[...falling slowly, sing your melody, i'll sing along...]

lisez moi en français !

hello !!

first of all, for all of you who had guessed i'd spend my precious day off at Broadway : congrats, yes i did. as soon as i got to NYC, i rushed towards the neon lights

but, first thing first : Leena went to her first day of kindergarden on friday, everything went great, she took the bus, like a big girl.
then Tara and i went to the Guitar Center in Springfield, and i bought myself a new guitar !!
happy audrey !


Saturday we had the block party, so we ate, talked and socialized, and so on, it was kinda nice. the neighbours are all very kind and they all get along so well, everybody knows everyone's life.
the party ended at Michelle & Sal, the next door neighbours, they had lit a brasero in their garden
so we made smores.




now, i don't know about all of you international people, but french people don't know what a smore is.
so for those you, like me, had no idea of what was coming, here it is :


a smore is a marshmallow that you melt over the fire. nothing special here, everybody does that.
but we are in america here, so the marshmallow is pressed between two crackers and some chocolate, in a nice little sandwich, called a smore.
and that's fucking good

So the next day, i got up early and ready to go spend my day off in the City. 10min of car to Summit, jumping in the train, and 50 min later (aka 50 pages of Game of Thrones, time just flew), there i am, in Penn Station, 5 min away from Times Square.

which was perfect, since the "Tkts" booth, selling at a discount rate the last tickets for the day's perfomances, is on Times Square.

dear reader, if you are one of my friends, it very likely that you've heard me ramble about and/or that i have at some point made you watch my favourite movie : Once

if you've never seen this movie, do watch it. it's really good.
also it's kind of necessary to the complete understanding of this article.

i have watched this movie a million times, i am a huge fan of Glen Hansard, i have all the soundtrack on my ipod and all the sheet music in my folder
i love the fact that most of the movie has been shot in Dublin streets, and in the actors' own houses, not in studios, i love that all the accents are real, and i love that when Glen Hansard plays a song in the movie that his character has written, well he really has written it himself.

well, it so happens that Once has been adapted as a musical so i thought that i really had to go see it...

i thus waiting on the line at the booth and managed to get a ticket with 50% discount. the only problem with the stand is that the available tickets are not always in the section that you'd like aka for me : the cheapest (aka the worst seats)
i still had to pay 77$ (yes i put almost half of my week's salary in Broadway, i don't see the problem), but i had a freaking great seat


to be honest, i was quite doubtful about it...would Broadway manage to keep the Irishness of the story ? would it handle the Irish/Check language-barrier well ? would the character of the Girl be played by a real Check actress ? Would the actor playing Guy be able to fill Glen-freaking-Hansard's shoes ?

well the actor playing the Guy (yeah, the two main characters aren't named at all during the story. so in the synopsis they are referred to as Guy and Girl), is none other than Arthur Darvill, whose most famous role is Rory Williams, in the BBC series Doctor Who

i love Rory. no problem there. he even is my favourite companion of the Doctor's. Arthur Darvill is great....
...but he is BRITISH. not Irish. so, yeah, doubtful.

since i had a looooot of time before the show, i wandered around New York
 

then went to get a Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks (really disappointing)

then went on the line and to my seat.



the actors were already on the stage, which is highly unusual, and they started playing and singing traditional Irish songs in a kind of jam session, like a pre-show, as people were taking their seats.
the actors were grinning and laughing and playing with each other and dancingin an irish pub-like atmosphere ; fiddles, guitars and raw voices...

the scene is set inside a pub.

this pre-show transitioned seamlessly into the beginning of the show, and the lights dimmed in the audience as Arthur Darvill started his first solo, paying himself the main guitar (the other musicians started joining and playing harmonies mid-song)


Of course, seeing anything that you like being adapted to another media means accepting the editing that goes with it.
as a whole, the transfer from movie to musical is a success. it's an excellent musical.
there was no orchestra behind the scene like in every other show : the actors were the musicians, most of them played several instruments, they could dance and play at the same time, the musical and vocal arrangements were superb....in a nutshell, here is a bunch of very talented people

Arthur Darvill was simply incredible. his interpretation of Guy was slightly different that Glen Hasard's, and not so different from Rory, sometimes a bit afraid to dip his toe and in need of the nudge of the Girl, who sometimes makes choices for him.
his acting was flawless, but it's everytime that drama let the scene to music that he would really leave me with my mouth hanging open : his take on the songs was of course different than Glen Hansard's, but just as emotional. he is a really good guitar player and a fucking amazing singer !
(even if i was kind of waiting to see how he would handle the angry crying on "When your mind's made up", but they sang it all together rather than as a solo)
anyway, i was afraid that the Guy would be played by some opera-trained singer that would lose the rough, almost hoarse, irish touch...well that wasn't the case and Arthur Darvill sounded AMAZING on those songs

  unwelcome changes : 

- accents :
Arthur's Irish accent was ok. he sometimes would had some colloquialisms like "meself", "me da" to remind the audience that he was supposed to be Irish, but as a whole, it was alright
on the other hand, the girl was bad. she was a british actress acting as a Check girl who speaks broken english with a strong accent.sometimes she would forget she was supposed to be Check and she would pronounce words correctly and then she would make up for it by over-accentuating her Rs and Hs..
 i am pretty sure there are dozens of slavic or germanic actress that could have played the Girl with a real accent...

- the story :
 i am completly ready to accept that for the sake of the story, they can't have a million different settings, and thus Guy and Girl meet in a pub rather than in a street.
there are other changes that were really weird...
like why make the Guy's ex-girlfriend move to New York instead of London ?
why replace the fact that he left her because she cheated on him by her moving to the states for job reasons ??? 'cause then his anger and pain seem kind of unfounded, if he loved her so much, he could just have gone with her.
the fact that the musicians that help him record a demo tape are the Girl's friends from Check Republic rather than random street musicians was ok, the irish-check frienships were actually kind of nice.
adding songs ? no problem with me. but not at the expanse of the songs from the movie !!! 
no "You must have fallen from the sky"?
no "Trying to pull myself away"?
NOT EVEN "All the way down" ??????

 -subtitles
using subtitles for the check characters was a really really good idea
making the actors speak english with check subtitles to make us understand that they are supposed to speak check though was a terrible terrible idea.
i kind of works when you only have check characters on stage, but when you have irish and check characters at the same time on stage, check characters alternating between the two languages, it was a bit of a mess
knowing who understood or didn't understood what or whom was kind of a tough odreal

this mess could have been avoided by having the check characters speak check with english subtitles for the audience. nice and easy.
 




-Girl : 
this is my main note. i think they really lost the character of the Girl
because they play facing a live audience, you have to create a bond and most of the time, you do it by making the audience laugh
they did it really well with the owner of the music shop : he has 1 line in the film, and here he becomes an important character, part of the band, in love with the girl and jealous of the Guy
on the other hand, they did not manage the transition of the Girl into a comical device very well. they took her constant honesty in the film and pushed it to the extreme, turning her into a caricature and losing her heart. from sincere, she becomes tyrannic.
i really could bring myself to like this character, while i love Girl in the film. she was lacking Markéta Irglová's sweetness. hence i had trouble understanding how Guy could fall for her.
and i didn't like her interpretation of If you want me
 Up the Hill was great though, i have to give it to her...

a couple notes, then, but really it is a must-see
really
i am so glad that i went, and that i had such a great seat. i had an amazing time
standing ovation and tutti quanti
i think that when you don't have the film in head, it's a completly different experience : all the people i talked with had never seen the film, and have loved the musical
as for me, i really liked the musical, but i still think the film was better

  you can watch here [x] the commercial clip with the original cast

  and here [x] Arthur&co in the scene where they record "When your mind's made up"

  and then: tadaaaam : curtain calls !!
all the actors came one by one and signed our playbills, and all of a sudden : Arthur !!
he was just adorable, he signed everybody's playbill, he was super kind and thanking us for coming

i got to talk to him, so i said
 "filling Glen Hansard's shoes is not an easy task, and you have done it superbely"

and he put his hand on his chest and thanked me and he look touched

i got a picture with "Rory" !!!

i didn't wanna leave just yet so i just stayed around, listening to Arthur's beautiful british accent as he kept signing and thanking everyone
and i'm so glad i did
'cause here what happened
there were only 4 or 5 people left in the line and all of a sudden his silver felt-tip pen stopped working, so he shaked it to get the ink to go down but the pen was leaking and he realized he had silver ink all over his fingers and on the strap of his bag
he looked at his fingers and went "oh, i'm turning into a robot"
and then, faster than the wind, i grabbed my tissues and offered him some, and that's the story of how i saved Rory Pond from an ink attack.

this picture was taken about 15seconds before Arthur started turning into a cyborg

the moral of this story ? always keep tissues on you, you never know which celebrity is going to decide that shaking a liquid pen is a good idea