What a Way to Make a Living!
Friday C-- and I went to see a local community production of "9 to 5", the musical based on the 80's movie of the same name.
I was somewhat surprised to discover it's a really cute show. Dolly Parton wrote the songs, and someone else wrote the book stringing them together. It loosely follows the plot of the film, wherein three ladies who work in the same office, after a really bad day, leave early to smoke some weed, have fantasies in which they humiliate their boss, all of which sort of come true. In the second act, the three women keep their boss chained to a bed in his own house while his wife is away, and reorganize the office to make it a less soul crushing place to work.
Unsurprisingly, for a show with three female leads and a whole chorus of primarily female office workers, it also passes the Bechdel Test. There are subplots with an accountant who has a crush on one of our women (the widow) and the ex-husband of the (recently divorced) new hire, but the real plot is about the glass ceiling in the workplace, and revenge fantasies played out and turned to the good.
Two of the three lead actresses were really quite solid, and the third was competently charming with a powerful belt, though not quite charming enough to offset the fact that when she wasn't belting, her voice was painfully flat. However, the real show stealer was the character actress who played the boss' obsessive stalker/flunkie. She lit up every damn scene she was allowed to walk through.
Unfortunately, the awful boss was enough of a cipher that he didn't feel like an effective threat. He was written to be a creep, sure, but was played gormless and pathetic more than as a powerful asshole. Directorial choices robbed him of a lot of his threat, but the actor also seemed a bit confused about his motivations.
That's all I can say on the show itself, because although I can imagine that all the elided scenes of character development were folded into the songs, the lyrics were almost entirely unintelligible. Yes, the leads were mic'ed, but nobody had bothered to set the levels. The feedback made the voices muddy and garbled, and still couldn't raise them above the volume of the rock-style orchestra, complete with drum kit and the worst brass section I've heard since Harold Hill's "think system" of musical education took the town of River City by storm.
In fact, this show was aurally painful. I really shouldn't leave the house without earplugs again.
As for the chorus, the poor abused chorus, they were seen but not heard. It was the worst of both worlds, as they were not mic'd, so completely drowned out by the drums, and to add insult to injury, they were choreographed by the guy who directed Brigadoon, who I finally got to meet. He seems like a really sweet guy, very enthusiastic and excited about his work. But he made several choices that I consider really amateur mistakes. For example, if you're going to base the show's dancing on a "signature move" that gets repeated multiple times (say, whenever the chorus sings the refrain to the title song) make sure that a) everyone can do the move and b) everyone who does the move, does it in synch. If you can't synchronize everyone, limit the move to the people who can do it in synch, and give the rest something lower profile to do in the background. I find his stage composition to be really lacking. It makes me sad, and I wish he had a mentor who could exorcise these amateur-hour impulses out of him.
So, it was an educational experience, but ultimately unsatisfying on its own merits. Good performers with a good show were sabotaged by technical missteps and a lack of artistic vision from the directorial staff.
In two weeks, C-- and I are going to see another show, with another group. Fingers crossed that it's better than this one!
I was somewhat surprised to discover it's a really cute show. Dolly Parton wrote the songs, and someone else wrote the book stringing them together. It loosely follows the plot of the film, wherein three ladies who work in the same office, after a really bad day, leave early to smoke some weed, have fantasies in which they humiliate their boss, all of which sort of come true. In the second act, the three women keep their boss chained to a bed in his own house while his wife is away, and reorganize the office to make it a less soul crushing place to work.
Unsurprisingly, for a show with three female leads and a whole chorus of primarily female office workers, it also passes the Bechdel Test. There are subplots with an accountant who has a crush on one of our women (the widow) and the ex-husband of the (recently divorced) new hire, but the real plot is about the glass ceiling in the workplace, and revenge fantasies played out and turned to the good.
Two of the three lead actresses were really quite solid, and the third was competently charming with a powerful belt, though not quite charming enough to offset the fact that when she wasn't belting, her voice was painfully flat. However, the real show stealer was the character actress who played the boss' obsessive stalker/flunkie. She lit up every damn scene she was allowed to walk through.
Unfortunately, the awful boss was enough of a cipher that he didn't feel like an effective threat. He was written to be a creep, sure, but was played gormless and pathetic more than as a powerful asshole. Directorial choices robbed him of a lot of his threat, but the actor also seemed a bit confused about his motivations.
That's all I can say on the show itself, because although I can imagine that all the elided scenes of character development were folded into the songs, the lyrics were almost entirely unintelligible. Yes, the leads were mic'ed, but nobody had bothered to set the levels. The feedback made the voices muddy and garbled, and still couldn't raise them above the volume of the rock-style orchestra, complete with drum kit and the worst brass section I've heard since Harold Hill's "think system" of musical education took the town of River City by storm.
In fact, this show was aurally painful. I really shouldn't leave the house without earplugs again.
As for the chorus, the poor abused chorus, they were seen but not heard. It was the worst of both worlds, as they were not mic'd, so completely drowned out by the drums, and to add insult to injury, they were choreographed by the guy who directed Brigadoon, who I finally got to meet. He seems like a really sweet guy, very enthusiastic and excited about his work. But he made several choices that I consider really amateur mistakes. For example, if you're going to base the show's dancing on a "signature move" that gets repeated multiple times (say, whenever the chorus sings the refrain to the title song) make sure that a) everyone can do the move and b) everyone who does the move, does it in synch. If you can't synchronize everyone, limit the move to the people who can do it in synch, and give the rest something lower profile to do in the background. I find his stage composition to be really lacking. It makes me sad, and I wish he had a mentor who could exorcise these amateur-hour impulses out of him.
So, it was an educational experience, but ultimately unsatisfying on its own merits. Good performers with a good show were sabotaged by technical missteps and a lack of artistic vision from the directorial staff.
In two weeks, C-- and I are going to see another show, with another group. Fingers crossed that it's better than this one!