| re: CAMELOT This Afternoon - SPOILERS | |
| Posted by: Revned 10:45 pm EDT 04/09/23 | |
| In reply to: re: CAMELOT This Afternoon - SPOILERS - Delvino 01:28 pm EDT 04/09/23 | |
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| I agree that in order for the story to work, the audience has to feel Guenevere’s love for both men, and that’s what’s lacking in this version. Sorkin’s script and the acting choices Soo is making (or has been directed to make by Sher) have Guenevere most often expressing brittle irritation and frustration in her scenes with both of them—beginning with the jokey, catty comments she keeps inserting between lines of the title song, undercutting its charm and magic. The beauty of that scene is that she and Arthur are falling in love by the end of it, and we don’t feel that here. I also think the seeds of her love for Lancelot need to be growing even before she sees him revive his fallen opponent (Arthur in this version); the mutual antagonism of Guenevere and Lance’s earlier scenes together should have a Beatrice and Benedick kind of spark; they’re baiting each other to avoid expressing the dangerous feelings they’re both already starting to experience. Here it just feels like they despise each other. Perhaps there’s more chemistry when Donica is on (I saw De la Flor) but the problem seems to be rooted in Sorkin’s dialogue and the way the scenes have been blocked and the choices Soo is playing. There are only a few brief moments when the two speak to each other alone, and even when Lance is expressing love Guenevere seems always to be resisting or pushing him away. Are we meant to believe that he was forcing her to continue an affair she wanted out of? Wouldn’t that make her a victim and him a reprehensible villain? But somehow that doesn’t quite appear to be Sorkin and Sher’s intent either… In the laborious final scene between Arthur and Guenevere, this Arthur takes responsibility for failing her by not expressing his true feelings; he says he was keeping a respectful distance because it was an arranged marriage and, having been forced to become a Queen, he didn’t want her to feel that she was being forced to be a wife. But this is nonsense, both psychologically and historically. History 101: What’s the primary reason for an arranged marriage between royals? To produce an heir! The fact that these two didn’t accomplish that doesn’t mean they weren’t trying; they would have been intimate starting on the marriage night; whatever feelings they developed for each other would have found expression, and the idea that he was keeping an overly respectful distance from his “business partner” is mind-bogglingly naïve on Sorkin’s part. And Sher went along with it? LCT is a major institutional theatre: Was there a dramaturg in the house? The error here seems to come from a notion of Sorkin’s that the affair with Lancelot had to be motivated, or at least justified, by some emotional failure on Arthur’s part; he makes an overly earnest and strained attempt to explicate the problems in their relationship in modern terms. But the grand theme of the tragic story, as told by both White and Lerner, is that lofty Utopian ideals—of a society guided by selflessness and decency—will inevitably be defeated by basic urges endemic to human nature. These include the knights’ unquenchable impulse to violence (“Fie on goodness”) and even Arthur’s own youthful sin with Mordred’s mother, but it comes to a head with Guenevere and Lancelot: Both of them love Arthur and revere his dream, but tragically bring about its undoing by being unable to resist their sensual passion for one another. Sorkin began by deliberately robbing the legend of all its literal magic, then went downhill from there: by undercutting and qualifying Guenevere’s love for both men, he neuters the story of most of its romance and passion. Given the beautiful work that Sher did on his revivals of SOUTH PACIFIC, THE KING AND I, and MY FAIR LADY, I’d be interested to know how the conversations went between him and Sorkin as this adaptation developed. It seems like they weren’t always on the same page, and thus the production wobbles beneath an uncertainty of tone. The dark austerity of the designs (even to having all the characters costumed in black in some scenes) is striking but jars with the overly jokey tone of the dialogue, and neither approach fully connects with the lush romanticism of the score. It’s as if everyone was getting in everyone else’s way, and Lerner was the chief casualty. For me, this exacerbates a growing worry about the way producers and directors have of late been getting more and more free in changing and rewriting the work of deceased playwrights, especially in musicals. It’s a very disturbing trend. There’s nothing to do about it when the work is in public domain, but most of these properties are still protected by copyright. Of course the changes get approved by the licensing agents and/or the estates of the writers, but it seems that often those entities are more concerned with making money off a major revival than protecting the integrity of the work with which they were entrusted. |
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| Previous: | re: CAMELOT This Afternoon - SPOILERS - Delvino 01:28 pm EDT 04/09/23 |
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