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In Which We See Tarzan
Jul. 30th, 2017 07:05 pmWe closed out the season at Berkeley Playhouse this afternoon with Tarzan: The Stage Musical. It was entirely meh.
I can't totally blame the Playhouse, because it was a real dog of a show. The problem starts with its plot, which is all over the place. It's a story about a boy avenging his parents death! (And oh boy, the start of the play is gruesome with the killing of said parents by a leopard on stage and later the killing of that leopard.) No, it's about an outsider finding his own family. No, it's about an abusive adoptive parent. No, suddenly at the end of Act I, it realizes that it's a Disney play and it rather quickly introduces an insipid romance. No, it's about bad guys destroying nature. Then the big finale is about Tarzan finding out who he was, which was literally only an issue for one song, far far earlier in the play. There is no through line, and the rapid-fire introduction of all these various elements meant there was no real characterization and no real plot development along the way. (OK, a little bit, mostly about Tarzan and his ape mom.)
And the messaging is often troublesome as well. I mean, we know that Disney romances are going to be utterly unrealistic and offer bad modeling for young adults, but Jane falling in love with someone she can't even communicate with, mainly because he's mostly naked all the time ... that's horrifying. And then after a play that was mostly about finding family, Tarzan and Jane are totally OK with Tarzan abandoning that family, until he's guilted into staying by his abusive adopted father's death. And then Jane leaves her family, and that's totally OK and not even commented on, because she's the woman. Meanwhile, the ape-murderer is just wheeled away in a cage like it's no big deal (which turns out to be a [BAD] change from the movie.)
And the music, it's almost totally soulless and unmemorable. (I kind of liked "I Need to Know", which was the one thing that tied to Tarzan's who-I-am finale, but mainly because its tune reminded me of Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower")
SIGH.
The actors actually weren't great either, though that might have been the poor source material. The young Tark was superb: gymnastic, emotive, and enthusiastic. But she appears in one scene. The older Tark was pretty good too, but his relationship with Tarzan was one of the things that notably suffered in this horribly truncated script. Jane was the third best, but beyond that we're getting into "OK" land. (There wasn't anyone bad, because this is the Berkeley Playhouse, but just a lot of "fine".)
The best performers in the play? Actually the back-up dancers, who did many awesome, acrobatic dances. And when the backup dancers are the best thing about the play, that's a bad sign.
The Playhouse was trying to figure out how to make their Tarzan as "immersive" as the Broadway experience, and they did so by making heavy use of their center aisle and their side aisles. At one point we had a snarling leopard swinging mere feet from us. Kimberly wasn't doing entirely well during the play and was not pleased when apes, having looted the Porter camp, ran up our aisle and tried to encourage her to bang on a metal mixing bowl. No amount of frantic shaking of her head deterred the apes. I finally had to rescue her by leaning over and giving the bowl a ba-bam.
And that was Tarzan.
Next up Sister Act, which I'll have to see early on, before life becomes some amount of busy in October.
PS: The most memorable song of the day was actually Schoolhouse Rock's "Three Ring Government", which we listened to while walking to the Playhouse after talking about how Trump doesn't play well with others and thinks he's the boss of the whole gov't. I thought it kind of sad that a cartoon song overshadowed a whole Broadway play until I learned that it (and many other Schoolhouse Rock songs) was written by Lynn Ahrens, who went on to become the broadway composer of Seussical (our first, excellent Berkeley Playhouse play) and Ragtime (which is showing next year and I'm now enthusiastic about).
I can't totally blame the Playhouse, because it was a real dog of a show. The problem starts with its plot, which is all over the place. It's a story about a boy avenging his parents death! (And oh boy, the start of the play is gruesome with the killing of said parents by a leopard on stage and later the killing of that leopard.) No, it's about an outsider finding his own family. No, it's about an abusive adoptive parent. No, suddenly at the end of Act I, it realizes that it's a Disney play and it rather quickly introduces an insipid romance. No, it's about bad guys destroying nature. Then the big finale is about Tarzan finding out who he was, which was literally only an issue for one song, far far earlier in the play. There is no through line, and the rapid-fire introduction of all these various elements meant there was no real characterization and no real plot development along the way. (OK, a little bit, mostly about Tarzan and his ape mom.)
And the messaging is often troublesome as well. I mean, we know that Disney romances are going to be utterly unrealistic and offer bad modeling for young adults, but Jane falling in love with someone she can't even communicate with, mainly because he's mostly naked all the time ... that's horrifying. And then after a play that was mostly about finding family, Tarzan and Jane are totally OK with Tarzan abandoning that family, until he's guilted into staying by his abusive adopted father's death. And then Jane leaves her family, and that's totally OK and not even commented on, because she's the woman. Meanwhile, the ape-murderer is just wheeled away in a cage like it's no big deal (which turns out to be a [BAD] change from the movie.)
And the music, it's almost totally soulless and unmemorable. (I kind of liked "I Need to Know", which was the one thing that tied to Tarzan's who-I-am finale, but mainly because its tune reminded me of Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower")
SIGH.
The actors actually weren't great either, though that might have been the poor source material. The young Tark was superb: gymnastic, emotive, and enthusiastic. But she appears in one scene. The older Tark was pretty good too, but his relationship with Tarzan was one of the things that notably suffered in this horribly truncated script. Jane was the third best, but beyond that we're getting into "OK" land. (There wasn't anyone bad, because this is the Berkeley Playhouse, but just a lot of "fine".)
The best performers in the play? Actually the back-up dancers, who did many awesome, acrobatic dances. And when the backup dancers are the best thing about the play, that's a bad sign.
The Playhouse was trying to figure out how to make their Tarzan as "immersive" as the Broadway experience, and they did so by making heavy use of their center aisle and their side aisles. At one point we had a snarling leopard swinging mere feet from us. Kimberly wasn't doing entirely well during the play and was not pleased when apes, having looted the Porter camp, ran up our aisle and tried to encourage her to bang on a metal mixing bowl. No amount of frantic shaking of her head deterred the apes. I finally had to rescue her by leaning over and giving the bowl a ba-bam.
And that was Tarzan.
Next up Sister Act, which I'll have to see early on, before life becomes some amount of busy in October.
PS: The most memorable song of the day was actually Schoolhouse Rock's "Three Ring Government", which we listened to while walking to the Playhouse after talking about how Trump doesn't play well with others and thinks he's the boss of the whole gov't. I thought it kind of sad that a cartoon song overshadowed a whole Broadway play until I learned that it (and many other Schoolhouse Rock songs) was written by Lynn Ahrens, who went on to become the broadway composer of Seussical (our first, excellent Berkeley Playhouse play) and Ragtime (which is showing next year and I'm now enthusiastic about).