jennyfair

I saw the photos you posted on your Insta of Georgia wilkinson. She is lovely but that costume is just far too bright. I like the gold but overall nothing seems to work well together.

IMO, I think the blue and the bold red is really the issue with it. I actually like the combo of blue and gold, but the bright red sticks out too much. Then again, I wonder why that shade of blue became such a dominant color. If it's supposed to be a version of Carlotta's, hers has no blue (even if we're supposed to think it was thrown together last minute). Even the Hannibal princesses don't have blue:

The production overall though tends to be quite blue, so maybe it was pulled from that?

If I could change it, I'd either delete the blue entirely or add some of it and more gold into the scarf. There's just a lot of space on the costume where it's one huge chunk of color, so it doesn't end up looking super cohesive.

In regards to the brightness of costume as a whole, I will say that all of the costumes are made with the mindset of how it will look onstage. So it makes sense that the costume being photographed in direct, bright sunlight won't be the most flattering. Even Georgia's wig looks completely washed out because it wasn't designed for that environment. If you look at photos onstage of the costume or even one from the same shoot but in the shade, the colors are much more toned down as they were meant to be seen:

I wonder if you feel like with every new non-replica production, the creativity and the novelty of a "different production" get's more stale? Set's getting more and more similar/ not many new ideas etc?

I actually felt the opposite! The first two non-replicas, which were in Budapest (2003) and Warsaw (2008), felt pretty derivative of other productions: Budapest had some interesting changes but aesthetically and in terms of blocking, still felt really beholden to the replica, and the Warsaw production was just a full on stage copy of the 2004 movie. Not all that innovative to me.

The next non-replica in Prague (2014), felt even more similar to the replica than Budapest. It wasn't until the one in Tallin/Tartu (2014) that I started noticing some interesting differences, at least according to reviews, in that it shifted the timeline somewhat (the auction takes place between the World Wars and the rest of the show seems to be Edwardian in aesthetic) and added some Leroux-ish influences. We then have the Helsinki (2015) non-replica, with its heavy metal aesthetic, and while the original Bucharest (2015) non-replica felt pretty derivative of many other productions, like the restaged tours, it led to the Oslo (2019), Greek tour (2020, 2023), and Middle East / European Tour (2023-present), which I've found quite fascinating and different.

And from there I think the non-replicas have spun off into a lot of variations: we've got the Belgrade (2017) production's weirdly modernist vibe, the Sofia (2019) production basically going "We only have a budget of $2 but we will make the most of it", the Kristianstad (2020) production that also feels very independent and fresh, and then Sydney Harbour (2020), which hews a little closer to the original but was set in an outdoor theater and went absolutely bombastic with some of the spectacle. And on top of that we have the Italian tour / Madrid non-replica (2023, 2024), which swings back and forth between "we're clearly inspired by the replica and just tweaked things a little" and "okay now for something completely balls to the wall wild" and the second Bucharest non-replica (2023), which used AI for a lot of its design, so... yay, I guess.

Now, do I necessarily like all the choices made in these productions? No, I think I've made fun of quite a few of them in the past. But if you're asking me if non-replicas are growing more stale and repetitive, then I would say that no, they're not; if anything, it feels like more and more of them are willing to stretch out and do something different, rather than lingering in the (admittedly long) shadow of the replica. And I think that's kind of cool!