Connnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

[captainsblog]

"This is very nice. It's not what I ordered, but it's very nice."
-Me, one of my all-time snarky comments when served the wrong entree at a fancyass steakhouse once owned by one of my law partners.

You'd think, with a couple of Sherlocks in the cast, that they've have been paying attention to detail. I saw a preview article in the paper a couple of days ago, announcing that our local art-house chain was going to rerun the 2011 NT cinema broadcast of Danny Boyle's Frankenstein. Emily and I had seen it two summers ago at the local Googolplex, and much enjoyed the version with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor. Here, finally, was a chance to see it the other way round- all the better now, since I've become well acquainted with JLM's unique take on the Holmes character and it'd be interesting to contrast how differently they take these roles.

Doing the ticketing this morning, it couldn't have been clearer:

Sunday's show features Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor and Johnny Lee Miller as the Creature.

Monday's show features Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Johnny Lee Miller as Victor.

I'd have preferred the evening show tomorrow, frankly (see what I did there?), but it was the luck of the draw and so I booked a for-sure ducat for me and then a second when Eleanor decided to go, too.  Imagine, then, the sound of other shoes dropping when Emma Freud's intro announced that "tonight's" performance would be, rather, the BC-as-Creature version I'd already seen.

Duh- what was anybody gonna do, walk out on THAT?

I'm actually glad we went. Of the two, I tend to think this casting is truer to what the actors best convey- so I'm happy Eleanor got to see that one of the pair. Plus it brings back the power and sheer artistry of Cumberbatch's Creature-ation; the dance, the running about like a two-year-old, the ever-slight fourth-wall bumps he pulls off in a couple of scenes.  I think it will make the never-seen encore tomorrow that much easier to enjoy.

As we left the cinema (where I heard not a single soul complaining), they had copies of the alt-weekly in the lobby, which I grabbed just to be sure I hadn't been mistaken. As the preview there put it: The Sunday broadcast features Miller as the monster; Monday Cumberbatch takes the role.

Looking back at the man Victor is and the man his creature becomes, it's perfectly plausible to argue that Miller did, indeed, play the more monstrous of the two today.

I will check before ticketing tomorrow just to be sure they are going to run the alternate version at the evening screening. Or maybe, true to Elementary, they'll just run them simultaneously on two separate DVD players.

Comments

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

This appears to be the upcoming shedule for the 617; Frank's not on, but the other ones are coming up:

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/venues/2004133123-coolidge-corner-theatre-the