RAT Theatre in our time.

["Jack Bentz S.J." <jbentzsj@hotmail.com>]

Last night I went to the epitome of what I have devoted way too much of my 
life mocking and it made me wonder.  Somehow I found myself in a cheap seat 
at a Pops concert featuring band leader Norman Leyden and the Norman Leyden 
Singers.  The program was a musical tour of Broadway throughout the last 
century starting with Romberg and ending up without me.  I only made it to 
the choral arrangement with choregraphy of "Five foot Two and Eyes of Blue" 
and then had to drag my companion over the knees of several old couples who 
were singing along.

How was it that in a huge concert hall of at least two thousand people was 
I, the man of the people, the only one longing for the door?  Me, I love 
cheese and irony but then perhaps I have come to the end of the line.  Was 
there too much dancing that featured women with hands on hips and men on 
their knees with arms outstreached?  How was this group of twenty singers 
able to seriously do a box step while singing a medley of hits from the 
flapper era?  Don't even ask me about "Makin' Whoopee!"

People loved it all.  They sang along.  The were brought to their feet or 
their walkers with 'Grand old Flag."  But where was I with my theater for 
the people rhetoric?  These were the people and yet I had no desire to serve 
them this sort of garbage.

Other people?  But the people in front of me are the people.  I wondered if 
the audience I wish to serve is really my own narrow aesthetic projected on 
an imagined audience?

Jack
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.