Knives Out at A Midwinter Mummer's Tale
2019-Dec-25, Wednesday 13:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
A brief post about two events I went to last week.
On Thursday, I had originally invited![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
worldbshiny to come see A Midwinter Mummer's Tale, a paganish British Folk take on Dickens's A Christmas Carol. She waffled a bit and eventually came back with a few other plays that she'd rather see as well as one movie. I was kind of interested in seeing the stage adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life at Stage 773, but 1) it was expensive and 2) worldbshiny said that she'd end up watching it at some point during its run anyway, so we settled on our second-most-popular choice--Knives Out.
I liked it a lot! With a name like that, I was worried that there'd be a lot of gore (which I really can't handle), but it was much more like a less-overly-comedic version of Clue, based on one family's numerous dysfunctions instead. The film wasn't even particular tense to me, because it kept cutting back and forth between the events in the past and the investigation in the present, so we always knew what was going on--at least, what specific characters said was going on. More was revealed over the course of the movie, of course. I highly recommend it.
At least when we saw it, there was a little footer at the end where Rian Johnson talked about how difficult whodunnits are to make, because a director is trying to maintain some sense of mystery and suspense throughout the course of the film, but also the audience really wants the character that's most dramatically satisfying to be the criminal. If some rando background character did it, even if all the evidence does point to them in retrospect, the movie's going to seem flawed. So Johnson avoided that and just made the ungrateful asshole playboy the villain while also making the victim's death actually a suicide even though it seemed to be murder, and contrasting it against the protagonist's kindness so it's obvious that she deserved the victim's wealth far more than any of his blood descendants did.
Also, the final shot of Marta on the balcony, looking down at the family outside the house, while she was drinking coffee from a "my house, my rules" mug was perfect.
But I still wanted to go see A Midwinter Mummer's Tale. I was originally going to go see it on Friday before strip dreidel, but it was sold out, so instead I went to it on Saturday afternoon before I went to my two evening parties. I got there a bit late and the seats facing the stage were almost all occupied, so I sat in a seat on the side, which might have affected my opinion.
Here's a shot of the program, as a capsule of how they changed the story:
Overall I liked it and will probably go again next year, but it was a bit uneven. The actress playing Esmerelda Pennywise wavered occasionally, and while the Cunning Man was fantastic, even hanging around a bit in character outside before the show, he spent most of the run-time off in the corner being spooky and was only visible to me due I had a side seat. That also meant that some of the action was obscured, and characters would be talking to each other but all I'd see was the back of one actor's head.
I loved the music, though. There was one song where they were singing in Welsh--don't ask me anything about it, I don't speak Welsh and the program doesn't list the song names--and leading a wassailer's parade with Mari Lwyd from door to door that I thought was fantastic, and the actress playing the Trickster had a beautiful soprano voice that she'd use occasionally when she was showing Pennywise scenes from her past.
The British Folk element was very strong, what with wassailing and mummers and the cunning man and so on, but the pagan element was less so. Scratch-replace "Christmas" with "Yule," have the final line be "Goddess bless us, everyone," and so on. The strongest element was, of course, changing the spirits of Christmas to the Trickster, the Holly King, and the Dark Mother, with a bit of a maiden/mother/crone thing going on. But the other events were all the same, for good or for ill.
It was a fun production, but A Muppet Christmas Carol is, of course, better.
On Thursday, I had originally invited
I liked it a lot! With a name like that, I was worried that there'd be a lot of gore (which I really can't handle), but it was much more like a less-overly-comedic version of Clue, based on one family's numerous dysfunctions instead. The film wasn't even particular tense to me, because it kept cutting back and forth between the events in the past and the investigation in the present, so we always knew what was going on--at least, what specific characters said was going on. More was revealed over the course of the movie, of course. I highly recommend it.
At least when we saw it, there was a little footer at the end where Rian Johnson talked about how difficult whodunnits are to make, because a director is trying to maintain some sense of mystery and suspense throughout the course of the film, but also the audience really wants the character that's most dramatically satisfying to be the criminal. If some rando background character did it, even if all the evidence does point to them in retrospect, the movie's going to seem flawed. So Johnson avoided that and just made the ungrateful asshole playboy the villain while also making the victim's death actually a suicide even though it seemed to be murder, and contrasting it against the protagonist's kindness so it's obvious that she deserved the victim's wealth far more than any of his blood descendants did.
Also, the final shot of Marta on the balcony, looking down at the family outside the house, while she was drinking coffee from a "my house, my rules" mug was perfect.
But I still wanted to go see A Midwinter Mummer's Tale. I was originally going to go see it on Friday before strip dreidel, but it was sold out, so instead I went to it on Saturday afternoon before I went to my two evening parties. I got there a bit late and the seats facing the stage were almost all occupied, so I sat in a seat on the side, which might have affected my opinion.
Here's a shot of the program, as a capsule of how they changed the story:
Overall I liked it and will probably go again next year, but it was a bit uneven. The actress playing Esmerelda Pennywise wavered occasionally, and while the Cunning Man was fantastic, even hanging around a bit in character outside before the show, he spent most of the run-time off in the corner being spooky and was only visible to me due I had a side seat. That also meant that some of the action was obscured, and characters would be talking to each other but all I'd see was the back of one actor's head.
I loved the music, though. There was one song where they were singing in Welsh--don't ask me anything about it, I don't speak Welsh and the program doesn't list the song names--and leading a wassailer's parade with Mari Lwyd from door to door that I thought was fantastic, and the actress playing the Trickster had a beautiful soprano voice that she'd use occasionally when she was showing Pennywise scenes from her past.
The British Folk element was very strong, what with wassailing and mummers and the cunning man and so on, but the pagan element was less so. Scratch-replace "Christmas" with "Yule," have the final line be "Goddess bless us, everyone," and so on. The strongest element was, of course, changing the spirits of Christmas to the Trickster, the Holly King, and the Dark Mother, with a bit of a maiden/mother/crone thing going on. But the other events were all the same, for good or for ill.
It was a fun production, but A Muppet Christmas Carol is, of course, better.
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Date: 2019-Dec-26, Thursday 22:20 (UTC)