Kimberly and I saw "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" (the musical play) last night and it was a big disappointment. It was, I think, the fourth play that we've seen at Kauai Community Players since we moved out here, and they've all been disappointments except the lead play, "She Kills Monsters", which was awesome. It's not the directing, acting, or staging, which have all been fair to good. It's the choice of plays. Last year we saw two bits of misery porn from the Eugene-O-Neill school of plot ("life sucks and it won't get better") and then there was last night's play which was bad on many different levels.
(Spoiler: we snuck out at intermission, just the second play that Kimberly and I have abandoned midstream and we've seen dozens and dozens of plays together.)
I mean, it started off good enough. Great messaging about how kids think they can do anything and that gets beat out of them as they turn into teenagers and adults. Great messaging that we need to keep LOOKing at the world around us.
Oh, the music part of the musical wasn't at all notable, and one of the actors actually seemed to have no sense of rhythm or beat, but I momentarily thought it was messaging: you can do something creative even if you're bad at it, and that's ok. (If it was messaging, it carried through the play, which shows some real stamina.)
And then the play is lazily divided into individual unrelated stories, and the first was quite good. Kindergarten class, kid wants to play a pig in a production of Cinderella, makes up his own role, and it's terrific and well-loved. I mean in another setting it'd be a problematic story of someone who can't work in a team, but as a kindergarten story, especially after that intro, we instead read it as a teacher empowering their student's creativity rather than crushing it.
But from there it was downhill faster than an Olympic toboggan.
It was a two-fer of stories maybe 15 minutes it that did it for me.
(Trigger warning: a story about suicide.)
First was a matinee star who kills himself after his wife of 44 years dies from cancer. Because he can't live without her. Sad story, no? No. It was presented as so great that it proved that true love existed. Seriously. The narrator/author kept talking about how it gave him hope. The suicide gave him hope.
Immediately on the heels of that was the story about how when you're depressed all you need to do is listen to Beethoven. Or maybe it was that whenever you're depressed all you need to do is remember that you don't have it as bad as the world-renowned composer Beethoven, because he could never hear his 9th symphony.
Exaltation-of-suicide / erasure-of-self immediately followed by erasure of the struggles of mental illness, and I would probably have just walked out there if I was there on my own.
A bit later, we had a piece about how narcissistic it is to have a gravestone, and you just need to provide quiet service even in death (there's that erasure-of-self again), coupled with an ode to how great it is that we all die. Then there was a final song that about how we can reflect light in the night (like the moon one presumes), with no conception that we might be our own light. At some point in one of these last scenes, Kimberly and I exchanged googley-eyes with each others.
Did I mention the awful miasma of perfume? We actually moved back from our original seats after a lady with heavy perfume sat down immediately next to Kimberly (and why she sat right next to her in the waning days of a pandemic I dunno, but I guess it's the same self-absorption that has you wearing heavy perfume to the theatre in this day and age). And then people sat in our previous seats and they seemed to have had a swim in perfume and/or cologne before going to the theatre. So I was riding the edge of a nasty headache the whole time we watched these bad messages.
And the thing was, they weren't even consistent. I mean we had, suicide-is-great-because-it-shows-love, immediately followed by if-you're-depressed-just-remember-beethoven, followed by a story about a guy who got cancer and didn't tell anyone and so he died and they didn't get to say goodbye. I was like, hello, did the friends of the matinee star get to say goodbye? I bet not. It was like the author just always latched onto the last thing he heard and wasn't even trying to create a moral structure.
Bleh.
I wonder if Kauai theatre just isn't for us after what I think are three failures in a row. But they were supposed to do Noises Off before (I think) it was cancelled by COVID. And the next one up is Private Lives, and those both sound like more our thing ... There was a Romeo & Juliet that we missed too. (Between COVID concerns and health issues we've made it to maybe half the shows since COVID restrictions lifted.) So, bad luck? We did definitely have failures at all of the Berkeley theatres, including one that we walked out of at Shotgun Players and another that drove us away from that threatre for years; and some from Berkeley Rep that we still laugh at ...
(Spoiler: we snuck out at intermission, just the second play that Kimberly and I have abandoned midstream and we've seen dozens and dozens of plays together.)
I mean, it started off good enough. Great messaging about how kids think they can do anything and that gets beat out of them as they turn into teenagers and adults. Great messaging that we need to keep LOOKing at the world around us.
Oh, the music part of the musical wasn't at all notable, and one of the actors actually seemed to have no sense of rhythm or beat, but I momentarily thought it was messaging: you can do something creative even if you're bad at it, and that's ok. (If it was messaging, it carried through the play, which shows some real stamina.)
And then the play is lazily divided into individual unrelated stories, and the first was quite good. Kindergarten class, kid wants to play a pig in a production of Cinderella, makes up his own role, and it's terrific and well-loved. I mean in another setting it'd be a problematic story of someone who can't work in a team, but as a kindergarten story, especially after that intro, we instead read it as a teacher empowering their student's creativity rather than crushing it.
But from there it was downhill faster than an Olympic toboggan.
It was a two-fer of stories maybe 15 minutes it that did it for me.
(Trigger warning: a story about suicide.)
First was a matinee star who kills himself after his wife of 44 years dies from cancer. Because he can't live without her. Sad story, no? No. It was presented as so great that it proved that true love existed. Seriously. The narrator/author kept talking about how it gave him hope. The suicide gave him hope.
Immediately on the heels of that was the story about how when you're depressed all you need to do is listen to Beethoven. Or maybe it was that whenever you're depressed all you need to do is remember that you don't have it as bad as the world-renowned composer Beethoven, because he could never hear his 9th symphony.
Exaltation-of-suicide / erasure-of-self immediately followed by erasure of the struggles of mental illness, and I would probably have just walked out there if I was there on my own.
A bit later, we had a piece about how narcissistic it is to have a gravestone, and you just need to provide quiet service even in death (there's that erasure-of-self again), coupled with an ode to how great it is that we all die. Then there was a final song that about how we can reflect light in the night (like the moon one presumes), with no conception that we might be our own light. At some point in one of these last scenes, Kimberly and I exchanged googley-eyes with each others.
Did I mention the awful miasma of perfume? We actually moved back from our original seats after a lady with heavy perfume sat down immediately next to Kimberly (and why she sat right next to her in the waning days of a pandemic I dunno, but I guess it's the same self-absorption that has you wearing heavy perfume to the theatre in this day and age). And then people sat in our previous seats and they seemed to have had a swim in perfume and/or cologne before going to the theatre. So I was riding the edge of a nasty headache the whole time we watched these bad messages.
And the thing was, they weren't even consistent. I mean we had, suicide-is-great-because-it-shows-love, immediately followed by if-you're-depressed-just-remember-beethoven, followed by a story about a guy who got cancer and didn't tell anyone and so he died and they didn't get to say goodbye. I was like, hello, did the friends of the matinee star get to say goodbye? I bet not. It was like the author just always latched onto the last thing he heard and wasn't even trying to create a moral structure.
Bleh.
I wonder if Kauai theatre just isn't for us after what I think are three failures in a row. But they were supposed to do Noises Off before (I think) it was cancelled by COVID. And the next one up is Private Lives, and those both sound like more our thing ... There was a Romeo & Juliet that we missed too. (Between COVID concerns and health issues we've made it to maybe half the shows since COVID restrictions lifted.) So, bad luck? We did definitely have failures at all of the Berkeley theatres, including one that we walked out of at Shotgun Players and another that drove us away from that threatre for years; and some from Berkeley Rep that we still laugh at ...