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New York
By Ned | March 17, 2007
So what did I miss while I was gone? Besides Gonzales not resigning and Lieberman and Nelson engaging in the kind of infuriating behavior that’s practically expected of them now, that is.
A lot of stuff happened in NYC. A lot of good workshops, including a couple great ones but New York Times staff writers and one by a journalism professor/Watergate expert (whose book, of which I now have an autographed copy, I look forward to reading).
The Blue Prints workshop, I thought, went great. Everyone was smart, funny, informative and honest. It looks like the audience liked it too - afterwards, a school from Hawaii gave us a gift bag with chocolate and free pens and stuff, and I got recognized by people wherever I went for the rest of the conference - even in the hotel elevator. It was a bit surreal.
Everyone on the trip sees two broadway plays, and for me this year it was The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Spring Awakening. I really had no idea what to expect from either of them, except that everyone who had actually heard of the latter was urging me to go see it.
Spelling Bee was hilarious. Slow at times, but hilarious, and not at all the weird, creepy thing I was expecting to happen when adult actors play small children. This actors were talented enough to pull it off. They even did some improvisation, mostly to accommodate the audience volunteers who were incorporated into the show.
As for Spring Awakening, I think I might be the only person on Earth who actually thought it was pretty bad. How bad was it? In one scene, a character at center stage masturbates furiously under his nightgown while quoting Othello at length. All of a sudden he’s surrounded by a giant musical number, and the whole scene is too absurd, elaborate and artificial to be offensive, shocking, or really elicit any kind of emotion at all. Which makes it a perfect metaphor for not only the play itself, but what the author seems to have been doing while he was writing the play.
I will give the play this, though: usually I don’t really give a crap about the instrumentals in a musical, but in this case they really were pretty good. Too bad the lyrics, with the exception of two songs, didn’t really do anything to make the music memorable.
By the way, last post was apparently my 100th on this blog. So, yay, I guess?
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