In which Our Hero has a crusty good time.
The worst theatrical performance I’ve ever observed occurred in an off-broadway theater this afternoon from 2pm to 4pm.
Experiential quality is the delta between expectation and outcome.
This play, which retails for $55 per seat, but which my partner and I observed for a steep discount, prompted my partner to say, “We spent more money getting to and from the show, which is appropriate.” (We took the subway.)
Issues included:
- An actor flubbing her line, saying “first anniversary” instead of “fiftieth anniversary” in a very-obvious-to-everyone manner.
- Plot point problems being invented only to be immediately resolved. It’s like Chekhov always said: “If a gun appears on stage in act 1, it better be fired within 5 seconds, lest any theatrical tension develop.” (That’s not the real meaning, duh.)
- A lead actor who had no light in his eyes. No joy on his face. No radiance whatsoever. When he sang about the weather – about his love for the wonders of the natural world – I received no awe. Only cringe. He hit his notes, his lines were clear and well inflected, he simply had no pleasure to share.
A year or two ago, I watched my partner’s brother-in-law perform in a small town musical. He played Linus in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I left that performance appreciating the heart that the performers shared with us that day. I left with a new, darker view of the character of Charlie Brown. I left disillusioned with the influential characters I had formerly seen as simplistic. I asked questions like, “How have the archetypes of that generation’s comics/cartoons shifted and morphed as the American experience has changed over generations?”
This play ended with the explicit moral “The real success was the friends we made along the way”.
I’m not kidding.
It wasn’t even tongue-in-cheek, self-aware. The writers seemed to actually think that was an acceptable moral. Or else the whole play is an over-the-top self-mocking farce that the director and actors failed to recognize. And then, why were the characters lit in purple for that one scene? Some avant-garde nod to Grimace? (Per my ex-professional-lighting-designer partner, “The lighting designer was incapable of changing the mood through anything but LED color washes and the colored lights weren’t powerful enough to properly light the scene and be visible.”)
Around 3/4ths of the way through the first act, when the characters on stage mention they’re about to go to intermission (they were performing in a TV program), I thought, “Ah, a fun meta-joke: Their intermission will be exactly the same time as ours.” Then, when their intermission struck, ours wasn’t for another 15 minutes! Another man in the audience clearly thought the same thing, as he stood up and then confusedly sat back down.
Woof.
My favorite part was before the show started, when a woman behind me narrated everything she was doing. “I like standing up so I don’t have to get up when people need to pass me. I hate shuffling by people and I am thoughtful and don’t want to make people shuffle by me. Oh, the row is now full, I will now sit,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s very stuffy in here. Very stuffy with all these people,” she said wearing a kn95 mask, her row full, but the theater only one-third full.
As my partner put it, “It was fun to sit near the woman who had to narrate everything out loud. I wonder what her IQ is.”
As that woman narrated just before the show started: “I do hope it’s a good performance.”
I also hoped it would be a good performance.
It was not.
-1 star.
Julian Wise 