OK, OK, OK, It's Been A While

A lot has been happening with me... but little of it theater related, hence the looooong pause between blog posts here.  

(Quick non-theater update: I've driven to Seattle and California and back; stayed with family; celebrated holidays; finished a remodeling; Minecrafted; and read, including the thick doorstop bricks Stephen King's It and the new Diana Gabaldon in the Outlander series, Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone.  Oh and, professionally interesting if personally sad, I got to walk round a newly burned-down home - not mine - and saw first hand what that looks like.  My next "burned-out" set will be more realistic.)

But I've got - still as of this date - a new show to design, To the Breeches! at Stage West in Fort Worth, which opens in June.  And I have been asked to mentor 2-3 set design students this spring.  Fantastic!

There are signs that theater is returning to something more like normal - despite Broadway opening and closing due to covid like a blinking marque lightbulb.  (The Rockettes have had to cancel Christmas shows!).  It is, I guess, heartwarming? to see that not even theater critics have killed off by a mere plague in the playhouses...?  I mean, unkind theater artists might have pictured drama critics gnawing over old bones, fingering brittle old clippings of past reviews, and quietly starving for lack of new shows, but no!  They were only sharpening their teeth on those bones!  Critics yet live!

Washington Post theater critic, Pater Marks, just wrote a STINKER of a review for a new Broadway musical.  I have not seen the show so I have no idea if this review is accurate or fair, I'm only heartened to see that theatrical criticism is even now pawing the ground, er, auditorium carpet, to sink its teeth into its work.  

I'll quote the first couple rabid sentences shall I?

"In the category of bad trips, few Broadway offerings at the moment (thus saving ink for later disembowelings of other shows, see?) can compete with "Flying Over Sunset," the turgid new musical about celebrities on LSD."

"Turgid," in the very first sentence too!  

Then the reviewer compliments set designer Beowulf Borritt and projection designers 59 Productions with "smartly realized" before declaring the show as a whole "an entertainment about as scintillating as an Agriculture Department instructional video on crop irrigation."  (Thereby guaranteeing resentment between the director and the complimented designers.  Sigh.  I suggest Mr. Borritt and the 59 folks print out this review, frame it, then hide it somewhere no one else will ever ever see it except, sometimes, themselves when they need a little boost, as when, say, a future director is being annoying.)

Oh, it goes on...  "tedious," "long-winded and impossibly earnest," "unremarkable score," "lumbering book," "the terrible lyric,"  (he's right there, it IS a terrible lyric, "I am a giant penis rocket ship!"  WT...Heck?).  "With so little plot..." etc. etc. 

You get the idea: 

Theater Criticism Is Back, Baby!