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sophia_sol) wrote2013-09-09 08:00 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2013-09-09 08:00 pm
(no subject)
Mara asked me last night whether I like Elisabeth or Romeo es Julia better, and I was momentarily stymied. I hadn't actually thought about it like that before! I've just been busily fanning over both!
It turns out to be something of a complicated question for me. Because first of all, my ideal production of Elisabeth doesn't exist, whereas my ideal production of Romeo es Julia pretty much does. And second of all, they're actually really different from each other? I like them in different ways!
On a purely music level I like Elisabeth better. Although there are certain songs from R es J that I adore, I think Elisabeth maintains greater consistency of excellence.
My liking for Elisabeth is made more challenging because it is based on real life history, and productions from different countries necessarily have different interpretations based on the experiences of that country. And I really know so little about European history from that time period that I don't even know enough to understand what different productions are saying about the real-life events and people. But despite this, the story is so powerful and the characterisations so powerful that I am able to connect with the musical anyways.
By comparison, R es J is a very ahistorical retelling of the already rather ahistoric Shakespeare play. It's set in....Verona as a dystopic semi-modern semi-not-modern city? Or something? with a lot of fire and a lot of leather. It's not trying to say anything about history-that-was, so I don't need to know anything about Actual Verona to follow the nuances. I can be sure that I am catching pretty much everything, as long as I pay close enough attention -- whereas with Elisabeth, it doesn't matter how much attention I pay, some stuff WILL be going whooshing over my head.
For some people that may be a detraction from Elisabeth? But I actually don't mind that lost-at-sea feeling, and in fact kind of enjoy it. It's like reading a novel when you haven't read earlier books in the series; it's like reading a fanfic for a source you're unfamiliar with; it's like reading a book written a long time ago or from a different culture than yours. The creator has understandable expectations of the knowledge set of the audience, and you the reader/watcher/listener/consumer have to just roll with it. It's fun! (...maybe this is how I get my narrative tension kicks since I don't like suspense about how things will end? idk!) (I come by this honestly. My mother is the sort of person who will read the second half of a book first, and then read the first half.)
What all this means is that although I love Elisabeth, I don't entirely understand it. Whereas I do both love and understand R es J.
Another difference is that with Elisabeth, the cast of characters-I-actually-care-about is very small, and restricted mostly to the main characters. Whereas with R es J I find myself caring about EVERYBODY. This might actually be related to my previous point about not understanding Elisabeth -- because I don't understand so much, I really only know enough to care about the characters who get the most explication over the course of the musical. Whereas in R es J I don't have that bound.
Another difference is that in R es J I SHIP A LOT OF THINGS and most of those ships are tragic/couldn't be anything but tragic but BY GUM I WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY. (...look, everyone in this musical has intense chemistry with everyone else, enough that even I notice. WHAT ELSE AM I TO DO but ship?) Whereas in Elisabeth my feels are not actually about romantic/sexual relationships hardly at all.
(...Another difference is that I am rather alarmingly into a character from Elisabeth (Szabo P Szilveszter's Death in the Hungarian production) in a really unsettling "if I were capable of experiencing sexual attraction I'm pretty sure that is what I would be feeling right now but I am not so instead my emotions are really confused" kind of way)
Anyways, it's kind of weird that these two musicals are fannishly linked to me, because really they are so different from each other. But they're so linked for me that I actually regularly get confused about which one I am talking about/intending to talk about! Like: of course R es J has Death as a major character, of course Elisabeth is set in a fiery dystopia, stuff like that.
In conclusion I don't know if any of what I just wrote was at all coherent but LA LA LA POSTING IT ANYWAYS.
(also I need to figure out a better way to label this fandom for me because "sparkly hungarians" only covers part of it)
It turns out to be something of a complicated question for me. Because first of all, my ideal production of Elisabeth doesn't exist, whereas my ideal production of Romeo es Julia pretty much does. And second of all, they're actually really different from each other? I like them in different ways!
On a purely music level I like Elisabeth better. Although there are certain songs from R es J that I adore, I think Elisabeth maintains greater consistency of excellence.
My liking for Elisabeth is made more challenging because it is based on real life history, and productions from different countries necessarily have different interpretations based on the experiences of that country. And I really know so little about European history from that time period that I don't even know enough to understand what different productions are saying about the real-life events and people. But despite this, the story is so powerful and the characterisations so powerful that I am able to connect with the musical anyways.
By comparison, R es J is a very ahistorical retelling of the already rather ahistoric Shakespeare play. It's set in....Verona as a dystopic semi-modern semi-not-modern city? Or something? with a lot of fire and a lot of leather. It's not trying to say anything about history-that-was, so I don't need to know anything about Actual Verona to follow the nuances. I can be sure that I am catching pretty much everything, as long as I pay close enough attention -- whereas with Elisabeth, it doesn't matter how much attention I pay, some stuff WILL be going whooshing over my head.
For some people that may be a detraction from Elisabeth? But I actually don't mind that lost-at-sea feeling, and in fact kind of enjoy it. It's like reading a novel when you haven't read earlier books in the series; it's like reading a fanfic for a source you're unfamiliar with; it's like reading a book written a long time ago or from a different culture than yours. The creator has understandable expectations of the knowledge set of the audience, and you the reader/watcher/listener/consumer have to just roll with it. It's fun! (...maybe this is how I get my narrative tension kicks since I don't like suspense about how things will end? idk!) (I come by this honestly. My mother is the sort of person who will read the second half of a book first, and then read the first half.)
What all this means is that although I love Elisabeth, I don't entirely understand it. Whereas I do both love and understand R es J.
Another difference is that with Elisabeth, the cast of characters-I-actually-care-about is very small, and restricted mostly to the main characters. Whereas with R es J I find myself caring about EVERYBODY. This might actually be related to my previous point about not understanding Elisabeth -- because I don't understand so much, I really only know enough to care about the characters who get the most explication over the course of the musical. Whereas in R es J I don't have that bound.
Another difference is that in R es J I SHIP A LOT OF THINGS and most of those ships are tragic/couldn't be anything but tragic but BY GUM I WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY. (...look, everyone in this musical has intense chemistry with everyone else, enough that even I notice. WHAT ELSE AM I TO DO but ship?) Whereas in Elisabeth my feels are not actually about romantic/sexual relationships hardly at all.
(...Another difference is that I am rather alarmingly into a character from Elisabeth (Szabo P Szilveszter's Death in the Hungarian production) in a really unsettling "if I were capable of experiencing sexual attraction I'm pretty sure that is what I would be feeling right now but I am not so instead my emotions are really confused" kind of way)
Anyways, it's kind of weird that these two musicals are fannishly linked to me, because really they are so different from each other. But they're so linked for me that I actually regularly get confused about which one I am talking about/intending to talk about! Like: of course R es J has Death as a major character, of course Elisabeth is set in a fiery dystopia, stuff like that.
In conclusion I don't know if any of what I just wrote was at all coherent but LA LA LA POSTING IT ANYWAYS.
(also I need to figure out a better way to label this fandom for me because "sparkly hungarians" only covers part of it)
no subject
Hmm, I suspect there are actually a fair number of layers to R és J that are only accessible if you speak Hungarian, but it's more--on the level of missing Hugo or Shakespeare puns and double meanings (e.g. I think Mercutio is possibly more gay and less bi than he comes off in the subtitles, and almost everything he says is wordplay), more than missing a WHOPPING BUNCH OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
But yeah, you've kind of nailed why Elisabeth fascinates and frustrates me (and I don't know what my ideal production would look like, except it would have Szilveszter Death and I'm disturbed by the intensity of my attraction to him in that role, in a way I can't really describe, although I think for different reasons than your disturbance). With Elisabeth I feel like I can keep digging deeper and deeper and filling in more of the context; with R és J I'm more...all about the AU possibilities and the sad doomed relationships.
Also I now desperately want an AU of Elisabeth set in a fiery dystopia. *makes note for Yuletide letter* And I should finish Tybalt/Death fic because Death should totally be a major character in R és J, but Death in a sexual context is...almost impossible for me to get a handle on, because he's so alien.