Cats, Tampereen Teatteri
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| Photo by Harri Hinkka. |
This autumn, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats is back in Finland. It's been almost ten years since our last full-blown production of the musical, so I guess it's about time.
I was in the wrong mindset when I saw this musical. I had seen the mind-alteringly good opening night of the new Swedish production of Les Misérables a week before, and watching Cats, my mind kept wandering back to Jean Valjean, Fantine and Javert. Had I known Les Mis was coming up when I bought the Cats ticket, I would definitively chosen another date. But what can you do – when I found out, this season's Cats performances were already practically sold out anyway.
But yeah, about the show itself...
I was a bit surprised to see how closely director Georg Malvius's version of the musical resembles the original Trevor Nunn direction. There's only one major change: the show is set in motion when a rat (played by Risto Korhonen) goes to bed and dreams of a world filled with felines. The rat doesn't speak, but he takes part in scenes, observes the Jellicles and tries to get accepted into their tribe.
Other than that, apart from a couple of fun little details – like Bustopher Jones frequenting a different sort of gentlemen's club, complete with pole dancing tomcats – the show looks, sounds and feels pretty traditional. The colours of the costumes (designed by Tuomas Lampinen) are reminiscent of John Napier's original designs, and even the orchestration resembles the original cast recordings from the 80s.
That's not to say the production isn't nice to watch, quite the contrary. My personal favourite scenes were Growltiger's Last Stand and Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, both performed by Tero Harjunniemi (a former Valjean, another Les Mis reminder). The former is especially fun because Harjunniemi gets to show off his operatic training by singing an Italian aria with Helena Rängman's Lady Griddlebone.
But despite all the good things, in the end, I liked this production – well, well enough.
The cast is talented, well-trained, and they clearly enjoy what they're doing, and the show looks beautiful. Still, the performance didn't make me feel much. Maybe it was simply the previous week's Les Mis overload distracting me, or maybe I've outgrown Cats for good (it was my very first favourite musical after all, I listened to it so much in 2008 I'm kind of permanently fed up with it nowadays). Maybe both.
Recommended, even if I didn't really feel the magic myself this time.
The Last Ship / Viimeinen laiva, Turun kaupunginteatteri
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| Photo by Otto-Ville Väätäinen. |
The Last Ship, or Viimeinen laiva in Finnish, is a musical with music and lyrics by Sting. It premiered in Chicago in 2014. After a three-month-long Broadway run (the musical's producers lost their entire $15 million investment), the show has now arrived to Europe. It had its European premiere in Finland, in Turun kaupunginteatteri this September.
The musical (book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey) tells the story of a man, Gideon Fletcher, who runs away from his hometown in his teens, comes back 15 years later and finds out everything has changed. While he's been sailing the seven seas, Gideon's old girlfriend has found herself a new man and the shipyard that's been the source of the town's livelihood has gone bankrupt. To fight off desperation, the unemployed shipbuilders decide to return to the shipyard, build one last ship and sail away together, while Gideon tries to win back the love of his ex-sweetheart.
I really don't know what to make of this story. It's an uncomfortable mix of realism and fantasy. It's too firmly grounded in the real world to feel like a fairytale. For example, it's explicitly set in Wallsend, Sting's own home town in England. On the other hand, it's also way too fairytale-like to feel real. For example... well, that whole shipbuilding business, really. A bunch of dudes building a ship to sail away towards new adventures, seriously?
I'm certain the titular ship and its maiden voyage are meant to symbolise something, but I don't know what. Freedom, maybe – but how would the shipbuilders running away from their problems solve anything, since it didn't work out for Gideon in the beginning? And what does that say about the characters who are left behind? Maybe the set design (by Jani Uljas) gives us a key to this mystery when, near the end of the show, the ship is represented by a close-to-lifesize cutout of RMS Titanic's propellers.
The love story is dull. Boy abandons girl, girl pines after boy, boy comes back and assumes he still has a claim to girl even though they haven't spoken to each other in 15 years and she's now with someone else. The musical does not pass the Bechdel test. I know that's common in musical theatre (some of my personal favourites don't pass it either), but times are changing. An original musical written in 2014 should know better.
All that said, I feel there's a compelling story hidden in here somewhere. Change, desperation, perseverance, lost love... these could be the elements of an interesting story. But as it is, it's just The Full Monty rehashed, this time with ships and clichéd romance.
Turun kaupunginteatteri's production of The Last Ship is beautifully staged and performed. I paid special attention to the orchestra, conducted by Markus Länne the night I saw the show – they sound fantastic, and the sound system is set up perfectly. You can hear each and every sound from the orchestra pit clearly and beautifully. I wouldn't mind the theatre staging an instrumental musical concert! The music's quite nice, too, though not especially memorable. I'm not a Sting fan, but the tunes are pleasant to listen to.
Too bad that the plot is what it is. No matter how talented the cast and the orchestra, how impressive the sound system and how handsome the visuals, it's simply not a musical for me.
P.S. Both Cats and The Last Ship have surtitles in English.
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