I HAVE FINALLY WATCHED IT. Thank you so much prinzsorgenfrei for this musical!! Honestly, basically all you have to do is make a musical about, well, anything, and I will have ALL THE FEELINGS about it and I'm so happy to have gotten the chance to watch and understand it thanks to your subtitles! :D Those were a labor of love indeed <3 (And sorry it took me so long to watch -- I've had issues watching anything for the past year (idk why, my bizarre response to 2020 apparently??), and have just gotten to the point where I can do so again.)
So I wrote most of this and then went back and found the discussion with selenak's review (and have added in some replies to that conversation), and was rather charmed to see how much we agreed :) ) (Rheinsberg review is here and here is the original thread; selenak does a much better job of actually summarizing than I do, and this is more of a companion to her review :)
It was interesting coming to this as someone who now knows a little, versus if I'd watched it a year ago, and I was impressed by how historical it actually was! Maybe I just have super low expectations due to the way US entertainment generally treats historical subjects (Hamilton was a notable exception in mostly trying to follow the history and for the most part not over-romanticizing it) but... I loved that we got August the Strong and Grumpkow and Seckendorff and even a mention of Maupertuis :D and that it didn't shy away from what Old Fritz became, and how that contrasted with Young Fritz. (Which really might be American Broadway low expectations on my part? Like, if, oh, say, Frank Wildhorn or Andrew Lloyd Weber (who admittedly isn't American, but same deal) got hold of Fritz' story, I suspect there would be... a lot less of Old Fritz in it.)
I also thought it got a lot of the feel right; the one thing I kind of thought was weird -- besides the big het elephant in the room, getting to that -- was how Wilhelmine was played as basically relentlessly cheery, which was definitely not the impression I'd gotten of her from the memoirs. I mean, there's some libretto textual evidence that she's putting on the best face possible, and also her function in the musical as foil and central relationship with Fritz means it might work better for her to be cheerful -- but it was still a little ?? to me.
I'd purposely tried not to spoil myself by e.g. reading selenak's review beforehand (although I did see enough that Grumpkow/SD was spoiled for me, whoops -- but perhaps for the best, lol), but I'd seen a couple of the clips on youtube that selenak had shown us before. And yet, even having seen the clips I was unprepared for the overwhelming het weirdness of Katte/Wilhelmine and the near-absence of Fritz/Katte or even Fritz & Katte. Like... Katte meets both of them, he's immediately assumed by all three of them to have paired off with Wilhelmine, and then that's... kind of it... until later on Fritz is like "you're my best friend I want to escape with you!!" and I was like "...he is? What happened? Was there a whole scene I missed?" (There was not a whole scene I missed.)
Fritz is definitely played as more into Katte than strictly platonic friendship, but there was absolutely no chemistry or attempted chemistry between them, either romantic or platonic, and not even any really good friendship moments. Some of this was Katte's actor, who seemed almost to be shying away from Young Fritz sometimes, but a lot of it was just the lack of any text. (Contrast Rodrigo and Carlo in Verdi; you could even cut the friendship duet bits of Dio che nell'alma infondere, and act it totally non-slashily, and Act II would still give you no doubt of the friendship between these two.) Which makes it not very resonant at all when Katte is executed, much less as the ghost who is talking to Old Fritz. Knowing the ship history (and thinking of it a bit as a dramatization of mildred's Pulvis et Umbra) I still enjoyed it, I guess. And yet the part of me that was watching it as a self-contained musical was like "...why is Katte here?" and I imagine if you didn't really know the history very well it would not make much sense at all!
(I must admit laughing a bit when they do the letter-play where Katte drops a letter which Grumbkow picks up and gives to FW, and FW is all "Katte has betrayed me!!" Schiller strikes again, I'm betting! :) Or perhaps it's convergent evolution -- after all, it's rather easier, and therefore dramatically sensible, to think of FW feeling personally betrayed by Katte, and letters are a canon-relevant way of getting that information across... but...)
Random bit that totally made me laugh (given how much knowledge about Fritz there was on display, I feel that someone here was having fun):
Old Fritz: I got Voltaire to come see me! He read my poems! [Direct quote from prinzsorgenfrei's subtitles:] And that he came all the way to Potsdam shows how much he liked them! Me: Oh Fritz. Oh Fritz.
I thought Fritz & Wilhelmine was quite well done, and though someone not in fandom wouldn't necessarily come out of the play shipping it (though there was definitely subtext there, which I thought was hilarious), I totally bought their close relationship in a way I didn't buy Fritz & Katte at all. The Wilhelmine scene where she argued with him about wanting Bayreuth to remain neutral was amazing. (And I thought that was a brilliant elision of history; lunch with MT, much as I adore that bit of history, wouldn't have worked nearly as well in a two-hour musical.) And now, selenak, I understand what you meant about the curtsey at the end -- her relating to him as the King she has just submitted to, not her beloved brother, ouuuuch.
And at the very end of the musical, I kinda loved that Katte slipped away during the final trio, leaving Young Fritz and Wilhelmine alone together. Though speaking of incestuous subtext: not only does Katte disappear, no longer coming between the two of them if you know what I mean, but she is wearing a white dress in the finale which I realize is supposed to symbolize that she is dead, but for this American audience member it also LOOKS LIKE A WEDDING DRESS and they're standing up on a platform like two figures on a wedding cake! I'm just saying.
The music was for the most part... selenak called it "workman level" in her review, and that's a good way of describing it; it did the job of making me invested (seriously, make anything into a musical and I will suddenly be emotionally involved in a way I wasn't before) but it wasn't at all memorable. The chorus numbers were for the most part particularly mediocre; often I really like the chorus numbers in musicals, but there was nothing in these that I found melodically or harmonically particularly catchy. The only song I could even take a stab at recalling the melody afterwards is "Sieben Jahr Krieg," which has that as its hypnotic refrain, and especially at the beginning of the song is rather devastatingly staged, with Old Fritz frowning stock-still at his desk in the middle while the chorus-stylized war is swirling around him. (Later in the song they start dancing around, which I think was supposed to evoke the frenzy of war but which I feel didn't work so well.) And I've forgotten that one too, a day later. Oh, and I did very much like the FW and Fritz duet ("Die Schande Preußens") about how Fritz is a disgrace to Prussia because he doesn't like war, etc. -- the neat thing was how FW and Fritz traded their melodic line back and forth, prefiguring the way Fritz takes on FW-like qualities later on. (Though I feel they lost a great opportunity for a callback when Fritz sings about how he's totally going to invade Silesia -- or maybe they didn't; although it's not the same melody as Die Schande Preußens, it's got enough harmonic commonality that on first watch-through I wondered if it was the same tune, which maybe was intentional and if so good job.)
Old Fritz (Chris Murray) is in my opinion by far the strongest singer in the cast; he's really good, with a resonant voice. So good that when it goes from his powerful solo (Ebenbild) to the finale where Young Fritz, Wilhelmine, and Katte have a trio, I had a moment of disorientation of "...why did the singing just get substantially more mediocre? Oh, because Old Fritz isn't singing anymore," which is probably not what you want your audience to be thinking at the grand finale. (I've now gone back and looked at the previous comments and saw prinzsorgenfrei said Bieri (Young Fritz) wasn't having a good day, which yeah, I'd totally buy. But even if he were having a good day, Murray's voice is substantially darker and richer than the others' (in part I imagine just because he's older and his voice has settled), and I don't think that was considered in the transition to the trio.)
Of course, this was the other thing I was thinking near the end:
Everyone in the musical: Old Fritz, you're such a terrible person that you're all alone! Me: What about Fredersdorf?? ...oh, well, I guess he's dead at that point. What about Heinrich? Heinrich: Leave me out of this!
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Friedrich: Mythos und Tragödie
Date: 2021-01-14 05:27 am (UTC)So I wrote most of this and then went back and found the discussion with
It was interesting coming to this as someone who now knows a little, versus if I'd watched it a year ago, and I was impressed by how historical it actually was! Maybe I just have super low expectations due to the way US entertainment generally treats historical subjects (Hamilton was a notable exception in mostly trying to follow the history and for the most part not over-romanticizing it) but... I loved that we got August the Strong and Grumpkow and Seckendorff and even a mention of Maupertuis :D and that it didn't shy away from what Old Fritz became, and how that contrasted with Young Fritz. (Which really might be American Broadway low expectations on my part? Like, if, oh, say, Frank Wildhorn or Andrew Lloyd Weber (who admittedly isn't American, but same deal) got hold of Fritz' story, I suspect there would be... a lot less of Old Fritz in it.)
I also thought it got a lot of the feel right; the one thing I kind of thought was weird -- besides the big het elephant in the room, getting to that -- was how Wilhelmine was played as basically relentlessly cheery, which was definitely not the impression I'd gotten of her from the memoirs. I mean, there's some libretto textual evidence that she's putting on the best face possible, and also her function in the musical as foil and central relationship with Fritz means it might work better for her to be cheerful -- but it was still a little ?? to me.
I'd purposely tried not to spoil myself by e.g. reading
Fritz is definitely played as more into Katte than strictly platonic friendship, but there was absolutely no chemistry or attempted chemistry between them, either romantic or platonic, and not even any really good friendship moments. Some of this was Katte's actor, who seemed almost to be shying away from Young Fritz sometimes, but a lot of it was just the lack of any text. (Contrast Rodrigo and Carlo in Verdi; you could even cut the friendship duet bits of Dio che nell'alma infondere, and act it totally non-slashily, and Act II would still give you no doubt of the friendship between these two.) Which makes it not very resonant at all when Katte is executed, much less as the ghost who is talking to Old Fritz. Knowing the
shiphistory (and thinking of it a bit as a dramatization of mildred's Pulvis et Umbra) I still enjoyed it, I guess. And yet the part of me that was watching it as a self-contained musical was like "...why is Katte here?" and I imagine if you didn't really know the history very well it would not make much sense at all!(I must admit laughing a bit when they do the letter-play where Katte drops a letter which Grumbkow picks up and gives to FW, and FW is all "Katte has betrayed me!!" Schiller strikes again, I'm betting! :) Or perhaps it's convergent evolution -- after all, it's rather easier, and therefore dramatically sensible, to think of FW feeling personally betrayed by Katte, and letters are a canon-relevant way of getting that information across... but...)
Random bit that totally made me laugh (given how much knowledge about Fritz there was on display, I feel that someone here was having fun):
Old Fritz: I got Voltaire to come see me! He read my poems! [Direct quote from prinzsorgenfrei's subtitles:] And that he came all the way to Potsdam shows how much he liked them!
Me: Oh Fritz. Oh Fritz.
I thought Fritz & Wilhelmine was quite well done, and though someone not in fandom wouldn't necessarily come out of the play shipping it (though there was definitely subtext there, which I thought was hilarious), I totally bought their close relationship in a way I didn't buy Fritz & Katte at all. The Wilhelmine scene where she argued with him about wanting Bayreuth to remain neutral was amazing. (And I thought that was a brilliant elision of history; lunch with MT, much as I adore that bit of history, wouldn't have worked nearly as well in a two-hour musical.) And now,
And at the very end of the musical, I kinda loved that Katte slipped away during the final trio, leaving Young Fritz and Wilhelmine alone together. Though speaking of incestuous subtext: not only does Katte disappear, no longer coming between the two of them if you know what I mean, but she is wearing a white dress in the finale which I realize is supposed to symbolize that she is dead, but for this American audience member it also LOOKS LIKE A WEDDING DRESS and they're standing up on a platform like two figures on a wedding cake! I'm just saying.
The music was for the most part...
Old Fritz (Chris Murray) is in my opinion by far the strongest singer in the cast; he's really good, with a resonant voice. So good that when it goes from his powerful solo (Ebenbild) to the finale where Young Fritz, Wilhelmine, and Katte have a trio, I had a moment of disorientation of "...why did the singing just get substantially more mediocre? Oh, because Old Fritz isn't singing anymore," which is probably not what you want your audience to be thinking at the grand finale. (I've now gone back and looked at the previous comments and saw
Of course, this was the other thing I was thinking near the end:
Everyone in the musical: Old Fritz, you're such a terrible person that you're all alone!
Me: What about Fredersdorf?? ...oh, well, I guess he's dead at that point. What about Heinrich?
Heinrich: Leave me out of this!