Joshua Jackson and the supertitles

So last night I saw Children of a Lesser God, and I found the direction and the show to be pretty dull. I was pretty bored, and while I thought some of the performances (Ridloff) were quite good, I was not impressed at all with Joshua Jackson. I found he lacked character and was severely lacking in the charisma department.

Now, if that had been the only problem with the show, I would've walked away with slight disappointment, but I am really pissed at what I saw on stage last night, almost to the point of being offended as an audience member.





A little background for those who have not seen the production: they made the show accessible for the deaf by broadcasting supertitles of the script, which is a fantastic idea, and we even had a talkback with Nyle DiMarco last night, and we had discussed that many more shows should do this in some variation to make broadway more accessible in general to audiences of all types.



So - There was a bit of an issue with the supertitles lining up with with the text in real time, but it was a minor issue. The major issue is that Joshua Jackson was paraphrasing the script the ENTIRE night. Literally every other line was not what was being displayed on the supertitles. He was adding words here and there, substituting words for similar meaning words, he was missing little words, and by the middle of the second act, I was so distracted by his lack of memorization and, TBH, disrespect of the script and playwright, that I couldn't concentrate on the play anymore. I was LIVID!!! I felt cheated and lost whatever respect I had for him. I just wanted to shout out during the show "STICK TO THE SCRIPT"!!!!! This isn't hollywood. You can't just "wing" the lines and editing will take care of it later..... This is a friggin' tony award winning best play, and he couldn't be bothered to LEARN THE TEXT. If it were any other play, I wouldn't have known he was paraphrasing, but the script was displayed for all of us to read along with, so you better learn it verbatim. The rest of the cast did. Why couldn't he? It came off as lazy and amateurish. I KNOW he has a heavy workload in the play, but c'mon, dude. Learn your lines. The playwright wrote those words for a reason, and you're metaphorically spitting in his face.



Has anyone else noticed this issue? does anyone else feel the same way? I don't know If I blame Jackson, or Leon for letting him get away with this bulls***

Updated On: 5/16/18 at 05:57 PM

"The rest of the cast did. Why couldn't he?"

Going out a limb here, how do you know if Lauren Ridloff, who has a similar workload in the show (everyone else had far fewer lines), was sticking to the script precisely? He learned a good bit of ASL, how do we know he's not stating what she said, if THAT differed from the script? (This isn't a knock on her at all, she's fantastic -- just pointing out we don't know all the facts here.)

"If it were any other play, I wouldn't have known he was paraphrasing"

So it's OK if anyone else shows such "disrespect" to the playwright, as long as you don't know about it?

"This isn't hollywood. You can't just "wing" the lines and editing will take care of it later...."

You're right, it's not Hollywood, where you get as many takes as you need to get something perfect. It's live theater.

Updated On: 5/16/18 at 06:13 PM

henrikegerman said: "Do you know the text well and are you quite surethe supertitles are more loyal to the script than Jackson was? Supertitles are quite oftennot taken verbatim from the script. They frequently, as at the Met, are much abridged.
"

This is a good point: the supertitles may not be Medoff's script at all, but a more direct translation of the sign language being used. I hope that this is the case, otherwise, that is quite embarrassing for Jackson. Even in professional theatre, some paraphrasing is likely going to happen, especially when it comes to leading roles in straight plays. It is partly the job of the stage manager or ASM to correct paraphrasing with line notes, because most of the time actors don't even realize they are doing it. However, needless to say, it is ultimately up the actor to learn their lines, and to learn them word for word.

All I know is that when I went to see Streisand live, I was toward the side of the stage, and up where the scoreboard would be for a sporting event, all of her between stage banter and song lyrics appeared verbatim. At first, you couldn't help but see if she went off-script, but at some point, I forced myself to watch the show in front of me and whether she ad-libbed, stuck to the script, or anything else, there was no way to watch the script and experience the performance at the same time. So, I never looked at it again...

henrikegerman said: "What doRidloff's signingsnot being supertitled have to do with which is more loyal to Medoff's script, thesupertitles of Jackson's lines or Jackson lines as he's giving them?"



The script would include what she is signing. The supertitling doesn't. I assume they are inferring from that, that that means the supertitles are not 100 percent loyal to the script, so it is not as far a jump to conclude that they may be otherwise altered. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dancinthrulife2.

Henrick said "Do you know the text well and are you quite sure the supertitles are more loyal to the script than Jackson was? Supertitles are quite often not taken verbatim from the script. They frequently, as at the Met, are much abridged."



In all of the other scenes that did not have Ridloff and Jackson alone, Every other actor was saying what was presented in the supertitles exactly. This leads me to believe it is the full and complete text. The only time the text did match up with what the actor was saying was when Jackson was speaking.

It's sort of crazy how some of the posters here differ so much from most of the reviews I've read praising Jackson's performance.