Last night we saw Bad Jews at the Arts Theatre. I was excited to see it, since it's a British production of a play about NYC Jews. I wanted to see how the production differed and how a British audience reacted to it.
It was indeed a fascinating experience, but the production was terrible. (Jon liked it more than I did.) For those of you that have seen Bad Jews, below are my reasons for disliking this production: (character refresher--Daphna is the religious one who wants Poppy's chai, Liam is her cousin who wants to use Poppy's chai to propose to his girlfriend, Melody is the Gentile girlfriend, and Jonah is Liam's taciturn brother):
-Liam's American accent was laughably bad. I mean, I literally laughed at it. He constantly slipped into an English accent, and not even in a consistent way. His pronunciation and his speech rhythm were so all over the place that I found it baffling that he was actually being paid to say words. I would've preferred if everyone in the show just spoke with their English accents with no explanation. I can suspend my disbelief when the production deliberately ignores authentic dialects completely, but listening to someone murder American pronunciation for ninety minutes just constantly took me out of the story.
-Daphna was super stiff and uptight--and SO SHRILL. And everything she said! Had the same rhythm! And it was all here! At the top of her voice! It made moments when she was supposed to be more relaxed and joyful seem really inauthentic--it was like she couldn't take herself out of that super rigid space.
-Melody was a complete caricature. Instead of being a fairly simple but good-hearted woman, she was a 2-dimensional "ditzy American" stereotype. The moment where she's telling the cousins that they can't talk to each so nastily because "everyone is a human being" was played for laughs ("You can't, like, talk to her like that, because everyone...is a human, being!")--as opposed to the original production, where it's a moment when a kind person is genuinely trying to instill some civility into the conversation. It was never played for laughs in NYC and it never occurred to me that it should be.
-There was excessive slapstick. Super weird.
-There was a bunch of long pauses that had no business being there. Is this a British thing? I swear the show was twenty minutes longer than it needed to be.
-The set was stupid. The explanation for why it was stupid is boring, but trust me, it was stupid.
-Jonah was fine, but the moment at the end where he reveals his tattoo to Daphna was played as this BIG DRAMATIC DRAWN-OUT MOMENT WITH LOTS OF BUILD-UP, which did not make any sense (and was out of character for Jonah).
-The audience laughed a lot less than the NYC audience. To be fair, the house was smaller. I don't know how much of the difference can be attributed to American vs. British senses of humor, American vs. British tendency to laugh out loud, and how much of it was just that this production was bad.
-A couple interesting notes: the audience reacted with very heavy groans when Daphna said, "Of course, my grandfather got a tattoo, but that was different--it wasn't his choice." So probably casually mentioning the Holocaust goes over differently here. Also, my favorite line--"She looks like she was conceived and f*cking live water-birthed at a Talbots"--was a total throw-away line that got very little reaction. They do have some Talbotses here, but maybe they're not well-known? Or maybe, you know, the actor and director were not good.
We continue to eat at restaurants and discover new Britishisms. For example, waiters keep whispering at us. We don't know if it's because British waiters like to whisper or if it's because they're afraid Americans will be too loud and whisper to re-calibrate our personal volume settings. Also, restaurant and store employees will often pass you off to another employee by asking you to "see my colleague." It makes every transaction seem super fancy.
Tonight we went to an American BBQ restaurant and celebrated our independence! I did not enjoy the food, Jon did. Between bad Bad Jews and bad barbecue, we're kind of done seeing how English folks do American things. Tomorrow we're planning on seeing the London Eye and then we'll catch the World Cup finals. USA! USA!
xo
Hannah
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