Theatah!

I've been getting myself some culture lately, in the form of tiny little theatrical productions. Well, they're not all tiny; I'm seeing Lion King this Saturday. But that's in the future; the outings in the recent past have been to wee little plays.

First there was a trio of plays based on H.P. Lovecraft stories. It might seem odd to take stories full of elaborate imagery and try to put them on a small stage with a smaller budget, and, well, it was pretty odd at that. Each play had four actors, although the middle one was mostly puppets.

So far it sounds kind of interesting, right? Well, it was . . . let's say "ambitious". That is, I don't think they ever quite achieved what they were aiming for, but I approve of the attempt. For horror plays, they were never actually all that frightening.

The two live-action parts had some interesting lighting effects that I liked, like in Nyarlathotep when the lights went out and the only lighting in the scene was from the Zippo lighter held by one of the actors. You can't do that in a big space, but since the audience was all within twenty feet of the action, it worked really well. And in Dreams of the Witch House, they used one of those cheesecloth things that can be made transparent; it made the dream sequences slightly less impossible to stage.

Weirdly, the puppets (which they used for The Doom that Came to Sarnath) weren't very well lit at all. It helped that there was a narrator, but a lot of the time, I couldn't really tell what the puppets were doing.

Three of the four actors in the Lovecraft plays were pretty good. Tragically, the remaining person was really distracting. He overemoted and was pretty stagy, especially considering that, as previously stated, he was practically in our laps. It might not have stood out so much if the other actors had been doing it too, but he was the only one making the big dramatic hand gestures and projecting his voice like he thought he was in a damn opera or something. It was like watching a tasteful British drawing-room comedy and suddenly having Kramer bust in through the door. Actually, that sounds like it might be kind of fun.

So that was a couple of weeks ago. And then, this last Friday, I went to see David Sedaris's The Santaland Diaries, only without David Sedaris. It was an outing orchestrated by Chiara, who basically wanted a gang of thugs (this may be the first time that Gael has been accused of being a thug) around her as she made her way to the secluded, barely-lit theatre on the banks of one of Seattle's lakes.

The performance was mostly what you'd expect: a one-man show, featuring a guy reading Sedaris's essays. I approve of that in theory, but in practice, I felt he was playing it, well, too gay. Now you might be thinking, "Monty! I'm surprised at you!" Or it might occur to you that David Sedaris himself has an actual lisp when he reads his stuff. And I understand all that. But, see . . . okay, let's put it like this. There's a certain level of swishiness at which point you're just interfering with the material. For me, I think the dividing line is right about at Isaac Mizrahi, who I enjoy. Maybe I could take Carson Kressley on a good day. But if you push it much past that, I'm probably going to find you tiring over the course of an hour and a half of monologuery.

Although I've given two somewhat negative reviews, I intend to continue with the theatre-going. Next week, as I mentioned in the top paragraph (remember way back then?), I'm seeing Lion King. And at some point in early 2005, I'm determined to go to New York and see a whole bunch of musicals.

And then I ran out of things to say.