Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily,
REVISITING GROUNDHOG DAY AGAIN… AND AGAIN
The experience of Groundhog Day, the 1993 film comedy in which a weather forecaster finds himself reliving the same day over and over again, has entered the vocabulary to describe the deja vu of finding oneself reliving an identical experience.
Now, the musical version is itself creating its own Groundhog Day as it returns to the Old Vic, where it premiered in 2016, for another welcome run.
I was at its final performance on Broadway when it closed, after an all-too-short run, in 2017 (in its last week, I saw it three times); and on Saturday, I was at the first preview for its return to London now. (I’m also booked into the first night and the last night already, and I know there will be more visits to come! (I saw it ten times during its original Old Vic and Broadway runs).
Obviously this isn’t a review — that will come after it officially opens on June 8 — but this show is, in my view, already a modern classic, and one that speaks to me with unparalleled personal power, hence my total identification with it.
You can’t change the past (unless you slip into a parallel world) — but you can have a different future. That’s the message of the journey that weatherman Phil Connors undergoes, as he finds himself literally stuck in the same day, day after day after relentless day. For me, that is a direct metaphor for depression — as a long-time sufferer, I recognise this intensely: that each day feels much like the one before, until the depression finally breaks and you feel like each day offers fresh possibilities again, instead of an endless rehashing of past miseries.
But more than that, GROUNDHOG DAY is also a show about how we can choose different outcomes for our lives; and seeing it again on Saturday, six years after it closes after an all-too-short Broadway run, I hope I can predict a very different outcome for its future this time, based on my own transformative experiences!
My own life has changed immeasurably in those six years which also lends the show an even more powerful resonance. In 2019, I suffered another prolonged bout of depression, that lasted from May that year to October 2020. But during that time, I also found the gift of recovery in a 12-step programme that allowed me to finally confront and deal with the demons of a lifetime of family trauma.
As I used the tools of the programme to come out of denial about the effects of my dysfunctional family upbringing, I became liberated to know that it was within my power to learn to re-parent MYSELF, and to free myself from the shame and blame of the past.
I was finally released from hoping for the approval of a father who had long rejected me, and to have this rejection officially confirmed by him when he emailed to tell me that my husband and I would spend an eternity in hell crying for forgiveness because “homosexuality is an abomination against [his] God”, it was a truly liberating moment. Like my mother, who ended her 63-year marriage to him three weeks before she died, so she could die with my brother and myself and our respective partners beside her instead of him, I was now finally set free of him.
I’ve been able to actively CHOOSE a new future. Just as Phil Connors does, too, in GROUNDHOG DAY, when he lets love into life — as well as creativity (when he learns the healing powers of playing the piano) and altruism (when he looks out for his fellow man and rescues a homeless man from dying in the cold).
SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY
My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-may-22-2023/
Openings this week include a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1989 musical ASPECTS OF LOVE (at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue on Thursday) and Maureen Lipman bringing her solo performance in Martin Sherman’s ROSE to the West End, after runs at Hope Mills in Manchester and London’s Park Theatre (at the Ambassadors on Friday).
See you here on Friday
I will be here with my usual Week in Review(s) column again this Friday, looking back over the reviews and news highlights of the previous seven days. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)