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chuckroI saw a stage production of Catch-22 in the village with Jethrien and my mother yesterday. It was an interesting attempt, and with one exception, I can't find any significant fault in the actors, the casting, or the sets.
Now, first to note: I love the book. It's one of my all-time favorite books, along with Einstein's Dreams and Good Omens. The thing is, it's a long and densely-packed book. It has lots of characters, each with at least a snippit of subplot, most with enough to fill a chapter and warrant mentions elsewhere. You can't cram all of that down into a two-hour show, not even if you speak really fast. Which means that you have to whittle down the book into a main plot and whichever subplots you deem most important.
The problem with this is twofold: First, the main plot of the book is disconnected and fragmentary to begin with, which means that when you pull out the "main" Yossarian scenes and put them together, you end up with the Cliff's Notes version of the story, but without the explanatory bits that tell you what you missed. It has the same problem as Dracula: The Musical did, that it doesn't make sense if you haven't read the book. The subplots they picked (Milo and Nately's Whore, with passing references to Orr and essentially a cameo by Major Major) have similar problems of losing too much detail in translation--there's almost a "why do we care about this?" feel.
(Along those lines: They folded Sheisskopf's role into Cathcart, and dropped both the great loyalty oath crusade and the moving of the Bologna map-line, which meant they could eliminate Major _____ de Coverly. De Coverly is the driving force of the "God is dead" theme, which meant the coversation between Yossarian and Nurse Duckett about the nature of god was kinda standalone and seemed out of place and preachy.)
But the bigger problem is that the story of Catch-22 isn't the point. The fact that Milo bombs his own squadron is a notable part of the plot, but the event isn't what's meaningful, the theme behind it is. You could do Catch-22 with space marines fighting xenomorphs and a Martian name Y'sar'n as the protagonist, but it could still be truer to the novel than a straight-up plot reconstruction if it keeps closer to the themes of the book: That war is a black comedy, a farce ruled by petty bureaucrats and profiteers, each scene more rediculous than the last and holy god his intestines are all over me and he's bleeding out and I can't save him.
Instead, they couldn't get the comedy up and running because they were too busy trying to match the scenes from the book, and utterly failed at making Snowden's death a "wham" scene by using what was obviously canned tomatoes. The best description I can give was that they translated the book into a play when they should have localized it--they needed to adapt the themes to the stage, and then rebuild the plot around them.
Overall? Meh. Glad I saw it, but would not buy again.
Now, first to note: I love the book. It's one of my all-time favorite books, along with Einstein's Dreams and Good Omens. The thing is, it's a long and densely-packed book. It has lots of characters, each with at least a snippit of subplot, most with enough to fill a chapter and warrant mentions elsewhere. You can't cram all of that down into a two-hour show, not even if you speak really fast. Which means that you have to whittle down the book into a main plot and whichever subplots you deem most important.
The problem with this is twofold: First, the main plot of the book is disconnected and fragmentary to begin with, which means that when you pull out the "main" Yossarian scenes and put them together, you end up with the Cliff's Notes version of the story, but without the explanatory bits that tell you what you missed. It has the same problem as Dracula: The Musical did, that it doesn't make sense if you haven't read the book. The subplots they picked (Milo and Nately's Whore, with passing references to Orr and essentially a cameo by Major Major) have similar problems of losing too much detail in translation--there's almost a "why do we care about this?" feel.
(Along those lines: They folded Sheisskopf's role into Cathcart, and dropped both the great loyalty oath crusade and the moving of the Bologna map-line, which meant they could eliminate Major _____ de Coverly. De Coverly is the driving force of the "God is dead" theme, which meant the coversation between Yossarian and Nurse Duckett about the nature of god was kinda standalone and seemed out of place and preachy.)
But the bigger problem is that the story of Catch-22 isn't the point. The fact that Milo bombs his own squadron is a notable part of the plot, but the event isn't what's meaningful, the theme behind it is. You could do Catch-22 with space marines fighting xenomorphs and a Martian name Y'sar'n as the protagonist, but it could still be truer to the novel than a straight-up plot reconstruction if it keeps closer to the themes of the book: That war is a black comedy, a farce ruled by petty bureaucrats and profiteers, each scene more rediculous than the last and holy god his intestines are all over me and he's bleeding out and I can't save him.
Instead, they couldn't get the comedy up and running because they were too busy trying to match the scenes from the book, and utterly failed at making Snowden's death a "wham" scene by using what was obviously canned tomatoes. The best description I can give was that they translated the book into a play when they should have localized it--they needed to adapt the themes to the stage, and then rebuild the plot around them.
Overall? Meh. Glad I saw it, but would not buy again.
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Date: 2008-12-21 06:07 pm (UTC)The fact that they had three people raise cans with the labels cut off and dump them on Yossarian would make that obvious, yes.
I still feel like they must have had a point there, but I don't get it. And I don't really feel like that's my fault.
But hey, "Yossarian lives" button.