there was more melody, more energy, and more creative choreography going on outside the theatre than in. And the response of the audience – who had to be strongly urged to return for Act II – says something to me about who was being entertained where by whom.

Miss Saigon has been playing for three years, and I guess it is not unexpected that some aspects get a little tired, things get taken a little for granted. On the other hand, one expects more of a Broadway show. For example, the second act opens with a chorus singing as accompaniment to a film strip of children in refugee camps who were fathered by American soldiers during their time in Viet Nam. The sequence opens with several shots explaining what the pictures are – at which poit it is painfully clear that the projector is slightly out of focus. The words were legible, but not clear or distinct – and that tended to characterize the evening. The lyrics (or sung dialogue) are rambling and unfocused. It felt as though, instead of taking the time to carefully craft a thought, a line, an emotion, the authors belong to the “let it all hang out” school, giving us the mundane set to music, music that seems to owe as little to the creative process as did the words.

The scenery was glitzy – lots of lights and glitter – but uninspired. And uninspiring. The choreography was bland, mechanical, and at best, utilitarian. Bob Fosse showed us how creative an old-fashioned “bump and grind” can become in the hands of a master. This was more reminiscent of 42nd Street (the locale, not the musical) than Fosse.

I could go on – but I indulge in this not simply to vent my disappointment in an evening that could more profitably have been spent asleep, but rather to note that this is a highly acclaimed highly popular show. It follows that the increasing pattern of giving the audience material in short segments, catering to short – and shortening – attention spans, Of not challenging the intellect or the emotion. Of not presenting anything that might offend or upset or disturb. And so we end up with superficial emoting masquerading as passion.

And the scariest part is that it seems to work. At least, from the point of view of the mindless masses who plunk down their $75 and line up. People come in droves, tickets are still hard to come by (this was a Thursday night, and the place was completely sold out) and they are booked well in advance. At the end of the evening there were some members of the audience who rose to their feet to give the cast what ought to be the audience’s highest accolade. (OK, some rose to try to beat the rush to the doors. But there were really and truly some who rose to applaud and stayed there. Naturally they were in my row, preventing me from getting out fast.) I console myself by thinking that when you have spent that much money on a ticket, you are reluctant to admit it might have been a dog. But I fear otherwise, that people really liked it. Television on stage.

When I returned to the Mission Bureau where I was staying, I felt I needed something to cleanse my artistic palette, and so I turned on the tv. (I can hear some of you snorting, but wait. Remember, in New York there are something like 60 channels from which to choose, so some things are possible.) And I stumbled across a wonderful PBS (or Arts and Entertainment Channel) show on Cole Porter, filled with examples of his songs and writing. And the contrast was simply breath-taking. Here was writing that compressed emotion or wit or simple observation into pungent lines. Words were shaped, melodic lines and text complemented each other (“Flying so high with some guy in the sky..” – not only a re-enforcing rhyme scheme, but a the words take you up, so to the melodic line rises. Yes!) In short, you had crafted and creative work, real melody and real lyrics. It not only helped refresh my mind, it pointed out even more strongly the lack in what I had seen earlier in the evening.

And later in the same week, I went to see Branagh’s new film. And – surprise, surprise – a thought occurred to me. One thing (out of many – it is a wonderful film, on many levels) that he really got right was the studied correctness, the very studied politeness and courtesy with which people treated one another. Not just serf to noble, but among friends and intimates, there remained a courtesy and a formality that today we find strange. But I suspect – on reflection, something that Jesuits are given to doing – that at least one reason for that was that a much less “civilized” person lived not very far below the surface. The people of Shakespeare’s time were much nearer to a tribal, an elemental, a less inhibited being – again, a sense that Branagh hints at in his opening scenes, and that he captures beautifully with some moments that are downright uncomfortable in the setting of the evening revels, where the Princes woos Hero. There is something more than a little pagan, more than a little wild in the feeling of that scene. And I think that Branagh is here reflecting something about Shakespeare and the people with whom he lived that we forget at our interpretive and artistic peril.

There is a school of thought that wants us to believe that we are all alike. No, even more, they tell us that we are all the same. People of other nations today are really the same as we are, we just speak different languages, and people of different races are all the same, and even people of different ages were really pretty much the same as we are today, lacking only health care, proper dentistry, television and indoor plumbing to make us virtually indistinguishable.

I can understand the emotions that lie beneath these philosophies. We don’t like thing we don’t know; in fact, we usually fear what we don’t know, and historically have a compelling drive to destroy or change what is different, whether an individual or a culture. (Destroy or change – are those different or simply variations of one idea? Change as destruction…hmmm) The sharp edges of culture and history become nicely rounded and we are left with neatly homogenized universe. (Yes, word users, I mean homogenized. Like milk.)

But in my experience, I have seen enough evidence to make me reject that comfortable notion. Other people, by virtue of the very language in which they have learned to think and contact the world, think differently than we do. They see and hear the world differently than we do. I am not here speaking figuratively, they literally see colors and perceive vistas and groups and shapes and movement differently than we do. This, I know, is the stuff of which anthropology is made – but anyone who has not walked along the path that links humanity and anthropology and the arts has yet to explore one of the great and intrinsic connections of our being.

There is an awareness of the primitive that lurks in all of Shakespeare, not very far below the surface, and often rises uncomfortably to a more prominent position. It occupied, I suspect, a similar spot in the day to day routine of Shakespeare’s world, and if we are to be completely honest, it is not that far below much of our own society today. Riots scare us – because we fear for our own lives, occasionally, but on a wider scale, because they show us ourselves out of control, the primitive breaking out. Te mob psychology of sporting events is usually controlled, and the modern stadium today is a masterpiece of crowd control. But when it is not controlled, we have the soccer riots of Europe and Latin America, and the mob violence following major league victories. In the same vein, there is something about the blatant sex shows of New York’s 42nd Street – or wherever urban renewal and big city economics move those shows, for like the prostitution they spawn, they are never wiped out, merely moved – that speaks to an elemental and very basic drive that goes beyond merely sexual arousal. We like order, as a protection. We take comfort in conformity, we cheer when the rule-breaker gets caught. And when he escapes.

The primitive lurks. In us, and even more blatantly around us. And he (or she) makes us very nervous.

That’s one reason – besides the great plots and brilliant use of language – that Shakespeare still “works” with modern audiences. In a way that few authors or playwrights have, he manages to bridge the chasm between civilization and a more primitive age, he taps into the “Amazing Hulk” that is in all of us, to one degree or another, just waiting to be transformed (or released).

And Kenneth Branagh has found this in Shakespeare, and in both his screen offerings to date, has brought that feeling onto the screen most brilliantly. What he does best, of course, is not giving us so much what Shakespeare says (although he has great respect for the words and generally does them proud.) But his most brilliant scenes are translating the moments without words into powerful and moving windows on another time – the flying arrows at Agincourt, the bathing scene in the opening of Much Ado. Our window into a world where people are not just like us, where passion and superstition and death live more openly and honestly, and where politeness and formality are the everyday weapons to keep them in check.

Thank you, Mr. Branagh, both for the view itself and for reminding us that it exists.