Happy Belated #LoveTheatreDay!

All the internet holidays crack me up, but I did have to get on board for yesterday's #LoveTheatreDay.  I mean, hello, for me, EVERY day is #LoveTheatreDay!  This has been an especially busy theater week, with a show/reading/event every night, and frankly, I'm exhausted.  But I can hang on.  Yesterday, for the special day, I had a two-show day!  Well, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, it was a one-and-a-half-show day...

My Tony voter boss asked if I'd like to see the new adaptation of Therese Raquin with him yesterday afternoon.  I said, of course!  Even though I'm not the biggest Keira Knightley fan, I thought it would be fun to see that show.  Then, before we left, my Tony voter boss said, 'oops, not Therese Raquin, Dames at Sea.  That's the show I have tickets for - do you want to see that?'  I thought, sure!  A fun, frothy musical with tap dancing?  Of course I want to see that (for free, from Tony seats)!

I should back up a little bit.  Yesterday at work, we released a statement to our press list.  As the morning went on, I was getting replies and questions.  So I was a little distracted.  I thought that seeing a fun, frothy musical with tap dancing was just what the doctor ordered!  It would be a light and mindless afternoon distraction before going back to the office.  Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out.

Maybe I was just too distracted by work, but I could not get into Dames at Sea at all.  And, to be perfectly honest about it, we left at intermission.  As I said yesterday, it takes a lot to get me to leave at intermission, but in this case, I don't really know why.  The cast was quite good, the songs were serviceable, if not very memorable, and the choreography was nice.  I mean, there was tap dancing!  We all know how I love tap dancing!  But I could not get engaged, at all.  First off, for me, the small (but talented) cast just didn't seem to fill the space.  The show was written as a small, spoofy parody of 1930s movie musicals, and it probably should've remained a small show.  Putting it on a Broadway stage, even the small-ish Helen Hayes Theatre stage, just seemed to be a problem from the start.  The show is pretty much wall-to-wall duets, owing to the fact that the original productions were done on miniscule stages so two people were probably all that could fit on stage at any one time.  The show just couldn't fill the space and embrace me in the audience for some reason.

It's never a good sign that whenever a song started I would think, 'ugh, not another song.'  I just looked at the Playbill and see that there were nine songs in the first act.  It seemed like a lot more than that.  Maybe they were all really long.  I don't know.  I'm sad that I didn't respond or didn't enjoy the show.  I'm sure it was nobody's fault but mine, but I can't help thinking that if the show hadn't been trying so HARD, I would've enjoyed it more.  Easy breezy seems to me the way it should've gone.  But it was working HARD.  And sometimes working too hard just turns me off.

My second show of #LoveTheatreDay was one I'd seen several times before, both here and abroad.  Actually, there were two shows that I've seen abroad!  At the International Gay Theatre Festival in Dublin, they always pair two pieces to play in one venue.  When I saw my friend's play The Further Adventures Of..., it was paired with a piece titled Adam and Eva, written by a young pair of actors from the UK.  The Further Adventures of... is written by a dear friend and starring three dear friends, so I can't really be objective about it.  I will say that each time I see the show, I get very emotional in different places.  You'd think that after seeing the show upwards of six times by now, I'd stop getting teary-eyed, but I don't.  I got just as weepy last night as ever.  My friends are just putting their heart and soul into this very soulful play.  For me, it says a lot about coming to terms with yourself and your life.  And Adam and Eva is also quite touching.  The young actors are charming and adorable, yet very real and vulnerable and are doing justice to a true story of friendship and self-discovery.  There are three more performances of the double bill they're calling We Met in Dublin, next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I think you should go go go.  Make your every day #LoveTheatreDay!