#GGLAM

[slice-of-rye-bread]

am I the captain of this ship? no. however I am the overeager cabin boy who will be making this ship my entire personality for the foreseeable future.

[dependabledreamboat]

If I had a nickel for every time a British character referred to as “Monty” in a comedy musical set in the 20th century gave me some of the most Intense gender envy I’ve ever experienced and made me want to be a musical theatre performer I would have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

[multidimensionalmusicalmess]

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and the subversion of expectations

I’ve been thinking a lot about GGLAM lately, and I wanted to write a quick post about the way it subverts expectations and why it’s so absurdly funny in a very particular way I don’t see often.

The plot of GGLAM—that is, what’s technically going on—is a tragedy right up until the last ten minutes. We have a poor, disowned man who, to avenge someone he dearly loved, is tempted into becoming a serial killer, in the process still fails to win (again, until the last minute) the girl he loves, and is captured for a crime he didn’t commit and ultimately planned to be executed. You could make a Shakespearean tragedy out of that and nobody would bat an eye.

Except that’s not how the story feels, because those are only the events. Despite having all the plot elements of a tragedy with a protagonist who engineers his own downfall out of a desire for revenge, through several bizarre twists of fate, he simply finds that vengeance is actually what he needed to be happy, gets all the money, and gets both of the girls.

There are also so many individual moments where the show sets up some audience expectation in a very stereotypical way and then just. Ignores it, which is where a lot of the comedy comes from.

For example!

Monty visibly leaves his scarf at Chisolmere, and then immediately worries in voiceover that he might’ve left something behind. Traditionally, this would come back to disadvantage him in the end. It doesn't, however; in fact, it never comes up again.

Monty ends up falling in love with Phoebe, someone whose beloved brother he murdered. We’d expect in any other story that, eventually, Phoebe would find out about this and it would ruin their fairy-tale romance—but Phoebe just never finds out, and ends up helping break Monty out of jail (more on that in a bit).

This is a brief one, but Monty temporarily vacillates over the idea of having to kill Asquith Sr, because he’s grown close to the man who helped him escape poverty. We wonder for a few seconds how he’s going to deal with this—

And then Asquith Sr. dies of a heart attack and Monty immediately shrugs and moves on, moral quandary forgotten by both him and the story.

Something similar happens with Lady Hyacinth—after being the hardest to kill, she shows back up again, and you wonder briefly if that might cause problems, but she dies in the very same twenty-second scene.

Now, none of this is especially unique; the show is a farce, after all. However, there's another layer of misdirection, because GGLAM not only subverts the conventions of non-comic stories, but of the ironic tone it sets up itself, particularly in act two.

In act two, we meet Adalbert and Eugenia D'Ysquith, the present earl and countess of Highhurst—and they're absolutely miserable in the position that Monty is trying to attain for himself. Adalbert clearly has PTSD, and while this is (successfully) played for laughs, his behavior calls into question the straightforward nature of Monty's quest for revenge. Essentially, seeing a character miserable in the position our protagonist is aspiring towards begins to create the expectation that Monty is simply trapping himself in an ironic cycle whereby he takes the place of the D'Ysquith family and inherits all of their miseries with it.

This is furthered by Chauncey's scene. This is a personal favorite of mine; in it, Chauncey (the janitor in Pentonville Prison) reveals himself to Monty as a D'Ysquith, and, when asked by Monty if he's never felt ill-treated by the family, says "They don't even know me. I ain't got none of the advantages of being a D'Ysquith, but I ain't got none of their troubles neither." This scene is just dripping with the energy of a moral lesson; Monty, on the eve of his probable execution for his crimes in the name of attaining a title and avenging his mother, meets a man in nearly the exact position Monty himself started in, who elected not to pursue anything ambitious and ended up content anyway. The obvious implication is that Monty has made nothing but trouble for himself with his actions, and will end up just another miserable rich person even if he isn't executed.

Immediately after that, this tone is compounded by Phoebe's arrival, during which (in direct response to Monty's expressed optimism, no less) she bursts into tears at the revelation that Sibella loves Monty. The love triangle has been revealed, and seemingly had its expected consequences. Everything is falling apart.

It's worth noting when this happens as well. From the beginning, the show has been set within a framing device of Monty's recollections as written in his memoirs, and, immediately after the conversations with Phoebe and Chauncey, that framing device concludes.

The show, however, does not—and immediately after Phoebe leaves in tears upon learning of Sibella's love for Monty, "That Horrible Woman" begins, in which it's made clear that the only reason either Sibella or Phoebe cares about Monty's unfaithfulness at this point is that it'll allow them to get him out of jail. Famously, the love triangle ends not in conflict, but with both women deciding to share Monty (and, we imagine, with the death of one Lionel Holland immediately after the show's conclusion, though that's a personal theory rather than anything specified).

Not only that, but a number of things quickly make clear that Monty is not inheriting the "troubles" of being a D'Ysquith; instead, his release from prison is greeted by cheering crowds and public acclaim, alongside Phoebe and Sibella. Rather than an ironic ending, we get a straightforward one: Monty just gets everything he wants. There are no consequences. Violence and power and the misery of the rich do not beget themselves. Having escaped the framing device precisely when everything looked darkest, we get a literal fairy-tale ending, and we realize that the writers have demonstrated masterfully their knowledge of how a normal story would conclude for the precise purpose of throwing that conclusion out the window. The grandest joke of the show is that the happy ending is not, in fact, a joke.

Of course, one might say that there's still an ironic ending—after all, Chauncey appears in the finale and is implied to attempt to murder Monty, continuing the cycle!

But this is an aftershock of the ending's joke, not a contradiction. Monty feeds Chauncey the belladonna flower from "Inside Out" during the curtain call—after the show has ended. Having constantly evaded any negative consequences of his own actions in the most unlikely and slapstick imaginable ways, Monty concludes the show by one-upping himself and retroactively deleting this particular consequence from outside the boundaries of the story itself. We are shown, once and for all, that the rules do not apply to Montague D'Ysquith Navarro.

Oh, and Chauncey's little segment in the finale also provides a nice twist on the moral implications of his first scene by literally inverting them; rather than Monty realizing the futility of his quest for revenge, Chauncey is inspired to to pursue his own. Luckily for Monty, it doesn't end quite as successfully for him.

[awestruck-atrophy]

save me 2014 broadway operetta a gentleman’s guide to love and murder starring bryce pinkham as monty navarro and jefferson mays as 9 different people who all die

[bowcard]

grian has the same energy as monty navarro from a gentleman’s guide to love and murder send post

[ourdadai]

✿ yuki ꒰ saturday ꒱ lockscreens !

[riggedtrap]

william easton cunty lean / bryce pinkham at the 2014 tony awards

[forthegothicheroine]

Miss Gascoyne with her Utopian dreams about the life of usefulness we were to lead required the natural antidote, and, strangely enough, the first whiff of the perfume Sibella used, wafted to me across the room as she rose to greet me, banished all sensation of ever having been bored by Edith, for I never admired her so much as when I was in the company of Sibella. In the same way I never longed for Sibella to such an extent as when I was with Edith.

Ladies, gentlemen and others, we have a musical number!

[everiistence]

this video is very aptly titled sibella_moment.mp4 in my files. me when the consequences of my own actions fr.

[theatre-nerd-101]

I love how you can always tell what musical I've just finished watching by what I reblog on here. My first instinct after watching ANYTHING is just "alright time to look it up on Tumblr now" and it's starting to get out of hand /nsrs

[slice-of-rye-bread]

Sibella : You know, the sky looks quite beautiful tonight. Monty : Do you know what else looks beautiful tonight? Both, sighing : ~Phoebe~

[songstresstinyteacup]

PSA:

WHEN MONTY GRABS PHOEBE’S HAND TO KISS IT POST-HENRY’S DEATH HE CLOSES HIS FINGERS AROUND HER HAND. THAT IS THE EDWARDIAN WAY TO SIGNAL THAT YOU ARE STAKING YOUR CLAIM ON A WOMAN YOU’RE COURTING AND I JUST-

[sibellanotholland]

Hello, Darlings! Gent's Guide Community Unite! ❤️🪓💗

Now that communities are a concept on tumblr, I've made a little place we can all gather to share our love for this silly little show, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

@@friends-of-monty

From fanfic writer, to actor, to casual listener of the album, all fans are welcome here!

Fans of Kind Hearts and Coronets and the original novel by Roy Horniman are very welcome as well!

Rules: Be kind, have fun, love me in pink, and leave the murdering to Monty!

[ladystrallan]

Here it is...

My academic analysis of Sibella Hallward

I got an A on this btw

@zelds-spellman @isingonly4myangel

[godlessondheimite]

Soft-launching your decade-long theater power couple romance and kids by adding a brief sentence to your Boston Symphony Orchestra profile.

[emsing685]

What y’all know about underrated musicals?