Here's a figure from today's Defoe that took me surprise, relating to the number of domestic animals in London at the time of the Great Plague: "I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house." That is a lot of cats. So many cats. I really didn't think of seventeenth century London as having that many cats. I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about cats. Ever since I saw the film of Cats in fact, which was like hearing Pennywise the Dancing Clown was back in Derry. Staring that beast in the face once more, however, I realised my uneasiness watching the movie was, if anything, the opposite of the uneasiness I'd felt watching the show as a child. There was no mystery to the movie, it was simply a mistake. But the stage show was not a mistake. It was intentional, unfathomable.
(source)
And as an adult I now admire that; particularly as an adult lucky enough to have participated in shunt, incredibly odd but popular theatre made entirely on its own terms, theatre - I guess like Cats - where there was nothing to "get". No questions. And yesterday I found myself actually defending Andrew Lloyd Webber on f*c*book, when Ed Morrish was having a pop at Jesus Christ Superstar - entirely fairly, he'd just seen it for the first time, and hated it - but I wrote: "A musical's really got to know what it is, and more and more I'm, quite reluctantly, realising how well Lloyd Webber's hits do this, given how mad the ideas are... Mad subject matter may actually help a musical, because its only quality can be its total 'itself'iness... Itselfiness is a very fragile thing though. There's so much not-getting-a-project that can happen down the line. That's what makes the hits so interesting to me."
Interesting, I said. Not necessarily great.
And I should probably go into this idea in more detail, but my eyes are tired and reasearching Cats does not help tired eyes. Lyndsay Ellis, who makes great videos about musicals, including the contribution at the top of today's post, does quite a deep dive into the differing fortunes of - and motivations behind - the Cats stage show and Tom Hooper's intughpretation here if you're interested. Here's today's Defoe, in which an adventure begins, an adventure in editing that I probably won't try again:
I agree that a musical (well, any form of storytelling, but perhaps especially a musical, given the innate absurdity of the medium) has to have a level of self-belief that sane people would balk at. I have always been a deeply unfashionable fan of Lloyd Webber, perhaps because my introduction to him was as a child – children are so wonderfully free of expectations of what a show 'should' be and what 'makes sense'. (Growing up on the children's movies of the 80s did not do much to raise expectations in this regard, either.) Even relatively sane productions like Sunset Boulevard really shouldn't work, seem to be in bad taste, and yet do ... at least, if performed with the conviction of the original London cast, not the caricature of the LA one. My only exception to this is Aspects of Love: despite liking the tunes, and in pre-Radio 4 days being desperate for audio content, I never managed to get all the way through both discs. I haven't kept up with his recent stuff, and now I'm wondering if that's because they're not mad ... or rather, that they too palpably whiff of business and playing it safe, rather than crazy creative conviction. Or maybe the songs just aren't as good.
ReplyDeleteI know I've been banging on about this excessively on Twitter, but: tax fraud and the property market are also mad ideas for a musical, and yet, the Magnitsky the Musical tab has been open in my browser since January. It could not work if it were anything other than wholly Itself. But it is, and it does, and I am very grateful.
Have you encountered Nevermore? I think the zaniness of the costumes might have put me off if I'd seen it on stage first, but I met it via the soundtrack, and it's regularly on repeat in my house. Solid storytelling, great tunes, and rock-hard mad Itselfness.
I suppose that could be an inspiration to us all ...
Yes! Magnitsky, the treaty of Versailles, gay Napoleonic horses - Robbie's sources of inspiration are similarly crazy like a fox. I don't know Nevermore so thanks for the tip! I'm only just now watching my first Hamilton animatic. I've a lot of catching up to do.
ReplyDeleteI haven't got on the Hamilton wagon yet at all – not that I doubt its quality, I just need to know there's a good musical I haven't got to yet, in case there's another drought. I didn't know Robbie Hudson had done a Treaty of Versailles thing! What is this?!
ReplyDeleteI'm just assuming you know about The Mighty Fin, but maybe you don't! "Hall of Mirrors" was the last Mighty Fin show Robbie collaborated on with Sue Pearse. There's frustratingly little about it online though, but it might be here: http://www.listenandoften.com/shop
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