Monday, February 18, 2008

just say no

The next time anyone invites me to an experimental production of anything, you all are going to do me a favor.

You're going to say, Andrea, there are places you can go. You can go to punk shows and you can go to outdoor concerts. You can go to indie films and foreign films and films in which lots and lots and lots of shit blows up. You can go to nice cocktail lounges and you can go to hole-in-the-wall bars. You can go hiking and you can go to the beach and you can even go to Red Sox games if they ever let you buy a ticket. You can go to restaurants that serve the cuisines of many different nations, though French and Japanese are iffy. You can go to massage conferences. You can go shopping. You can go for aimless long walks. You can go to the MFA and the ICA. You can go to Vermont and look at cows.

But, Andrea, you are going to say, you cannot go to the theater. You are too stoopid, uneducated, and lower middle class to go to the theater. Just say no.

xoxo

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, c'mon now.

I mean, you liked the dancing, at least.

Or was that just cause it meant it was over???? :p

I mean, wasn't that better than cow tipping in Vermont?

malevolent andrea said...

I may not know much, but I do know that Shakespeare didn't intend that play to be a musical.

Dancing! ::grumble grumble::

Anonymous said...

I should point out that the review in The Herald was even worse than the one in The Globe.

So maybe you're not "too stoopid, uneducated, and lower middle class"... maybe you're too smart, well-educated, and sophisticated to be taken in be some some young French avant-garde director's personal wanking on Shakespeare.

Anonymous said...

I can't believe I both misspelled avante-garde above and tossed in two "You means" in the first comment when one would have been more than sufficient.

It would definitely be nice if one could somehow copy-edit one's one comments. Otherwise, the reader will just have to take it on faith that I can write better than it sometimes appears. :)

P.S. The dancing was still fun even if it wasn't exactly Shakespearian, or even made much sense at all.

malevolent andrea said...

The Herald *knew* they had to give it a bad review because their entire readership is stoopid, uneducated, and lower middle class like me :-) C'mon now.

Uncle said...

This may be a follow-up, since Blogger is still ruminating on my last. OK, I'm guessing this was "Julius Caesar" at the ART? Andrea, you've got company. From Theatermania:
"Thomas Derrah's Caesar is a strutting bantam who retains just enough humanity to make us flinch as he endures his "three and thirty wounds" --or we might do so, if the scene weren't choreographed like an aerobics workout, the attackers panting and grunting rhythmically in unison. It's like a Blue Man Group routine gone hideously awry."

That's one of the nice things they said :)

malevolent andrea said...

Um, yeah. "Blue Man Group routine gone hideously awry" about sums it up :-)

Anonymous said...

What does it mean when the worse you all say it is, the more I want to see it? ::sigh::

malevolent andrea said...

No, trust me, you really don't :-)

Three and a half hours of your life that you would never get back.

Anonymous said...

Wait. Three and a half hours? F**k. Never mind, then.

What about the dancing? How long was that? Can I at least see the dancing?

malevolent andrea said...

If *only* they allowed videoing in the theater, we could have uploaded that final number to youtube, dammit.

But, instead, just imagine the whole cast doing something that looked like what the Pips did behind Gladys Knight. (Including Lucius in his sparkly sequined cape, which I believe is what pushed me over the edge and caused me to spend the last half hour of the play writing my blog post in my head, btw.)

Anonymous said...

Gotta admit, things really devolved in that production after the funeral orations. It looked like the director ran out of good ideas by then, so then he just started throwing anything he could think of at the production just for the hell of it.

I mean, what was the point of a complete 1960 sedan hanging vertically above the stage... or the wing that preceded it hovering above stage left?

But I've gotta agree Lucius in the sparkling sequined cape really was the most egregious "what the fuck?" part of the whole spectacle.

Still, I liked the production number, cause that was so out of left field and made so little sense it was just really, really amusing. Plus I definitely appreciated being able to check out both the sexy Calpurnia/Portia and the very cute and shapely stagehand (apparently filling in for Cicero who I guess couldn't dance).

Weirdest part of the dance number... it wasn't the end of the performance! There was still a bit more movement and set manipulation and such after that... making it all seem kind of anti-climactic after all.