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So, what's the alternative? That you
should force yourself to embrace a certain type of work that you currently
despise in some kind of self-imposed Orwellian thought control so that your
aesthetics are more "populist"?
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 3:05
PM
Subject: RAT Theatre in our time.
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
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