Not surprisingly, there was a reaction. Yesterday, when the final task was accomplished, it was me time. No blog was a-happening. So today, I hope to make it up to you with a double.
All or nothing, Part I
Farce is a very unforgiving form of comedy. Everything depends on maintaining a breakneck pace of frantic commotion. Without the frenzy, without a cast which is WITHOUT EXCEPTION committed 100% to the panicked chaos, it just isn't funny.
Nothing is quite so painful as seeing a community theatre attempt a farce. These groups inevitably cast one weak link in every show. Sometimes it's politics. Sometimes it's necessity, the only way to fill out the cast. But it seems like there is always one poor ass up there who simply doesn't belong on stage. In an ordinary show, that's fine. It's not pleasant to see Cyrano or Into the Woods ground to a halt when the TD's wife flits through even though she's 20 years past playing the ingénue, but it doesn't kill the whole show. Farce isn't that forgiving. As soon as the rube slows it down, the whole thing becomes UNFUNNY. Sitting through hours of UNFUNNY that is TRYING TO BE FUNNY, that's one of the lesser known circles of Hell.
Now, one playwright, Ken Ludwig, had obviously experienced a few of these miserable trainwrecks before writing Lend Me A Tenor, because he built in a brilliant remedy. The curtain call includes a scripted runthrough of the entire play a second time in 5 minutes - and then a third time in 1 minute, or maybe it's 30 seconds. In any case, it is HYSTERICAL. The audience laughs so hard in that last 6 minutes, they completely forget they've been bored shitless for an hour and a half.
Okay, I hear it now: "But, Chris, aren't you the one always criticizing authors who dumb down their material assuming their audience is stupid?"
Yes, I am. Yes, I do. The audience is not stupid, as a whole. There are about 2% of them who are dumb as a bag of sand, and a medium goes to hell when it starts pandering to that 2%. Ahem, Sorkin break-
We're all being lobotomized by the country's most influential industry which has thrown in the towel on any endeavor that does not include the courting of 12-year-old boys. And not event the smart 12-year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots, of which there are plenty thanks in no small part to this network."So, where was I? Oh yes, don't penalize the 98% for the sake of the 2.
-Wes, Studio 60
That said, what Lend Me A Tenor does isn't seeing the audience as stupid, it is seeing them as human. Human nature is a wonderful and glorious thing to exploit as an artist. You can't push people's buttons without knowing where those buttons are and how they work. We'll talk about that next time. Doing it right and... well, doing it the DC way. Sigh.
