I'm not sure about the current movie adaptation of "The History Boys" because I've not seen it, but I am sure that the stage production is superb. I saw this on Broadway a while back, and seeing it here on its "home turf," if you will, is an extra added bonus. It's like these schoolboys stepped right off the street and onto the stage for the afternoon. Even though there is a seedy aspect to some of the lessons these boys are learning, this story still sits squarely in the middle of the great "plays and movies about teachers" genre that always weakens me at the knees. I don't think you can embrace this profession without a bit of the old Henry Higgins in you... turning flower girls into ladies...
The new production of "Sound of Music" has everything about it that Broadway would hate. The lead was picked in a "UK Idol" sort of show-down; it has kids in it; it is familiar... waaaaay familiar; it's simple and untextured; it's claim to fame is a movie with Julie Andrews; all that rot. You can hear the critics sharpening their keyboards.
Well, bollocks to them.
This show is so familiar as to be iconic, and that means it passes over from kitsch to classic. Most people who are alive have grown up with this movie, this story, burned into a special set of holiday-family-feel/good neurons. I dare you not to get caught up in it if you go ahead and buy the ticket.
Connie Fisher, who won the "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" play-off on the BBC, pretty much channels Julie Andrews, and the production stays so close to the movie as its source that this is quite welcomed. She is apparently committed to 8 shows per week all the way through April or something.
Trimming a three-hour movie into a play requires some compromise, so a few of the scenes are missing, combined, or integrated, and some of the songs appear in different contexts. There are 3 new numbers that are obviously placed to give the other adult actors something to do other than to be foils for the kids. And presumably to give Connie a break.
Like some wonderfully odd bookend to "Cabaret" (and the order in which I saw these was no accident), we move to 1938 and the movement of the Nazis from Germany to Austria. Like "Cabaret," the presence of the Third Reich is more overt than in some earlier productions of these materials. THe bad guys don't even need black hats when they have red armbands.
The kids, selected from thousands and thousands, I hear, are terrific. I credit the source material as much as the actors, here; I think the parts are written well. And although you have seen this whole thing play out so many times before, it is a credit to the script and the actors and the music that you simply want to see it again, to make sure it turns out alright... sort of like Santa's visit.
The sets are complex and well executed. They solved the problem of the mountain in a terribly interesting way. The Abbey set is a textbook testimony for the impact that good lighting has on a stage.
Cheers, London.
