![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
After not going to the theater for some time, we actually caught two shows this weekend, both excellent.
Saturday was the off-off-off-Broadway musical Minimum Wage. Essentially a series of sketches about working in fast food, this plotless-wonder was mostly a cappella songs written by one of the guys from Rockapella. It was surprisingly decent, and a lot of fun. Also, random. It felt a lot like the Princeton Band collaborated with Rockapella to write a full-length musical.
Last night, we went to The Drowsy Chaperone, which was about as far from the creepy blackbox of the night before as you can get. Big, big, big Broadway musical, complete with chorus, huge pit, 50 gadzillion sequin-spangled costumes, and a biplane that descends from the ceiling. Also, Bob Saget in the most pathetically adorable role ever. The conceit of the play is that Saget is listening to the record of a 1920s musical and telling us about it. The musical unfolds in his studio apartment. So he makes snarky comments, pauses the record to tell us about the original actors (while the actors onstage freeze), skips the record back to make us listen to the good parts again, and so on. The musical is the stereotypical silly love story, that doesn't really make sense, and has a couple songs whose lyrics are really stupid (which he warns you about). It was just...fun. Some of the most fun I've had in a theater. I was grinning for most of the performance.
Unfortunately, the lady next to me hated it, and spent the entire time sighing heavily and muttering to her husband about how stupid this was. She didn't get most of the Broadway-related jokes - I think she may have actually be trying to take the show seriously instead of being tongue-in-cheek. If she sighed one more time, I was about ready to strangle her. Ah well.
So, yeah, utterly delightful theater. Yay!
Saturday was the off-off-off-Broadway musical Minimum Wage. Essentially a series of sketches about working in fast food, this plotless-wonder was mostly a cappella songs written by one of the guys from Rockapella. It was surprisingly decent, and a lot of fun. Also, random. It felt a lot like the Princeton Band collaborated with Rockapella to write a full-length musical.
Last night, we went to The Drowsy Chaperone, which was about as far from the creepy blackbox of the night before as you can get. Big, big, big Broadway musical, complete with chorus, huge pit, 50 gadzillion sequin-spangled costumes, and a biplane that descends from the ceiling. Also, Bob Saget in the most pathetically adorable role ever. The conceit of the play is that Saget is listening to the record of a 1920s musical and telling us about it. The musical unfolds in his studio apartment. So he makes snarky comments, pauses the record to tell us about the original actors (while the actors onstage freeze), skips the record back to make us listen to the good parts again, and so on. The musical is the stereotypical silly love story, that doesn't really make sense, and has a couple songs whose lyrics are really stupid (which he warns you about). It was just...fun. Some of the most fun I've had in a theater. I was grinning for most of the performance.
Unfortunately, the lady next to me hated it, and spent the entire time sighing heavily and muttering to her husband about how stupid this was. She didn't get most of the Broadway-related jokes - I think she may have actually be trying to take the show seriously instead of being tongue-in-cheek. If she sighed one more time, I was about ready to strangle her. Ah well.
So, yeah, utterly delightful theater. Yay!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-11-05 04:06 pm (UTC)From: