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| re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware | |
| Posted by: garyd 01:18 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - AlanScott 01:04 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Correct. This was all hatched pre-Trump. The 2015 ending is similar to the current ending but the current is softened slightly, in that one can, with a WHOLE lot of mental gymnastics, consider this to be a suicide by Jud in that Jud walks, not away, but menacingly toward Curly and Laurie. And so, we move forward into a "beautiful day" but with the permanent stain of trampling on "the other" amongst us. The blocking of the reprise of the title number underscores this with Jud singing but totally separated from the rest of the cast. Agree this is not an R&H intention, but not so sure about Riggs. (though the Riggs ending is certainly not ambiguous in terms of Jud falling on his own knife). So much for the ending. Now someone, please, please, explain the ballet. |
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| re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware | |
| Posted by: singleticket 09:57 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:18 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| So much for the ending. Now someone, please, please, explain the ballet. It was a dream ballet but with different choreography than Agnes de Mille's. |
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| re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 01:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:18 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Thanks for the reply and the confirmation, garyd. I'm a little confused by this: "Agree this is not an R&H intention, but not so sure about Riggs. (though the Riggs ending is certainly not ambiguous in terms of Jud falling on his own knife)." I think you're agreeing with me that Jud falls on his own knife in Riggs (although the stage directions are less explicit about this than in Oklahoma!) so I'm not sure what you're saying about there perhaps being uncertainty about Riggs's intention. |
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| re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware | |
| Posted by: garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - AlanScott 01:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Yes, Jud falls on his own knife in Riggs. No doubt. However, I get the impression, from doing a bit of research on Riggs over the years, that Riggs did consider Jud, well the character most of us know as Jud, to be a sympathetic "other". Spent some time with several Bard folk a few weeks ago over a Memorial day gathering and they feel Fish spent quite a bit of time with the "Green Grow...." script and that it had a significant influence on his interpretation. (the "folk songs" especially seem to influence the "country western" feel of the song delivery and orchestrations of the current production as well as the smoke house scene in this production....which I think is exquisite). Now, once again, that ballet. |
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| Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:54 pm EDT 06/25/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I wrote a reply to you a few days ago, but I wanted to re-read all the Jeeter stuff in the play before posting it. And now that I have, I have revised what I almost posted a few days ago. I don't find the Jeeter of the play to be more sympathetic than Jud. If anything, I think he’s less sympathetic than Jud. He’s really a scary creep. He’s troubled, but he seems even scarier and more dangerous than Jud. Even more than in the musical, it seems like he would rape Laurey and then possibly kill her if given the chance. I've always found Jud in the musical a partly sympathetic character, but he is also a dangerous sociopath. I think the trick is to make him understandable, almost certainly the victim of some kind of severe child abuse, and not just scary and creepy, and yet to make him also scary and creepy and someone you'd never want to know and whom you would probably reject if you did know him. If we can trust what Hammerstein wrote about the song in his Notes on Lyrics, Riggs approved the song because “It will scare hell out of the audience.” So that doesn’t necessarily suggest that he viewed Jeter very sympathetically. I realize, of course, that both can be possible, and I would think that both Riggs and Hammerstein wanted us to feel some degree of sympathy for him but not too much. And, really, I think any sympathy we feel for Jeeter in the play comes only in his final lines after Laurey fires him. I think a useful comparison might be made between "Lonely Room" and the Judge's "Johanna," but I'll leave that for another day. |
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| re: Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd | |
| Posted by: garyd 08:10 pm EDT 06/26/19 | |
| In reply to: Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd - AlanScott 09:54 pm EDT 06/25/19 | |
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| No problem. Always good hearing from you . I think your thoughts concerning Jeeter are valid. He is creepier than Jud and Fish's Jud is a whole lot creepier than R&H Jud. The Fish Jud could definitely be capable of rape and murder. This comes not just from the interpretation of the actor but mainly from the manner in which Fish directs two important scenes involving Jud and Curly and then Jud and Laurey. And, as in most top notch productions of OKLAHOMA!, the majority of audience sympathy for Jud comes from the actor/director interpretation of "Lonely Room". This is the case, in my view, of the Fish production as well. And the Fish final scene certainly invokes sympathy along with a very large dose of shock bordering a bit too close to a true WTF moment. Upon reflection, I think my view of Jeeter as sympathetic comes not so much from a close reading of the play as it does from perhaps projecting more than appropriate on several interviews I have read with Riggs. A contrast/compare discussion of "Lonely Room" and the Judge's "Johanna" would be a lot of fun. |
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| re: Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 04:20 am EDT 06/27/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd - garyd 08:10 pm EDT 06/26/19 | |
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| I'm glad you were able to follow my post. When I re-read it, I realized it really needed at least one more go-through before I posted it. | |
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| There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: tmdonahue (tmdonahue@yahoo.com) 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Except it was well-danced and energetic. Oh, one might say one thing: how could you do the Agnes de Mille ballet in this production, even if you could afford the dancers? By itself, that doesn't justify the ballet. Boring after a few moments. | |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Last Edit: lordofspeech 01:05 am EDT 06/21/19 | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 01:03 am EDT 06/21/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I think maybe the young bald creature in the “ballet” might be supposed to represent Laury. They’re both female, and the “ballet” creature in her underwear had dark tones to her skin which, in the play, told me that we the audience were supposed to have been reading Laury within the context of the African-American female in the Old West. Before that, I hadn’t realized that Laury was supposed to reflect something about “race in America” in some kinda essay-ish way. Also, I didn’t think Laury gave Jud a bl*w-job in the black-out. I thought, from the sounds, that he had kissed her very mushily and then he had unbuckled his pants and she’d pushed him away and then the lights came up. For those of you who think Laury went down on Jud...well, if she wanted to go down on him so much, then shouldn’t she have tried to save him from being murdered at the end? Or is she just sort of serial man-hater and can we expect her to go down on Curly in the sequel, post-wedding, and then engineer his death later on too...? And, though there was an intense homosocial energy between Curly and Jud in the earlier black-out-scene, I think it was definitely homosocial rather than homosexual. |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: NewtonUK 11:35 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Well - they weren't going to use the De Mille in this production, thats for darn tootin sure. But the dream ballet is a famous element, adding pure dance to the storytelling world of a musical. To be honest, if I had been directing this production, I would have the perfect opportunity to deal with the ballet - take intermission before it, come back to the scene after it. We wouldn't have missed it. If the 'ballet' is there, and takes up its full 14 minutes stage time, then it needs to have a purpose other than to show us an angry, frustrated black woman. Laurey is played as an angry frustrated black woman for 95% of the production. We don't need 14 minutes of acrobatic dancing to remind us of that. In great musicals - musicals written by people who write great musicals - everything in the show explains, plot, character, inner life. The dance in FISHLAHOMA does none of these things. It just exists, in a musical world totally out of context with anything that has come before or after. |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: aleck 09:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I was baffled and bored by that ballet myself. But I was sitting in the middle of a group of high school students and the dance was the part of the production they liked the most. Otherwise, they were mostly bored, although some were engaged and others not. This was a mixture of both boys and girls. The girls seemed more bored than the boys, which I thought was interesting. Later, thinking back on the production (and actually the material itself), this is more of a play about the hopes and fears of men and how they interact with one another to get what they want. The women might be the target of these interactions, but the hopes and dreams of the women are limited and not very deep. So, you have Curly vs. Jud over Laury and Will and Ali over Ado, plus the farmers and the cowboys (men) fighting for prominence. There is almost no conflict among the women, except for Aunt Eller who serves as the arbiter of frontier social behavior and justice. The boys in that high school group seemed to be engaged in sorting out all the behavior clues of the men. The girls were mostly thrilled by that "dream" dance, which, other than Aunt Eller, provided the only expression of female strength. | |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: ryhog 12:18 pm EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - aleck 09:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I think you've hit on an important observation about resonance. I think the "anti" sentiment here reveals a lot of anger that someone has had the temerity to stage a show for a demographic with which they cannot identify. Kinda like my great grandmother thought Gershwin was garbage. | |
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