General Theatre Discussion

Off-Topic
#25

Brecht was a committed and lifelong Marxist, and was dedicated to re-purposing theater to be something more of a way to convey political ideas. Im also just not fond of the postmodernist ideology in general, giving rise to my dislike of a lot of the more recent stuff to come out of Western playwrights and such. It tends to just not be my taste, and even the Modernists were generally not my cup of tea, though a few exceptions like Kafka do exist for me.

I tend to look for character development and plot rather than an ideology being pushed and while I find Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author as having an interesting concept, its just not what I am mainly looking for in a play, I suppose. Hence why I tend to drift towards older works with a heavier focus on the storytelling element in general, I suppose. Do you perhaps have a favorite Shakespeare play? I tend to be partial to Julius Caesar for obvious reasons, since I happen to study Rome a lot.

#26

Isn’t Umineko technically postmodernist too, being a deconstruction of Golden Age mystery and all that?

#27

Ehhh, sort of kinda but its a different perspective imo. It doesn’t carry a lot of the baggage the western postmodernists do from what I can tell.

#28

Would you mind explaining that different perspective? I’m kinda curious tbh.

#29

See, the typical Postmodernist perspective is weighed down a lot more in the western tradition of it, in that it seems rather married to its roots in Nietzsche’s Perspectivalism and Relativism, causing it to tend to reject the notion of a concrete reality whatsoever.

(SPOILERS HOLY SHIT UMINEKO SPOILERS TURN OFF NOW IF YOU HAVENT READ IT TO THE ABSOLUTE END YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED) However while Umineko seems to have that, its more that its lesson is that while there is a concrete, fixed reality in the Book of Single Truth, it more seems to advocate that sometimes other things can be more important than finding that truth, since at times to the common person a pleasant fiction is better than a harsh reality. Thats what Umineko is about, rather than say the denial of such a fixed reality in general. It takes up the trappings of such, but in reality it still seems to acknowledge a fixed reality underneath. This seems to me to be perhaps a product of not being from the Western Tradition, but the Easten Tradition, bringing a different perspective to the table.

#30

I think postmodernism is a very broad term, there are a lot of different stories written in that style some good ones, and some bad ones and it’s elements are used in many works of fiction that might not be entirely postmodernist. So generalizing like that is a bit unfair.

#31

I just tend to be objectivist so I take umbrage a bit with its tending towards relativism and such. Postmodernism is kind of my bugbear so just ignore me a bit on it. I’m talking mostly ‘archetypical’ postmodern works when I talk about that I suppose. Especially ones that tend to be anchored in the more relativist strain than the deconstruction vein.

#32

Fair enough, there are certainly some elements in postmodern works that I have a problem with. And I’m not a relativist myself, although I don’t mind it when it’s presented in an interesting way since I’m usually quite open to different views. I also tend to prefer older works though.

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#33

I’ve always wondered, would Rosencratz and Gildenstern are Dead count as postmodern? It’s certainly very meta, but that’s not the same thing exactly, and I wouldn’t exactly call Waiting for Godot postmodern, and that’s what it most closely resembles, but I’ve heard it described that way several times.

Regarding your earlier question, @Restkastel I don’t know who it was directed toward, but my favorite Shakespeare play would probably be Twelfth Night. I also like Much Ado About Nothing and Othello a whole lot. What’s yours? Other than Julius Ceaser. And what’s your favorite genre? I tend toward his comedies, but I like the tragedies a lot too.

#34

I put it at the end of the post asking the question, but yeah. Marc Anthony is also another good one, I rather like stuff about Rome for obvious reasons. Im the guy who restores Rome in Crusader Kings II in order to make everyone know the true might of the original and only true rulers of Europe.

#35

And if we are discussing plays I, unfortunately, can’t add too much to the discussion. Most of the plays I’ve read and have seen performances of are Russian ones, which are probably of no interest to others, although some of them are quite good. I’ve also read some Shakespeare and I’ve read Faust. My favourite Shakespeare play is probably Macbeth, but I like his other plays as well. And I’m pretty sure I’ve read Sophocles’s and Aeschylus’s plays at some point, I don’t remember them too well though and I’ve read them in Russian. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is pretty good by the way, I’m not sure if it counts entirely as postmodern though, even if it has some elements of that style.

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#36

Ah, I see. I prefer plot over character development, though both are important for the storytelling aspect, which I agree is the most important part of any work. Just to be able to put the right conversations, turn of events and characters in the right places makes the story interesting and intriguing. Anyhow, who doesn’t have a favourite Shakespeare play? I haven’t read all of his, but my favourite would probably be The Tempest. I like the setting, the characters and the thoughts of the author conveyed through the story a lot. I am interested to read Marc Anthony, too, is it any good?

@thesorceress Sorry, I forgot to answer you earlier. I’ve only read The Glass Menagerie of Tennessee Williams, so I haven’t read much of him, like I said.

@Doldod Oh, I would be interested to hear of your Russian plays. Well, only if they’re interesting, of course. I know the names of quite some Russian playwrights and have seen excerpts of their work here and there, but haven’t read them. What are your favourites? What are they like?

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#37

I haven’t read it, but I heard it is quite good, and theres planets named after Caliban and Propsero in the Warhammer 40k canon, I also know it predates the entire concept of postcolonialism and talking about things from the perspective of the natives instead of the conquerors. (I just took a class on western lit starting from the renaissance to the modern day).

As for Marc Anthony, I found it good but Im biased since I’m a Rome Fanatic, as I mentioned. Anything that is of passable quality at the very least and strikes my fancy will usually end up being that much better for me by being related to Rome. I have a similar thing for Victorian stuff. (Part of what lured me to Umineko is the pretty dresses and the fact it was relating to golden age detection, both of which the friend who got me into it brought up to me.)

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#38

Ha ha, well, I’m quite into history too, and Ancient Rome is one of my favourite time periods, so I suppose I’d like it, too.

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#39

Going to switch the threads gears a bit~

What do you guys think about musicals in comparison to regular ol’ plays? Do you think they had something extra that plays don’t have? What are your favorites?

#40

I tend to feel that forcing things into song and dance like musicals do is a detriment to their storytelling in my opinion. I like Les Miserables, but I have to wonder how much better it would be if they didn’t force musical numbers and singing into it.

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#41

Well, let me think. I like Gogol’s The Government Inspector. It is his most famous play and probably his best work in general. I like The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters by Chekhov, those are worth looking into. Leo Tolstoy’s The living Corpse and The Power of Darkness are pretty good. And I actually really like Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing and his plays are not an exception. A lot of his work was banned in USSR, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers of 20th century. I saw his play Flight when I was in St. Petersburg a year or so ago and was not disappointed. It’s a play set during Russian Civil War and it was banned for a long time because it depicted both sides of the conflict. Also, he wrote a play called Ivan Vasilievich which was adapted into an absolutely great Soviet movie called Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession commonly translated as Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future. It’s a comedy in which a Soviet citizen Ivan Vasilievich and Russian Tsar Ivan IV Vasilievich, more commonly known as Ivan The Terrible, switch places and have to survive in a different time period. Both the play and the movie are great, but I don’t think the play was translated into English.

Edit: To answer Pandora’s question, I like musicals, but I, unfortunately, didn’t get a chance to see many of them. Basically, I think that musicals can bring something extra and different to the table. Some of them are great, some are not so great, but overall I’m happy that they exist as a form of expression.

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#42

Here’s my thing with musicals. I feel like for a musical to work, you have to have a good singer. Too many times have I seen a movie adaptation of a musical that has its actors sing, and the actors fall flat. I don’t blame the actors at all for this, because who expects someone to be good at acting and also have an academy award winning voice? Lately Hollywood has been autotuning the actors/actresses that are singing (like in the Beauty and the Beast remake), which is ok, but I think I liked it better when actors were just dubbed over by singers (old disney movies do this a lot). Dunno though, a bad dub is just as distracting as having the actors sing.

The best example of this I can think of is Phantom of the Opera… It’s one of those musicals that’s been around forever and has had multitudes of movies made from it. My favorite version of this is the original with Michael Crawford as the phantom. While he’s not the best of actors, the man’s got a good set of pipes. Anyway, in the 2004 remake they replaced him with Gerard Butler, who you may know as Leonidas in 300. Butler’s a great actor, but he’s not the best of singers.

Another example of this is Russell Crowe in Les Misérables. He’s a great actor, but cannot seem to carry much of a tune. I’d argue the same for Anne Hathaway actually, but for some reason I found her performance a bit less distracting. Still, I would have loved it if she was dubbed over. I would have really loved if she were dubbed over by Susan Boyle… I love Boyle’s cover of “I Dreamed A Dream” so much!

Anyway, I’m not really sure what my answer is to this is. Because as I said earlier, bad dubbing can be just as distracting as having the actors sing. Autotuning them helps a little bit, but it can be rather distracting too. Maybe the answer is to get someone who can act and sing, like Idina Menzel?

What do you all think on the matter? Do you like the autotuning? Do you like the actors trying to sing, or do you prefer dubbing? Or do you just think I’m crazy, and that I’m way too easily distracted by the singing in the musicals that have turned into movies?

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#43

I think it’s much better to dub than to autotune, autotuning is a little bit distracting to me. But I would say that in some situations actors who are not great at singing should still keep their voice without dub or autotune. It all comes down to what that scene needs if it has to sound professional, it’s better to dub if it’s more emotional, then the professional actor might do a better job than the singer. Anne Hathaway, for example, is not the best at singing, but the performance she gives in Les Miserables is very emotional and extremely memorable and dub could have taken away from that. I agree that Russel Crowe should have been dubbed though.

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#44

Personally, I love musicals. Y’know how its often said that music is one of the most powerful forms of self-expression and communication there is? Well infuse that with great vocals and story/character driven lyrics and you get to what the heart of musicals are.
My top three favorite musicals all have something that really sets them apart from the averages. Heathers for one, has tracks that are pretty good at giving the listener an examination of the complexity of the characters or at least their mental/emotional state.

Freeze Your Brain illustrates a very good portrait of J.D. In this song, we learn that Jason is a person who’s lost a lot in life, has zero social skills, doesn’t believe in having dreams, is anti-society, and numbs his pain by consuming slushies and getting into fights or cutting if the line “fight pain with more pain,” is any indication. We also learn that despite his preferred way of coping being to numb himself the point where self reflection, expressing himself, and connecting with others are incredibly difficult for him to do-Jason still longs for an identity of his own and for someone to validate his existence, which is what he gets in the form of being a bully hunter and Veronica-a girl who he see’s a bit of himself in, becomes obsessed with and over time wants to corrupt due to being love starved and stuff as seen in the track, Our Love is God.
Unlike Heathers, I would say Hamilton excels more at story based songs. Stay Alive Reprise basically covers the death of Philip Hamilton-the son of Alexander Hamilton-after he loses a duel against another kid who insulted his father. The way that the music imitates Philip’s fading heartbeat is really impressive, I have to say. And the vocals that are in this song aren’t forced and actually not only mix well with the beat, convey the despair of his parents and the moment that ended up killing Philip. There is also The World Turned Upside Down-which is an amazing overview of the battle of Yorktown and is genuinely a pretty good history lesson. The rapping is also 10/10 too.

The Lion King on the other hand, focuses a bit more on atmosphere than character or story to me. This is represented by the very first track-The Circle of Life-which is a mix of several indigenous African languages and English. The musical itself almost feels like an ancient African fable brought to life, which is partly why I like it so much aside from the songs that really convey a sense of myth and wonder. Another track I really is They Live in You which is very mysterious and haunting. This 1997 NYTimes review explains why its one of my favorites.

Tbh I hate live action movie musicals. The only movie musicals that work are the animated ones.

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