Here's a fun game to play backstage! Simon Says, but instead of Simon it's Stage Manager Says and everyone just LISTENS TO THE STAGE MANAGER AND THE PROPS WOULDN'T GO MISSING GODDAMMI-
Okay, I’m going to see Moby-Dick one last time tomorrow and I still really want to get my broader thoughts down. I wrote the following as emails to a couple friends who saw it and wanted to chat about it, so I’m just going to put it here for posterity and maybe add more tomorrow night?
I'm still all over the place, though, so I'm going to answer this in no particular order, heh.
First off, some things I love:
Everything about part two is just like candy for me. The audience participation, the anachronistic theme park announcement, the silliness, the way that Choksi pulls out that pointer and keeps collapsing it to make one more comment, then pulls it out again, then collapses it again to make ONE MORE COMMENT. I love the puppets and the puppet show aspect of it. I love how much fun the cast seems to be having! Watching it is fucking delightful, it’s the reason that I’m a member of the ART and the reason I love Malloy’s weirdness and the reason I love weird regional theatre.
The performances are stellar, of course, and there’s a lot of emotion, especially in part four. Starr Busby as Starbuck blows the fucking doors off the place and while I am usually fairly femme4femme, that fucking costume she wears is A LOT for my tiny gay heart to handle, okay? Choksi is brilliant, of course--perfect perfect PERFECT, I cannot imagine a single other person in this role. It’s so weird, I was watching some old Comet clips a couple weeks ago and it’s CRAZY how the beard and the attitude turn him into an entirely different person. (I know, that’s how acting works, but still.) I don’t particularly care about Ahab, but I love basically everyone else? Tashtego and Daggoo’s little asides throughout were particularly good. I loved the use of Dawn Troupe as everyone who’s NOT on the Pequod and her costumes were stellar and that bit where she’s the Rachel in part four is INCREDIBLE.
The music is also incredible. I’m not like, smart about music, but it manages to keep incorporating like, melodies and refrains again and again to bring the different sections together and it was....good. He musiced good, that Dave Malloy. Good on him.
“The Pacific.” Oh god. That song alone could kill me.
The costumes were great, the set is amazing, and overall it’s just...fun. I had a good time! It’s a 3.5 hour musical and the only parts where I thought, “Oh god, this is long” were a couple of Ahab’s songs. I was never bored! It is a wild, sprawling work, but even though parts of it didn’t work for me, nothing turned me off entirely, which is saying a lot for something that long and intricate.
(Also, to be clear, I haven’t read the book! I saw a few review on the internets where people were like, “If you haven’t read the book, you won’t be able to follow it at all!” which I have to say is untrue. I read a couple of the first chapters in a class in college, fifteen (!!!!!) years ago, but I didn’t so much as wikipedia the thing over the entire course of preparing for this show. I meant to, but I never got around to it. And despite that, I had no problem following it or enjoying it?)
Anyway, onto the criticisms.
So, I agree with a lot of what you said. Some of it is def intentional--I remember either Rachel or Malloy saying in an interview that most adaptations are focused entirely on Ahab, when he largely exists more as sort of this weird, menacing figure who occasionally drops in to be obsessed and then disappears again. But there's def a lot of messiness that I think is the result of trying to do too many things in a very limited amount of time. I would have LOVED to see the seven hour version for comparison's sake. I think the tonal shift is intentional as well, but I don't know that it 100% works for me? Like, I get that Pip's section of the book is fascinating and I get that he wanted to draw the parallels to Pip and the lost boys and Ishmael in part four, but I honestly think a lot of that could stand to be cut. It could be a great stand alone piece, but the things it sets up don't justify the length of it. If they used that time instead to set up some of the despair in part four, I think the tonal shift wouldn't feel so abrupt as well.
The framing device is also a weird choice to me. Like, I love Choksi's performance of it, and I would hate to lose some of those bits, but I feel like, to justify it being in there, you need a follow-up after act four? It would space out three "character" breaks--the prologue, the Fedallah monologue, and then something like an afterword--and do a better job of actually "framing" the show. But also, honestly, I think it would work just as well to take it out all together. It feels like kind of a foreword? And I think that would be better served as like, a note in the program ahead of the bibliography. It's such a fucking weird choice to open out of character and then never really return to that? Like, you can have Ishmael address the audience and break the fourth wall and be anachronistic and not need that weird set up, I promise, Malloy.
(I love reading the bibliographies in playbills at Malloy shows. That has nothing to do with anything, it's just a dumb thing I like, haha)
I would have loved to see some more time devoted to developing Starbuck and developing the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg, which, again, I feel like there would have been space to do if they got rid of some of the Pip stuff. Especially because Starbuck carries so much of part four, and I would die for Starr Busby and she can definitely shoulder that weight, but the narrative needs to shoulder some of it too. I'm glad that he made Ishmael and Queequeg explicitly a queer couple, but I feel like there's a line between "this is quietly happening in the background and not of importance to the narrative" and "this happened almost entirely off-screen and people who need 'explicit' confirmation of things aren't going to understand it, entirely." I feel like the average cis het folks seeing this show would very easily be like, "Oh, they're slow dancing and holding each other like friends do!!! :)" not out of any malice, but because it wouldn't even occur to them to look at it any other way.
To answer your last question: this is definitely NOT going to broadway any time soon, if at all. It's def still in the development stages and I don't think he has his eye on broadway for it. It's too long and too weird and too much, and I think he knows that. So I feel like it's important to not hold it up to the same metric as the out of town tryouts that the ART normally does? Like, it's not going to compare to Waitress or JLP or even Comet, which had very inventive staging but was a very simple story and fairly well hammered out by the time it was in Cambridge? Which doesn't give it a free pass or anything--it's def still very messy. But I feel like it's mess is different as a piece in development than it would be as an out of town, you know? And I really like that there's a place in regional theatre for weird, messy, experimental things that aren't necessarily aiming for that level of commercial success.
So my tl;dr is that I agree with a lot of your criticisms and think it needs a whole lot of work going forward, but also I kind of loved it for what it was, warts and all, and I'm going back to see it again tomorrow, SO XD
Also, I saw Moby-Dick last week! I haven’t written about it yet because I honestly have no idea how to describe it outside of the words “fucking wild” and “puppets,” along with some emphatic hand gestures.
It is like, everything about Malloy turned up to 13. So if you like Malloy...you will probably not be bored during the three and a half hours of stuff.
If you are of the opinion that he is “a little much for you,” as a friend politely said to me after seeing it, perhaps....skip this one.
Anyway, I’m going back on Tuesday, like a person who likes Dave Malloy a normal amount, and perhaps I will have more to say on the whole thing then.
Starr Busby could murder me and I’d be okay with it!
Also, the first time we saw it, the audience was VERY into both the puppets and the jokes dragging Malloy. This go-round, they were not as invested in either of those things and also one of the gentlemen from the audience chosen to be a member of the crew was definitely not enjoying himself at all and it made me mad that he was WASTING THE OPPORTUNITY.
This show is so much, and while I can understand and appreciate the critiques of it for being unwieldy and scattered and Too Much, seeing it again really cemented just how much fucking fun I had and how much of it was so incredibly delightful to me. I need to get my grubby little hands on the music post-haste.
I’m going to let my thoughts on the show continue to cook in my brain until I’m not a) bogged down at work/getting all my Christmas crafting done and b) fucking exhausted from staying out until midnight watching a whale puppet show.
first notes posted on this blog! i’m studying for my theatre & drama final that’s in a week. also, does anyone know any lighting/editing tips to make my notes look better?
