Elvis’s songs in stage adaptation of the movie “Cold War”

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Elvis talks about the rehearsels: https://youtu.be/l0S96qyysd0?si=851zlw6l03IUZJ63

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Interview with Conor McPherson (behind paywall): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/wha ... interview/

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https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/thea ... JtAQj9E8d0

Cold War at Almeida Theatre review: Pawel Pawlikowski’s doomed love story, brilliantly translated to the stage

There’s cold weather, alcohol and fights, but that’s about as Christmassy as this exquisitely sad love story between two Poles adrift in postwar Europe gets.

It’s been adapted sensitively by Conor McPherson from Pawel Pawlikowski’s award-winning 2018 film, the folk music of the original augmented with new and existing songs by Elvis Costello. But to call it a musical would somehow denigrate the atmospheric mournfulness of Rupert Goold’s production, strongly led by Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon.

It begins with composer-conductor Wiktor (Thallon) and his choreographer partner Irena (Alex Young) tabulating folksongs and dances in rural Poland. They, along with coarse Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey) are producing a touring show to preserve national pride in a country invaded by Nazis and now under Soviet sway. Then Wiktor clocks sultry, sullen, powerfully melodious Zula (Chalotra).

The heat of this new passion cools when the orchestra is pressed to perform new songs in praise of Stalin and agricultural machinery across the Warsaw Pact countries, and a mood of paranoia deepens. On a visit to Berlin, Wiktor defects but Zula is prevented by the watchful and adoring Kaczmarek. When the couple reunite in Paris years later and try to restart their romance and their shared musical ambitions, they realise they can’t live in or out of Poland, or each other’s company.

After the lusty burst at the start we hear snippets of the folk tunes Wiktor has adapted for Zula in Paris alongside Costello’s simple, plaintive compositions. The songs punctuate rather than dominate, accentuating emotion rather than carrying it. McPherson sometimes makes explicit what’s implied in Pawlikowski’s film, particularly regarding Wiktor’s wartime shame, but the script has the understated pathos that characterizes much of his finest works. Goold makes us feel the years of degradation behind the doomed love story.

Levey plays Kaczmarek as a faux-ebullient cockney fixer, while Chalotra’s character is all Midlands-accented anger – Zula once stabbed her abusive dad – except when deploying a lovely, crystalline singing voice. Thallon gets to sing less, but his modulated bourgeois diffidence is perfectly suited to Warsaw boy Wiktor’s apathetic self-loathing. Sometimes, here, you want to shake the character. Zula is full of active energy, Wiktor mostly passive.

Goold’s production is vividly designed, embracing bright peasant garb and left-bank boho chic, Iron Curtain apparatchik offices and smoky, spotlit clubs. Choreographer Ellen Kane gives us windmilling rural dances, a spiritedly drunken jive to Rock Around the Clock, and a take on the famous Madison routine from Jean-Luc Godard’s Band a part. I didn’t have any of this on my dance card for theatre in December, but Cold War is a brilliantly bitter antidote to standard Christmas fare.

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https://www.thereviewshub.com/cold-war- ... re-london/

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https://www.whatsonstage.com/news/cold- ... zTG6oy1J1w

[Man out of Time]

Five star review by Fiona Mountford in i News published today.

"Cold War, Almeida Theatre, review: One of the best plays of 2023

The theatre opened 2023 with one of the stage highlights of the year, A Streetcar Named Desire, and with this it ends the year in the very same way

Rupert Goold, director and magic-maker extraordinaire, has teamed up with playwright Conor McPherson, creator of the exquisite Girl from the North Country, for another superlatively resonant “play with songs”. These plangent songs, not to be outdone by all the other creative credentials flying about, are by none other than Elvis Costello.

McPherson has taken Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 Oscar-nominated black and white film about Communist-era Poland and stylishly fleshed out its sparse screenplay, while steering rightly clear of the twin traps of over-emphasis and over-explanation. It’s an abrasive, down-the-decades love story between Zula (Anya Chalotra) and Wiktor (Luke Thallon), the former an emotionally direct singer and the latter an emotionally fugitive composer.

The pair meet in 1949 via an initiative from the Culture Ministry, to create a troupe performing traditional Polish songs and dances. Zula is successful in the audition and will thus be offered, according to plain-speaking ministry apparatchik Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey), “clean clothes, three meals a day and unlimited political instruction”.

The troupe, dancing with ferocity and singing beautifully, goes on to tour Eastern Bloc countries and romance blossoms in this time of secrets and subterfuge until, in a distinctly The Third Man-esque atmosphere, Wiktor flees to the West.

This small but mighty piece takes on, with unflagging sophistication, mighty themes – the sacrifices we make for others, the decisions we take that benefit only ourselves – and asks the towering existential question: what, or where, is freedom?

Chalotra is all fire and passion, her raw and real voice packed with feeling for each song. “I Do”, Zula’s signature number, is woven sinuously throughout the show, as she pushes Wiktor for the sort of mighty declaration of love that he is incapable of giving. Thallon eloquently suggests a melancholy man seething with undeclared dreams and desires.

In Jon Bausor’s pitch-perfect design, the stripped-back walls of the Almeida beautifully evoke the run-down aura of Communist-era Poland, with piles of rubble at the side of the stage reminders of the terrible wartime destruction the country suffered.

With the assistance of Paule Constable’s muted lighting to evoke the film’s tenebrous colour palette, the drabness of post-war Poland gives way to the slinky louche-ness of Paris, where Wiktor plays piano in a range of late-night clubs.

The Almeida opened 2023 with one of British theatre’s shows of the year, Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and with Cold War it ends the year in the very same way.

The venue produces hit after unstoppable hit – this is simply exquisite.

To 27 January (020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk)"

Interesting that the reviewer describes Elvis' songs as "Plangent". Plangent Visions Music Ltd. was a publishing company owned by Jake Riviera back in the day, and credited on a string of Elvis' albums from TYM through to Spike.

MOOT

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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/ ... lo-almeida

Cold War review – Conor McPherson follows doomed love across eastern bloc

Luke Thallon and Anya Chalotra are the lovers in this adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film, with Polish folk music and Elvis Costello songs

In Conor McPherson’s first play since the Bob Dylan-laced The Girl from the North Country, pianist and musicologist Wiktor (Luke Thallon) meets Zula (Anya Chalotra) while touring postwar Poland collecting folk music for a state-sponsored show. These songs tend to concern either love or the devil, which rather sets the tone for this tale of amour fou. Zula, who is not the simple mountain girl she claims to be, is enjoined to spy on her new beau by apparatchiks; Wiktor harbours a devastating secret that explains his walled-in emotions. Their first duet even broaches the topic of deceit: “You may say I don’t lie / But I do.”

Over the next few decades, their paths crisscross in Europe and the eastern bloc, their passion persisting as it is bent out of shape by guilt, jealousy and political upheaval. Rubble, jagged wood and bullet-scarred brick is always visible on Jon Bausor’s set even when the stage is transformed by Paule Constable’s crisp lighting design into a recording studio or bebop club. This is a love in disrepair before it has really begun.

Zula teases Wiktor for limiting himself to arrangements rather than original compositions, what she calls “going over old ground for new potatoes”. In adapting Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film, McPherson has harvested a nourishing if carb-heavy crop. The music, too, is repurposed, whether Polish and Lemko folk or a smattering of Elvis Costello numbers, including the ominous I Want You. The score never overwhelms the action (this is no musical), but nor does it quite invoke Zula’s passion for song.

Pacing is also a problem for director Rupert Goold. Pawlikowski’s film concertinaed more than 20 years into an elliptical 88 minutes, so it is perhaps inevitable that the material, necessarily lugubrious in nature, feels unhappily protracted at times.

Cast members stick pleasingly to their assorted British dialects, Death of Stalin-style; the tour manager Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey), for instance, comes across as a Del Boy-esque wheeler-dealer. Chalotra, a dead ringer for Penélope Cruz in looks and volatility, explores fearlessly the depths of Zula’s pain. The bookishly handsome Thallon captures the haunted aspect of a man fleeing his own propensity for cruelty, and waging war on himself.

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Cold War at the Almeida Theatre – Reviews

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https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/cold ... pert-goold

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article ... avic-gloom

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https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2023/1 ... ge-review/

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Four-star review by Helen Hawkins published at The Arts Desk on 15 December, 2023:

"Cold War, Almeida Theatre review - compelling bittersweet tale of love in post-war Europe
Beautiful Elvis Costello songs and stirring music underpin a fine adaptation

There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its plot is driven by the same Lara/Yuri dynamic, of an overwhelming love affair trying to outflank the forces of history. Now it's been adapted at the Almeida as a play-with-music by Conor McPherson, with lush songs by Elvis Costello, directed by Rupert Goold. It’s not remotely Christmassy, though offers a gift of no ordinary kind.

The Polish lovers who consistently find themselves confronting the fault line dividing post-war Europe are Wiktor (Luke Thallon) and Zula (Anya Chalotra). At the start, Wiktor is a musical purist, a pianist-composer trained in Warsaw who is now gathering folkloric materials in the Polish countryside with a lover, Irena (Alex Young), overseen by a functionary from the communist party (Jordan Metcalfe). Into one of their recording sessions comes Zula, whose motives for auditioning are probably mercenary. But she has a strong voice and a certain something; the dance moves, as she dismissively points out, she can easily pick up.

Wiktor is smitten. He stays with the touring troupe even after Irena is cast aside for refusing to compromise the artistic aims of the project. She argues that the cultural heritage these songs provide, even if every drunk peasant sings them, are all they have to cling onto now. But the official in charge wants a showcase for the virtues of important Soviet exports such as Land Reform and agricultural machinery. Zula and Wiktor strike up an almost screwball, argumentative relationship, she feisty and down to earth, he able to escape reality in a Chopin nocturne, but both insanely in love.

It seems as if Zula is being set up as the “new” post-war Poland, a strong woman going flat out in survival mode, even if it means dressing up in national costume for the troupe’s shows, where a giant portrait of Stalin becomes the backdrop. She is also having to fend off Kaczmarek (a suspiciously avuncular Elliot Levey), the troupe’s manager, an arch ducker-and-diver. Wiktor’s dreams, though, do not involve writing songs about tractors, and he devises a plan to walk with Zula across the border into West Berlin when the troupe visits the city. (This is in 1952, when such things were still possible.)

When Zula doesn’t join him, the wheels are set in motion for their romance to stop and start, jerked between Soviet conformity and Western "imperialism". Wiktor is initially embedded in bohemian life in Paris, Zula marries an electrician from Palermo, a move she claims to have made purely because it allows her to travel legally outside the USSR and search for Wiktor. But the stakes grow higher, the sacrifices more cruel, for would-be travellers across the eastern bloc’s borders. Zula emerges as the more committed to her cultural heritage and less enamoured of the dog-eats-dog West. And, in her way, also more heroic.

The poignancy of this love affair is underpinned by beautiful music of all kinds: the simple a cappella duetting and stirring choruses of Poland’s folk tradition – hats off here to the Warsaw Village Band’s contributions –with great dancing to match (choreography by Ellen Kane), but also the winsome melodies and punchy lyrics Elvis Costello seems to have on tap. One song, I Do (Zula’s Song), a wistful number about going to a crossroads that threads its way through the piece from the outset, is a signal to those who loved the film that this adaptation is not going to fudge its plot.

The rural scenario described in that song is not one the staging attempts to replicate, thankfully. The unadorned space is set up to hold a curtained stage withiin a stage for the troupe’s shows and Zula’s later solo performances. There's a baby grand on wheels that's often centre-stage and rickety furniture to the side, all in a dreary, crusty dark-grey/brown, with occasional appearances of a mobile platform (the impressive design is by Jon Bausor). Paule Constable’s subtle lighting adds to the “distressed” feel, and in one memorable concert scene, provides a spotlight effect in which the thick dust motes are almost palpable.

McPherson’s adaptation is 100% faithful in patches, taking whole passages of dialogue from the film. But he also fleshes out characterisation with chunks of his own devising, giving Wiktor, for example, a long speech to Zula about an older lover he abandoned in his youth, an act of cowardice that has preyed on him ever since. He may or may not be an informer, even a one-time Nazi collaborator: all McPherson innovations. (Informing is standard in this society, and Zula openly indulges in it.) What Zula does to save Wiktor from lengthy imprisonment is also tweaked, in a rather unhelpful way. These changes make the main characters less enigmatic – and less surprising – than their counterparts in the film, especially Wiktor, who emerges as a weaker man, not just a man made vulnerable by passion.

These quibbles will matter not a jot to those who haven’t seen the film. The two leads are still engaging opposites in a heartbreaking relationahip: Chalotra, a Carmen type, moody but direct and purposeful, who as a singer is unafraid to pursue Costello’s vocal lines up the stave; Wiktor, a gently teasing lover but a diffident, sensitive man with a melancholy core, who can’t pursue the musical life he thought he would have, let alone the woman he wants to be with. Nightclub jazz and film scores are his lot now, whores his drunken solace.

Light relief comes from Levey’s almost music-hall comicality; whereas Irena is looking to record songs about pain and humiliation, he wants the music of victory. (Zula shows her modernity by choosing an audition song from a Russian movie.) McPherson has also added some dumb American producers as backers of the French film Wiktor is scoring, loud and blowsy types who try to rewrite his music and liken Wiktor to “Sho-pan”. It’s a bit cheap, as are the jibes about his film not being understandable as it’s French.

What the piece forcefully communicates, though, is the serious pain of statelessness and of not knowing where you belong, a sadly perennial theme. It gives the couple’s romance a bittersweet kick, without destroying its tenderness.

Cold War is at the Almeida Theatre until 27 January "

MOOT

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The 10 best plays of 2023

Cold War at #4

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Elvis Costello didn’t aspire to write a musical. Accidents will happen.
Adapted from an Oscar-nominated film, ‘Cold War’ marks the British singer-songwriter’s London theater debut
By Peter Marks

LONDON — Elvis Costello sat down one day to watch a rawly affecting Polish film about a troubled romance in the early days of the communist takeover of that Eastern European country. He ended up with the seeds of a musical.

“Cold War,” based on the Oscar-nominated 2018 movie of the same title by Pawel Pawlikowski, is now a stage production that developed inexorably out of the British singer-songwriter’s love of the film, and a song he wrote in response to it, even though musical theater was hardly his jam.

Under the direction of Rupert Goold, and with a book by Conor McPherson, the work that has evolved is the latest excursion by a star of popular music into the world of show tunes, and one that justifiably earns the adjective “distinctive.” For “Cold War” is a fascinating hybrid, constructed not only out of new melodies by Costello, but also out of extant Costello songs, as well as from the traditional Polish folk music that figures in the plot.

“I think it’s important to remember that the music is in a balance,” Costello said, in an interview. “It’s a play, supported by music, and music is within the story. But it’s not a musical. So the music really is no more important than any other components — on the whole as essential, I suppose, as lighting or costumes.”

Despite Costello’s insistence, “Cold War” — now playing at London’s Almeida Theatre, with Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon as the Polish country girl with a singular talent and the choral director who falls in love with her — is a musical. It’s just not a musical that came together in anything like a traditional way. Which is in keeping with a theatrical form that is mindful of convention, but also always looking to remake itself.

“So it’s a mixture of Polish music from the film, Polish music not from the film, including new music that was rediscovered and remade by a modern Polish rock-folk group,” Goold said, sitting in Almeida’s offices in Islington. “Then there are songs that Elvis wrote in response to the movie. And then there is a little bit of Elvis’s back catalogue, and then a little bit that he wrote for the show.”

Given the eclectic inspirations in the 69-year-old musician’s own career, “Cold War” feels like exactly the sort of musical in which Costello would participate. Whether it enters the entertainment mainstream remains to be seen. The London reviews have been admiring, if measured: In Time Out’s London edition, Andrzej Lukowski, who gave it 4 out of 5 stars, wrote that it was funnier and longer than the movie, “with a gorgeously weary nocturnal quality replacing the crisp black and white cinematography.”

The interest of recording artists in repurposing their music for the theater continues on both sides of the Atlantic. Alicia Keys recently debuted her autobiographical musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” at off-Broadway’s Public Theater, with a transfer to Broadway confirmed for the spring. And at Arena Stage in Washington, the Avett Brothers have boosted their theater fortunes with a well-received mounting of “Swept Away,” starring John Gallagher Jr. and Stark Sands, with music from the group’s rich songbook.

None of these conforms strictly to the genre of jukebox musical, which more often hangs flimsy showbiz stories on the catalogues of rock and folk groups and singers. The added depth to an adaptation of “Cold War” seemed predestined with the sign-on by Goold, a noted British director who runs the Almeida, and McPherson, a playwright who adapted Bob Dylan’s music for the successful Broadway musical “Girl From the North Country.”

“This whole show is partly due to the spark of Elvis, connecting with the movie and contacting the filmmakers to talk about it,” said McPherson. “And you know, you realize that Elvis in the last couple of decades has been writing songs which are very much in the very traditional, old-fashioned songwriting tradition, I think going back to the Gershwins and Cole Porter, which not many pop stars do.”
Once McPherson understood that, he realized how the melodic threads of the story could make sense. “I was like, ‘Oh, I see. Okay, so we can have the Polish folk music, and then as they move into the Jazz Era, and they moved to Paris, Elvis’s songs can definitely flower.’”

With Pawlikowski’s blessing, the stage adaptation closely follows the plot of the movie, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including best director and best foreign-language film. It charts the meeting of Chalotra’s Zula and Thallon’s Wiktor in post-World War II Poland, as he auditions singers for a chorus founded to highlight Indigenous Polish music and the socialist government’s propaganda. The story, which follows the couple to the West, is a microcosm of the tragedy of a Poland wallowing in hardship and paranoia.

For Costello, being a cog in a theatrical production has been invigorating. “It’s a lovely experience,” he said, and far different from the kinds of performances he’s assembled up to now. “I did recently do a 10-night stand in New York, and I did a different set every night, because I wanted each night to have a distinct mood. So I don’t have much theatrical experience, but because I do that night to night, that is a kind of drama.”
And to find that something he wrote years ago might illuminate drama in a new fashion — particularly in such a collaborative project — is itself exciting.
“It doesn’t really alarm me in any way, even if a song disappears from a scene,” he said. “Because, as I say, the important thing is the whole, and the cohesion of the story.”

Cold War, music by Elvis Costello, book by Conor McPherson, based on the film by Pawel Pawlikowski. Directed by Rupert Goold. Through Jan. 27 at Almeida Theatre, London. almeida.co.

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Many thanks to all at the Almeida Theatre and many congratulations to the cast and crew and all concerned with this wonderful run of “Cold War” ⁦
@AlmeidaTheatre @ElvisCostello
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