Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-12-11 08:54 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-12-11 08:54 pm
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Three days of epic win (and one day of epic fail)
Sunday
Student-rushed the matinee of Andrea Chénier at the Opéra Bastille. I was expecting Revolution geekery, Romanticism, pretty pretty tenor show-off arias, and failtastic one-dimensional anti-Jacobin spin on the Terror. Because, um, it's about André Chénier. What I got was Revolution geekery, Romanticism, pretty pretty tenor show-off arias, and an amazing depiction of revolutionary Paris that managed to be balanced and non-failtastic in its anti-Jacobin sentiments. Because instead of the usual "behold the bloodthirsty self-destructive underbelly of your so-called Revolution!" or "the Revolution was hijacked by a bunch of violent paranoid wannabe dictators!" approach, the entire opera was permeated with love for the ideals of the Revolution, for devotion to one's homeland and self-sacrifice and the raising up of everyday people into heroic figures, and on the war and destruction that threatened France on all sides. And the idea was the Terror is not the right solution to these problems, which as these things go is pretty mild. And really the thing that sticks with you is the Romanticism and the sheer pride and adoration of the Revolution.
There were a few libretto problems--the antagonist's motivation isn't sufficiently justified, for example. But overall I would so totally see it again. Gorgeous staging too. The scene that stuck with me the most was "Son la vecchia Madelon," where the call has gone out for donations and volunteers for the army, and an old woman on her deathbed stands up and says that her son was killed in the taking of the Bastille, her grandson was killed at Valmy, and now she's presenting her youngest grandson as a volunteer. It's such an emotional moment, and it would have been written so differently in a more modern work--probably with some emphasis on the Revolution tearing families apart or something, when here, it's presented as a heartrendingly noble action that has to be done because the conscience and the duty of both the grandmother and the kid require it.
Oh yeah, and the tenor singing André Chénier was awesome.
Monday
Went and saw Handel's Messiah at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. OMG so awesome. First of all, I realized when the conductor first came out that I have never before seen a Srs Bsns concert at a major venue conducted by a woman. Which sucks ass now that I think about it, but the lady who conducted this, Emmanuelle Haïm, was awesome.
Chorus: Was tiny (20 people!) and didn't sound like it at ALL. Huge voices, very precise, plenty of dynamic range, and the sopranos blended amazingly considering there were only six of them. Also, half the alto section was made up of counter-tenors.
Camilla Tilling, the soprano, would've been the shining jewel of pretty much any other performance; here, she was just part of the general awesomeness. Nice tone, effortless ornamentation, just all-around beautiful to listen to. The alto parts were sung by a counter-tenor, Matthew White, who did not have any of the reedy/falsetto-y sound you sometimes hear in counter-tenors. Great in the first part; added some ornamentation to the second half of "He Was Despised" so I didn't entirely fall asleep; sounded a little fatigued during "Thou art gone up on high" but no major mishaps. The tenor, John Tessier, wowed us from the very beginning--very bright, powerful voice. And he was hot, which didn't hurt. But it was Christopher Purves, the bass, who was UTTERLY EPIC AND AMAZING and rocked the hell out of "The Trumpet Shall Sound" and was the only soloist to get an ovation right after an aria. Because I am pretty damn sure he managed to stick both an A1 and an A4 into that motherfucking aria, and if he didn't he must've come pretty damn close on both ends. Just--asdlk;jasdf epic.
YouTube has no record of the epicness, alas, but it does have him rocking "Why Do the Nations".
Tuesday
Tuesday was Copenhagen! Did not get a great deal of sleep, as we had to get up at 3:30 to get to the airport, but was okay for most of the day. Copenhagen is lovely and welcoming and I mostly got over my fear of being in a place where I don't speak the language at all. (Well, by the time I left I had learned how to order doner kebab with no sauce and no tomatoes in Danish, but that doesn't count.) We wandered around a lot and fed the ducks and hit up a few museums, but mostly wandered.
And then we saw Les Mis.
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toi_marguerite has an excellent writeup of the show, with pictures, so I'm going to try not to repeat anything she said.
First of all, the sets! This was possibly the first production of Les Mis to do literal sets, different ones, for almost every scene--most regionals take their cue from the London production and have a couple big set pieces and then evocative use of ensemble blocking, lighting, tables and chairs, and a few props for the rest. Not so for the Copenhagen production. Sometimes it was small--a window and doorway for the innkeeper who turns Valjean away in the prologue, a podium for the judge in Who Am I, a bit of wall with a curtained window for Valjean's room when he dies. But a lot of them were quite elaborate: a harbor for Lovely Ladies with ships and ropes in the background and a gangplank for the bouncing excited midshipmen on shore leave to descend; the Thénardiers' inn had a counter and shelves full of bottles; the garden of the Rue Plumet had the gate but also a stone wall and interior details to make it look more like a real garden; the sewers were spectacular and had an actual waterfall. And of course the barricade was HUGE. Like, bigger than the standard production. Like, so big they had to take half of it offstage just to give it room to spin around and show dead Enjolras. And Javert jumps off a stone bridge that looks like it might actually have existed in Paris. (Protip for set designers: Paris is monochromatic. Nice buildings are made of limestone, cheap buildings are lath and plaster. Very little visible wood, almost no brick. Plz to remember this if you want your sets to look like Paris.)
Costumes were not direct knockoffs of the standard production (except the inevitable Enjolras vest), but about the same quality: serviceable but not fabulous. I did like the Lovely Ladies costumes, which managed to convey the ladies' profession by things like shorter skirts, bare arms, and cleavage rather than by "Wild West tavern wench Halloween costume" gaudiness. The stylized look worked for the original, but I liked this better with the more literal sets. Cosette's In My Life dress looked like Disney trying to take on 1830s fashion, but her Every Day dress was brown and looked a lot more period, and her wedding dress somehow managed to be both 1830s and not hideously ugly.
Ensemble work was fab. Imagine what would happen if you took the Broadway revival ensemble (or any other seasoned, improv-happy ensemble starting to get bored with the standard blocking) and told them to have a field day rewriting the blocking and officially enshrining all the things that used to get them yelled at by the stage manager. Interactions and relations between the beggars in ATEOTD, like a family huddling together for comfort and enemies shoving at each other. Rewrites of the usual personalities of the travelers in Master of the House--Traveler #1 comes in with a wife or girlfriend who keeps getting hit on by random guys and is Utterly Scandalized, Thénardier keeps tossing people off of chairs to sit new people down. Random shit in the background, like an old woman stealing cabbages that fell off the runaway cart. Just... someone knew how to use the ensemble. (If I ever finish writing the Lausanne review, you will see that not every director has this talent.)
Musically it was good quality, but I feel like that wasn't the focus. The leads were good but not stunning, and they did use the original orchestrations, thank god. They also restored a lot of cut material that usually is not restored--"It's the same with a tart as it is with a grocer," the full Runaway Cart, "Shoot me now or shoot me later," a slightly abbreviated Drink With Me reprise at the Dawn of Anguish, and the full Sad Oboe Solo of Dead Frenchboys (normally a 'verse' is cut). The trade-off was that the conductor took everything way too fast and it detracted from the timing of some key scenes.
Cast:
Tomas Ambt Kofod (Valjean): He was fine. Nothing wrong with his performance, but nothing standout either. He appears to be either the understudy or the alternate for Flemming Enevold.
Morten Staugaard (Javert): Bears an unfortunate resemblance, both physically and in acting choices, to Timothy Spall. Javert should not remind me of Peter Pettigrew and Beadle Bamford, but when he is portrayed as obsequious and indecisive and almost furtive and the actor looks like Timothy Spall... yeah.
Sanna Johansson (Fantine): Adored her. She had some of the same grimy street-rat look that makes Eponine so endearing to some people, and she just kept getting screwed over and you wanted to give her a hug so badly. She also pulled off the ethereal consumptive look very well, as the production photos show.
Kim Hammelsvang Henrikson (Thénardier): Understudy. Usually plays Creepy Creepy Bamatabois. He was also kind of creepy-looking as Thénardier, but he rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like he was playing everything for laughs, even the more sinister aspects of his character.
Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis (Mme Thénardier): Too lightweight for the role. I don't mean physically, as anyone who's seen Jennifer Butt can tell you, but she was just sort of mean instead of being terrifying.
Maria Lucia Heiberg Rosenberg (Eponine): ARGH NO. Try to imagine Keira Knightley playing Esmeralda from Disney's Hunchback and you have a fairly accurate idea.
(Digression: The reason Eppie-boppers exist is because the musical is set up to make high-school girls identify with Eponine--who is presented as kinda awkward and socially rejected but *~beautiful inside~*--over Cosette--who is presented as the traditionally pretty girl who has nice clothes and normal social graces. Even this flawed premise completely falls through when even the depths of abject poverty cannot prevent Eponine from being as pretty and perfect as the girls you hated in high school.)
Johannes Nymark (Marius): So cute. Like... blond Adam Jacobs minus the nasal voice cute. I was half-expecting him, like Alistair Brammer, to be too lightweight for the role, but he wasn't at all.
Mia Karlsson (Cosette): Lovely! I was kind of feeling the effects of sleep deprivation during A Heart Full of Love, but I do remember her being very sweet and pretty.
John Martin Bengtsson (Enjolras): He was good. He had the "why yes, I will follow you onto the barricade!" charisma. He also had a beard, which would normally have been distracting and OOC, but it was totally a Lord of the Rings beard so we dubbed him Faramir!Enjolras and it worked for the character.
Daniel Bevensee (Grantaire): WTF? He didn't appear to get much characterization--as in, there wasn't much setting him appart from the other students except that he was making sarcastic comments--but what characterization he did get tended toward the psychotic. As in grabbing a pistol out of Enjolras' hand, pressing it against Javert's head, and saying "What's the difference, die a schoolboy, die a policeman, die a spy?" ("Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?")
Emil Jeppesen (Gavroche): Didn't move much outside his blocking, but he had plenty of blocking so it didn't seem too stiff.
Line Lindersson (Little Cosette): She was good! I initially thought they were getting older kids for the little Cosettes, so they could sing and act better, but it turns out she's just a very talented eleven-year-old.
Wednesday
Morning was nice.toi_marguerite did some Kierkegaard fangirling--we visited his grave, then the Copenhagen city museum which has a small exhibit on him.
Afternoon was disaster. We got a late start getting back to the airport, then got on the wrong train out of the city, because the signage was absolute fail. When we realized this we changed trains as soon as we could, got to the airport way too late, fidgeted through the security line, then sprinted through the airport to the terminal... only to see our plane pulling out onto the runway as we got there. Excellent dramatic timing. Scandinavian Airlines refused to let us change our tickets or even give us a discount, so we had to pay extortionate face-value price for a last-minute ticket to Paris. More than twice the original round trip fare. Ugh.
And then I realized I'd left my watch at the security checkpoint and ran around to anywhere that might possibly have it--information desk, lost luggage retrieval, etc. Many phone calls were made by very nice, concerned airport employees, nobody knew where the fuck it was, and eventually I had to exit the secure area, wait in line again, go BACK THROUGH SECURITY, and ask the screeners if they'd found my watch. Which they had, thank God. Even so, if it had gone on fifteen minutes longer I could've missed the SECOND flight as well.
We did get back to Paris though. Just... ugh, I hate airports.
Student-rushed the matinee of Andrea Chénier at the Opéra Bastille. I was expecting Revolution geekery, Romanticism, pretty pretty tenor show-off arias, and failtastic one-dimensional anti-Jacobin spin on the Terror. Because, um, it's about André Chénier. What I got was Revolution geekery, Romanticism, pretty pretty tenor show-off arias, and an amazing depiction of revolutionary Paris that managed to be balanced and non-failtastic in its anti-Jacobin sentiments. Because instead of the usual "behold the bloodthirsty self-destructive underbelly of your so-called Revolution!" or "the Revolution was hijacked by a bunch of violent paranoid wannabe dictators!" approach, the entire opera was permeated with love for the ideals of the Revolution, for devotion to one's homeland and self-sacrifice and the raising up of everyday people into heroic figures, and on the war and destruction that threatened France on all sides. And the idea was the Terror is not the right solution to these problems, which as these things go is pretty mild. And really the thing that sticks with you is the Romanticism and the sheer pride and adoration of the Revolution.
There were a few libretto problems--the antagonist's motivation isn't sufficiently justified, for example. But overall I would so totally see it again. Gorgeous staging too. The scene that stuck with me the most was "Son la vecchia Madelon," where the call has gone out for donations and volunteers for the army, and an old woman on her deathbed stands up and says that her son was killed in the taking of the Bastille, her grandson was killed at Valmy, and now she's presenting her youngest grandson as a volunteer. It's such an emotional moment, and it would have been written so differently in a more modern work--probably with some emphasis on the Revolution tearing families apart or something, when here, it's presented as a heartrendingly noble action that has to be done because the conscience and the duty of both the grandmother and the kid require it.
Oh yeah, and the tenor singing André Chénier was awesome.
Monday
Went and saw Handel's Messiah at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. OMG so awesome. First of all, I realized when the conductor first came out that I have never before seen a Srs Bsns concert at a major venue conducted by a woman. Which sucks ass now that I think about it, but the lady who conducted this, Emmanuelle Haïm, was awesome.
Chorus: Was tiny (20 people!) and didn't sound like it at ALL. Huge voices, very precise, plenty of dynamic range, and the sopranos blended amazingly considering there were only six of them. Also, half the alto section was made up of counter-tenors.
Camilla Tilling, the soprano, would've been the shining jewel of pretty much any other performance; here, she was just part of the general awesomeness. Nice tone, effortless ornamentation, just all-around beautiful to listen to. The alto parts were sung by a counter-tenor, Matthew White, who did not have any of the reedy/falsetto-y sound you sometimes hear in counter-tenors. Great in the first part; added some ornamentation to the second half of "He Was Despised" so I didn't entirely fall asleep; sounded a little fatigued during "Thou art gone up on high" but no major mishaps. The tenor, John Tessier, wowed us from the very beginning--very bright, powerful voice. And he was hot, which didn't hurt. But it was Christopher Purves, the bass, who was UTTERLY EPIC AND AMAZING and rocked the hell out of "The Trumpet Shall Sound" and was the only soloist to get an ovation right after an aria. Because I am pretty damn sure he managed to stick both an A1 and an A4 into that motherfucking aria, and if he didn't he must've come pretty damn close on both ends. Just--asdlk;jasdf epic.
YouTube has no record of the epicness, alas, but it does have him rocking "Why Do the Nations".
Tuesday
Tuesday was Copenhagen! Did not get a great deal of sleep, as we had to get up at 3:30 to get to the airport, but was okay for most of the day. Copenhagen is lovely and welcoming and I mostly got over my fear of being in a place where I don't speak the language at all. (Well, by the time I left I had learned how to order doner kebab with no sauce and no tomatoes in Danish, but that doesn't count.) We wandered around a lot and fed the ducks and hit up a few museums, but mostly wandered.
And then we saw Les Mis.
toi_marguerite has an excellent writeup of the show, with pictures, so I'm going to try not to repeat anything she said.First of all, the sets! This was possibly the first production of Les Mis to do literal sets, different ones, for almost every scene--most regionals take their cue from the London production and have a couple big set pieces and then evocative use of ensemble blocking, lighting, tables and chairs, and a few props for the rest. Not so for the Copenhagen production. Sometimes it was small--a window and doorway for the innkeeper who turns Valjean away in the prologue, a podium for the judge in Who Am I, a bit of wall with a curtained window for Valjean's room when he dies. But a lot of them were quite elaborate: a harbor for Lovely Ladies with ships and ropes in the background and a gangplank for the bouncing excited midshipmen on shore leave to descend; the Thénardiers' inn had a counter and shelves full of bottles; the garden of the Rue Plumet had the gate but also a stone wall and interior details to make it look more like a real garden; the sewers were spectacular and had an actual waterfall. And of course the barricade was HUGE. Like, bigger than the standard production. Like, so big they had to take half of it offstage just to give it room to spin around and show dead Enjolras. And Javert jumps off a stone bridge that looks like it might actually have existed in Paris. (Protip for set designers: Paris is monochromatic. Nice buildings are made of limestone, cheap buildings are lath and plaster. Very little visible wood, almost no brick. Plz to remember this if you want your sets to look like Paris.)
Costumes were not direct knockoffs of the standard production (except the inevitable Enjolras vest), but about the same quality: serviceable but not fabulous. I did like the Lovely Ladies costumes, which managed to convey the ladies' profession by things like shorter skirts, bare arms, and cleavage rather than by "Wild West tavern wench Halloween costume" gaudiness. The stylized look worked for the original, but I liked this better with the more literal sets. Cosette's In My Life dress looked like Disney trying to take on 1830s fashion, but her Every Day dress was brown and looked a lot more period, and her wedding dress somehow managed to be both 1830s and not hideously ugly.
Ensemble work was fab. Imagine what would happen if you took the Broadway revival ensemble (or any other seasoned, improv-happy ensemble starting to get bored with the standard blocking) and told them to have a field day rewriting the blocking and officially enshrining all the things that used to get them yelled at by the stage manager. Interactions and relations between the beggars in ATEOTD, like a family huddling together for comfort and enemies shoving at each other. Rewrites of the usual personalities of the travelers in Master of the House--Traveler #1 comes in with a wife or girlfriend who keeps getting hit on by random guys and is Utterly Scandalized, Thénardier keeps tossing people off of chairs to sit new people down. Random shit in the background, like an old woman stealing cabbages that fell off the runaway cart. Just... someone knew how to use the ensemble. (If I ever finish writing the Lausanne review, you will see that not every director has this talent.)
Musically it was good quality, but I feel like that wasn't the focus. The leads were good but not stunning, and they did use the original orchestrations, thank god. They also restored a lot of cut material that usually is not restored--"It's the same with a tart as it is with a grocer," the full Runaway Cart, "Shoot me now or shoot me later," a slightly abbreviated Drink With Me reprise at the Dawn of Anguish, and the full Sad Oboe Solo of Dead Frenchboys (normally a 'verse' is cut). The trade-off was that the conductor took everything way too fast and it detracted from the timing of some key scenes.
Cast:
Tomas Ambt Kofod (Valjean): He was fine. Nothing wrong with his performance, but nothing standout either. He appears to be either the understudy or the alternate for Flemming Enevold.
Morten Staugaard (Javert): Bears an unfortunate resemblance, both physically and in acting choices, to Timothy Spall. Javert should not remind me of Peter Pettigrew and Beadle Bamford, but when he is portrayed as obsequious and indecisive and almost furtive and the actor looks like Timothy Spall... yeah.
Sanna Johansson (Fantine): Adored her. She had some of the same grimy street-rat look that makes Eponine so endearing to some people, and she just kept getting screwed over and you wanted to give her a hug so badly. She also pulled off the ethereal consumptive look very well, as the production photos show.
Kim Hammelsvang Henrikson (Thénardier): Understudy. Usually plays Creepy Creepy Bamatabois. He was also kind of creepy-looking as Thénardier, but he rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like he was playing everything for laughs, even the more sinister aspects of his character.
Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis (Mme Thénardier): Too lightweight for the role. I don't mean physically, as anyone who's seen Jennifer Butt can tell you, but she was just sort of mean instead of being terrifying.
Maria Lucia Heiberg Rosenberg (Eponine): ARGH NO. Try to imagine Keira Knightley playing Esmeralda from Disney's Hunchback and you have a fairly accurate idea.
(Digression: The reason Eppie-boppers exist is because the musical is set up to make high-school girls identify with Eponine--who is presented as kinda awkward and socially rejected but *~beautiful inside~*--over Cosette--who is presented as the traditionally pretty girl who has nice clothes and normal social graces. Even this flawed premise completely falls through when even the depths of abject poverty cannot prevent Eponine from being as pretty and perfect as the girls you hated in high school.)
Johannes Nymark (Marius): So cute. Like... blond Adam Jacobs minus the nasal voice cute. I was half-expecting him, like Alistair Brammer, to be too lightweight for the role, but he wasn't at all.
Mia Karlsson (Cosette): Lovely! I was kind of feeling the effects of sleep deprivation during A Heart Full of Love, but I do remember her being very sweet and pretty.
John Martin Bengtsson (Enjolras): He was good. He had the "why yes, I will follow you onto the barricade!" charisma. He also had a beard, which would normally have been distracting and OOC, but it was totally a Lord of the Rings beard so we dubbed him Faramir!Enjolras and it worked for the character.
Daniel Bevensee (Grantaire): WTF? He didn't appear to get much characterization--as in, there wasn't much setting him appart from the other students except that he was making sarcastic comments--but what characterization he did get tended toward the psychotic. As in grabbing a pistol out of Enjolras' hand, pressing it against Javert's head, and saying "What's the difference, die a schoolboy, die a policeman, die a spy?" ("Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?")
Emil Jeppesen (Gavroche): Didn't move much outside his blocking, but he had plenty of blocking so it didn't seem too stiff.
Line Lindersson (Little Cosette): She was good! I initially thought they were getting older kids for the little Cosettes, so they could sing and act better, but it turns out she's just a very talented eleven-year-old.
Wednesday
Morning was nice.
toi_marguerite did some Kierkegaard fangirling--we visited his grave, then the Copenhagen city museum which has a small exhibit on him.Afternoon was disaster. We got a late start getting back to the airport, then got on the wrong train out of the city, because the signage was absolute fail. When we realized this we changed trains as soon as we could, got to the airport way too late, fidgeted through the security line, then sprinted through the airport to the terminal... only to see our plane pulling out onto the runway as we got there. Excellent dramatic timing. Scandinavian Airlines refused to let us change our tickets or even give us a discount, so we had to pay extortionate face-value price for a last-minute ticket to Paris. More than twice the original round trip fare. Ugh.
And then I realized I'd left my watch at the security checkpoint and ran around to anywhere that might possibly have it--information desk, lost luggage retrieval, etc. Many phone calls were made by very nice, concerned airport employees, nobody knew where the fuck it was, and eventually I had to exit the secure area, wait in line again, go BACK THROUGH SECURITY, and ask the screeners if they'd found my watch. Which they had, thank God. Even so, if it had gone on fifteen minutes longer I could've missed the SECOND flight as well.
We did get back to Paris though. Just... ugh, I hate airports.