I’m sitting here very surprised, and I know we’ve only had one runthrough, just how disappointed I am with the Azeri staging. The stage itself is absolutely bang on. We open on Elnur and a solar eclipse. It looks great. Mystical. Lovely. And then, about 30 seconds in, they introduce the interpretative dancers and it just breaks the mood totally. It’s probably very nice interpretative dance, I’m no expert. But it just looks… distracting. Mood breaking. Whisper it quietly…slightly silly.
I like silly. I’m a great fan of silly. I will never disdain silly. But you know, there’s a time and a place for it… If they weren’t there, if it were just him singing perfectly well enough in front of a subtly developing backdrop, I’d be a heck of a lot more impressed with what I just saw and freely bandying about phrases like “top table”. As it is, it’s a top 10er but probably not much more than that. Oh well.
[EDIT – it *does* look better when you get dry ice floating around the stage. Still, though.]