Animal Farm, the musical
Feb. 12th, 2003 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidYes, you read right, musical.
Starting with what we saw first, the set. The set sloped back to front, all wooden slats for a floor (that turned out to have some trapdoors built in). There were bales of hay about, rafters with ropes and other sorts of barnlike things about. There were little tiny cubes of hay bales by the edge of the stage, keeping the audience from walking on it accidentally (The stage tends to be flush with the floor in this theater space.). There was lighting, yellow curves that looked like grain. The back of the set was more wooden slats, that turned out to have doors and other apertures worked in them, and a space behind that showing sky and grain growing. The set was well-designed.
The costumes were amazing. They were all masks/puppets of some sort, all different sorts, each actor wearing a drab tunic and pants as well as the specific animal/person pieces. All the people were exaggerated, with enormous hands, masks, hats, oversized implements. Slightly creepy faces, too. The cat was on two sticks, so it could get into the rafters, and the raven was on many more sticks, so the huge wings could move. The sheep were four heads on a rack of some sort carried by one person. The pigs were all heads worn in front of the chest, attached to the arms as well as the shoulders, as the actors crawled around (seriously heavy-duty knee pads!). The dogs were all extremely over-sized head-encompassing pieces. The goat and the donkey had necks and heads coming out of the actors' torsos, with sort of merry-go-round pegs out of their skulls for the actors to hold on to. My favorites, though all were good, were the chickens and horses. The actress who did the chickens wore them on her feet (chicken slippers, almost), keeping her feet in motion to keep them pecking at things. The horses all had big masks over their heads, including long manes, and had sticks with some kind of cones at the bottom that made clip-cloppy sounds. Really cool. Oh, and the costumes included appropriate tails for everyone.
All of the actors included appropriate animals sounds along with the dialogue, which worked.
There were three narrators, one of whom also played the keyboard for the musical pieces. I hadn't reread the book before the show, so hadn't remembered it, particularly. I'd forgotten just how much of a morality play it is, really, about people's responsibilities, and how abdicating them leads to leaders who become corrupt.
I was impressed with the whole performance, the later lighting, the costumes, the songs. There were a few glitches with narrators speaking at the same time when they shouldn't've been, bits of the set that didn't quite cooperate as they should've, but overall, a wonderful performance.
o
Starting with what we saw first, the set. The set sloped back to front, all wooden slats for a floor (that turned out to have some trapdoors built in). There were bales of hay about, rafters with ropes and other sorts of barnlike things about. There were little tiny cubes of hay bales by the edge of the stage, keeping the audience from walking on it accidentally (The stage tends to be flush with the floor in this theater space.). There was lighting, yellow curves that looked like grain. The back of the set was more wooden slats, that turned out to have doors and other apertures worked in them, and a space behind that showing sky and grain growing. The set was well-designed.
The costumes were amazing. They were all masks/puppets of some sort, all different sorts, each actor wearing a drab tunic and pants as well as the specific animal/person pieces. All the people were exaggerated, with enormous hands, masks, hats, oversized implements. Slightly creepy faces, too. The cat was on two sticks, so it could get into the rafters, and the raven was on many more sticks, so the huge wings could move. The sheep were four heads on a rack of some sort carried by one person. The pigs were all heads worn in front of the chest, attached to the arms as well as the shoulders, as the actors crawled around (seriously heavy-duty knee pads!). The dogs were all extremely over-sized head-encompassing pieces. The goat and the donkey had necks and heads coming out of the actors' torsos, with sort of merry-go-round pegs out of their skulls for the actors to hold on to. My favorites, though all were good, were the chickens and horses. The actress who did the chickens wore them on her feet (chicken slippers, almost), keeping her feet in motion to keep them pecking at things. The horses all had big masks over their heads, including long manes, and had sticks with some kind of cones at the bottom that made clip-cloppy sounds. Really cool. Oh, and the costumes included appropriate tails for everyone.
All of the actors included appropriate animals sounds along with the dialogue, which worked.
There were three narrators, one of whom also played the keyboard for the musical pieces. I hadn't reread the book before the show, so hadn't remembered it, particularly. I'd forgotten just how much of a morality play it is, really, about people's responsibilities, and how abdicating them leads to leaders who become corrupt.
I was impressed with the whole performance, the later lighting, the costumes, the songs. There were a few glitches with narrators speaking at the same time when they shouldn't've been, bits of the set that didn't quite cooperate as they should've, but overall, a wonderful performance.
o
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-12 11:36 am (UTC)My only gripe is that they took it out of England, but that's a pretty minor gripe.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-12 11:42 am (UTC)Oh, yeah, it was weird that they changed the words of the song "Beasts of England" to "beasts of our land" without changing the title of the song in the program. Though I suppose there are legal issues with doing that.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the wanting-to-be-a-Firebird sneakers you noticed.
Credits
Date: 2003-02-12 01:35 pm (UTC)(No, I'm not going to put the info about everyone in the production, but I realized it felt strange not to mention the writers/creators of the piece.)
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