The Decline of the Theater
We were recently in New York and saw two Broadway plays. Before I “review” each, I’ll comment on the current practices of people during musical performances to hoop and holler, as if at a rock concert. The recent horror, Six, which we saw in London and is playing in New York, consists of six women (the wives of Henry VIII, how’s that for a concept?) shrieking atonally their way around the stage with basically pro-female and anti-male commentary in the songs, encouraging the audience to shout-out. One woman across the aisle in Suffs, below, constantly hooted as if at a rodeo or demolition derby and sounded as if she needed to be hospitalized. This all began, in my view, with Hamilton, which IS a terrific musical but was less enjoyable when you couldn’t hear the words because the audience was screaming incessantly.
Stereophonic
This is the story of a song being created in a studio. One set, with a running time (including intermission) of a ghastly 3.5 hours. The evolution of the song is interesting, and the actors are very accomplished musicians and singers. But the soap-opera-like, predictable tensions are too obvious and repetitive. A woman won’t cut the amount of verses in her song even to make the time requirement. A perfectionist constantly asks for more and more attempts until, late into the morning, goes back to the original cut. The sound engineer is long-suffering, and talks with a profound (I guess, southern) accent, where the word “bread” would be pronounced with three syllables. The writer has built in loooooong dramatic pauses (think of the anti-David Mamet) to the extent I thought someone had gone up on their lines or forgotten the dialogue. It’s tedious. It claims to be the recipient of the most Tony nominations ever, in which case it is clearly the most over-rated musical ever. Don’t go.
Suffs
This is the unfortunate name of a musical about the Suffragist (not “Suffragettes”) movement, which is an interesting storyline about brave women overcoming prejudice and brutality a century ago. Unfortunately, if the above horrid play is Six, this could be called Fifteen, because the same pandering to the audience takes place with contestant interruptions by people in the audience hooting and hollering as if at a political convention where everyone believes they hold the moral high ground. Thus, a great many clever comments are missed and some of the dialogue is obscured. The cast here is far better than Stereophonic, with great voices and stage presence. For some reason obscure to me because I guess I’m not that deep, the several male characters in the story are played by the female cast, which really is distracting and bizarre, and weakens the point of discriminating men in unsubtle satire. (The production does a rare and incredible job of including an actor truly confined mostly to a wheelchair, who is totally involved in all scenes and the choreography is beautifully inclusive. This was stunningly impressive.) Unfortunately, this was another case of “jump to your feet at the end and let’s prove these $300 tickets were a good investment and our taste is sound.” Don’t go.
There have been great musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, Cabaret, A Chorus Line, Grease, Les Mis, and In the Heights where the audience was respectfully quiet and didn’t have to participate in the performance, the music and dialogue were original and focused on entertainment and not “agendas,” and the audience gave standing ovations to the truly outstanding and not the mere experience of watching something.
Like Little Shop of Horrors, which is what theater attendance is becoming.
