Day 26: The Real Thing
First, an announcement: as of last night, I am madly in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is the perfect Annie in the current Broadway production of The Real Thing - spirited, intelligent, full of life and passion, shame-free. There is a certain essence of deep calm in her take on the character, but she still conveys Annie as a sort of a fundamentally young revolutionary soul. It's a stunning performance; if you don't fall for her by the end, I'm not sure we're watching the same show. ♥__♥
Ewan McGregor's Henry is quite the sympathetic portrayal of a character who says a bunch of things on stage that could render him SUPER unlikable - and he achieves this by playing him as affable, young-hearted, and also a bit... well, blank. When Annie tells him: "To you, [Brodie] can't write. To him, write is all you can do," it sounds believable enough; when Henry later says his moral system is whatever Annie thinks is right, we can buy it. And, after a number of examples of his own sophistry, delivered with skill but debatable conviction (to say the least), it feels quite right to see him twisting inside the cyclone of love - the one writing topic that poses such a challenge to him, and a clear (though never stated) example of a thing defined by one's perception rather than objective reality. McGregor plays him as arrogant but not superior, which is a generous take on Henry... and I'm sure the actor's innate charm also helps. :)
Cynthia Nixon is fantastic; I'm not quite sold on Josh Hamilton's performance, but it might just be a matter of recalibration (much like the young woman who plays Debbie). Oh, and the Q&A session after the show was utterly delightful: the audience questions were somehow not cringe-worthy, and the cast members replied with great humor and sweetness. It's such a lovely, lovely group. (Btw, they confirmed Stoppard has been giving his input early on during rehearsals, and has made some changes to the script to make it work better for an American audience. Cynthia Nixon, who was in the Broadway premiere of the play 30 years ago, joked that he'd approved of some of the changes he already made for that production, and declared about others that he'd never written such a thing. GAH!!! :D)
Finally, I LOVE the use of music in this production - the actors/characters singing together at the beginning and the end, throughout all the set changes, and along to the diegetic music played during various scenes. The playbill included the list of songs used in the production, so I'm sharing them below (click on the tracklist image to DL):
Enjoy!