fangs for the memories
It finally happened: I finally found a French theater piece that delighted me, entertained me, made me laugh, made me gasp and didn't make me pee my pants. (There was an intermission, thank the theater gods.)
It probably comes as no surprise to those who know me that the piece that finally won my heart is a musical, but the fact that a French musical won my heart surprised even me. (I haven't been the biggest fan of French theater while we've been here—check out this post to find out why...)
The piece that has set my heart on fire is none other than "Le Bal des Vampires," a campy rock musical directed by Roman Polanski (yes, that Roman Polanski) based on Polanski's 1967 film of the same name (called "The Fearless Vampire Killers" in the U.S.). As you might imagine, the show is full of blood, outlandish makeup, smoldering looks, mild raunch and a score that blows your hair back. (The music was written by Jim Steinman and Michael Kunze.)
What makes the musical such a riot is that it manages to walk that fine line between ridiculous and realistic (well, as realistic as a musical about an undead vampire capturing a young woman and turning her and her faithful companion into undead vampires at a fabulous undead ball can be). The acting is outsized but not clownish. The costumes are miraculous but functional. The sets are so lavish that Joshua and I leaned over to each other at nearly the same time to say, "They must have so. much. money." And the music. Ah, the music.
One of the ballads that gets many, many reprises in the show made my ears perk up with recognition from the very opening strains. That sounds like—exactly like—no, it is "Total Eclipse of the Heart." With new words. My brain raced with questions: How did they get the rights to rewrite such an iconic rock ballad? Why would they have wanted to incorporate such a well-known piece of music into such a different context? Why this song, when the canon of rock ballads is thick with classics? Were there other repurposed songs in the score that I just hadn't recognized?
By the fourth time the song was being sung—by a cast of incredibly strong and versatile vocalists, I must add—I figured that there had to be more to the story, so I Googled the heck out of the show when I got home. Lo! and behold, composer Jim Steinman not only poached the song, he poached it from the best source I can imagine: himself. He's an American composer and lyricist who's written tons of songs for Meat Loaf, Barry Manilow, Air Supply, Celine Dion...and Bonnie Tyler, famed for her rendition of Steinman's song "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
What I found upon even more digging further enchanted me: Steinman had originally written the song to be a kind of vampire love ballad in the first place. When interviewed about the song's inclusion in the musical, he said, "That was an accident almost. I'm surprised it stayed in. [For the original production] in Vienna, I had only a month and a half to write this whole show and we needed a big love duet...But with Total Eclipse of the Heart, I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was Vampires in Love because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark. And so I figured 'Who's ever going to know; it's Vienna!' And then it was just hard to take it out."
The show is chock-full of other Steinman melodies, if not lyrics (those were done by German writer Kunze, who signed on to turn the Polanksi film into a German-langauge musical in its first incarnation as "Tanz der Vampire," which premiered in Vienna in 1997). Somehow, the fact that the show is based on a foundation of modern rock songs rewritten to fit late-19th-century Eastern Europe makes me love it even more.
For those American musical theater lovers, you may be wondering (as I did) why this weird little bloodthirsty gem hasn't made it stateside yet. Well...it has, but the mounting of the Broadway production was so full of creative cock-ups, actor meltdowns, rewriting nightmares and producing snafus that it only ran for 56 performances before closing on January 25, 2003—becoming one of the "costliest failures in Broadway history," according to The New York Times.
There were no such problems in Paris, however, especially considering Polanski was allowed to direct the show, something he was not allowed to do in America. (Polanksi is nationalized French and was born in Paris, but he's worked all over the world. In 1977, he was arrested in Los Angeles for unlawful sex with a minor and he fled to Europe, where he's worked primarily ever since. If he sets foot on American soil, he'll be required to answer for his crime.) Rocky directorial history aside, the German show was translated into French and premiered here in Paris around Halloween of last year. Because of its smash success, it's still playing—which is how I was able to see it for Valentine's Day four months on.
I plan on seeing the show as many times as my bank account will allow because it's that wonderful rarity of theater: funny, not too deep but not flimsy, well-done, visually and aurally stunning and just generally a bloody good time. It's something you can really sink your teeth into...
BY POPULAR DEMAND
I have a confession to make: I haven't written a blog post on this site for nearly two months (which you'll probably be able to tell by taking a glance at the side bar—last post: December 18). I've been very flattered to receive questions—and some downright demands—about my next posting both online and IRL (a frightening acronym if ever there was one, but that's for another blog...), but I have another confession: I just haven't felt like writing in a while.
As many of you who have a smartphone, tablet, computer, radio, television or eyes and ears are probably aware, the satirical Parisian newspaper "Charlie Hebdo" was the subject of a terrorist attack on January 7th. While the event was not directly connected to anything in the city save a decades-old grudge against a paper that prints things in very poor taste—which incited a heinous act in even poorer taste, resulting in the deaths of many—it brought Paris to a standstill. Growing up post-9/11, I'm no stranger to living in a country that's constantly on the lookout for potential terrorists, but experiencing the fear and fervor in France was new to me. New and very scary.
Joshua and I happened to be out on a television project (I'll announce it soon, though some of you already know—and the secrecy seems ridiculous) that very week, Wednesday through Sunday of the attack on the paper, the subsequent shooting of the policewoman, the hostage situation and killings at the Jewish deli and ensuing manhunts. We were being driven by van all over the city to various neighborhoods, both ones in which we've lived and ones we've only ever seen on foot, which was both a reassuring and damning experience. It was reassuring because, while reports of pandemonium and further terror threats splashed across headlines all over the world, we were seeing firsthand many of the places tourists were being told "not to go under any circumstances" due to riots, demonstrations, violence and the like. The reality was infinitely weirder than the headlines made the atmosphere out to be. While there was indeed a very large march in the Place de la République (which throughout history has played host to almost weekly demonstrations, though none have topped this one for the sheer number of participants), the rest of the city was back to business as usual in a matter of hours. Yes, police presence had been stepped up and menacing "Vigipirate" (the French version of the terror alert system) signs had been posted at all schools, monuments and government buildings, but otherwise, people were still going to work, flooding the metros, walking their dogs, eating food. Almost nothing had changed...only everything had changed.
What Joshua so astutely observed while we were trying to make sense of our altered milieu is that what had been affected was not the actual safety of the majority of Parisians—17 people dying (gruesome though it was) out of a population of 2.2 million puts the percentage of carnage in acute perspective—but rather the sense of perceived safety that we all take for granted every single day. Sure, I occasionally think about the fact that the metro I'm riding might be carrying a bomb—terror acts aren't usually announced until they're, y'know, detonated—but otherwise, I take for granted that, due to sheer mathematics, the likelihood is that I won't be affected in my day-to-day life. What the terror attacks did was raise the tension in the city to such a palpable level that it felt like everyone was expecting bombs to rain down from the sky at any moment, blanketing the city in chaos and carnage like never before. The reality was that three sick individuals decided to take their hatred and anger out in a violent manner and were subsequently pursued and killed. End of story. Or is it?
The problem with sensationalism is that the 24-hour news cycles need fodder, and when something frightening and terrible happens, they milk that fodder for all it's worth until all that's really being recycled is fear, not facts. That same week, thousands of people were killed in the Nigerian city of Baga by Boko Haram, considered the group's deadliest attack to date. But here in France, at least, all that we kept getting blared from the news outlets was "Je Suis Charlie" (and, if you had a good eye, "Je Suis Ahmed," a phrase proclaiming solidarity with the slain Muslim police officer who tried to stop the terrorists—an overlooked figure when you consider the widespread backlash that occurred for Muslims across the country, since the media can't seem to differentiate a few bad seeds from an entire religion).
The upshot of all of this information—it seems to be flooding out of me now that I put fingers to keyboard—is that the idea of writing this blog for the past couple of months has seemed frivolous at best, fraudulent at worst. Who am I to discuss the hijinks and hilarity of living as an American in Paris when I've never felt more like a foreigner in my life? I'm not French. I felt no loyalty to the slain cartoonists—though I certainly don't think they should have been killed—but I also think a march of 4 million people to decry a relatively minor event in the grand scheme of world politics is a little silly. World leaders who have refused to share the same conference room in the past were suddenly holding signs proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" side-by-side as they marched down the street with millions of fellow outraged citizens. Again, I think the killings were despicable, but I think the fact that the conversation about what makes angry, marginalized people so desperate that they would commit such an act—France is notoriously terrible to its immigrants, especially if those immigrants happen to be poor—is even more troubling. Je ne suis pas Charlie. Je ne suis pas Ahmed. Je suis triste (sad).
We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of humorous tales from beneath the Tour Eiffel tomorrow, but for now, thank you for taking the time to read this and for being so eager to read my musings. Sometimes being an American in Paris is not all it's cracked up to be, and it would have seemed disingenuous to continue writing about my usual comings and goings as though nothing had happened. Sometimes life intervenes.
