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magidLast night I went to the first performance of BTW's production of Pulp (Patricia Kane), which is described as "a play with music". Despite the first night glitches, it's a fabulous show, following Terry Logan after her discharge (for finally being caught with some girl or another) from the WACS as she goes to Chicago, finding a bar with other lesbians, both out and not. It's over-the-top, self-consciously cheesy, and it works beautifully.
The space at the Black Box Theatre is set up with woodwork around the whole space, the audience seated either at little tables for two (with little lamps on each), or the one row of chairs along the perimeter. The performance space is at the bar, and a little circular stage space in the middle. The audience becomes part of the play, the audience for a variety of singing performances. It totally works. Of course, there are the usual issues with working in the round, making sure that no one is blocked from seeing the action for too long, but they did a pretty good job of that.
The dialogue is fun, being over-the-top parody of lesbian pulp fiction filled with innuendo. And the music was impressive: these actors can sing, too.
The glitches: there was a screw-up with the sound, which lead to them having to rerecord a lot of the incidental sounds. Even though we started half an hour late (luckily, it's about a 90 minute show, so it didn't make the night too late), they'd gotten only 75% done, so the composer was in the sound booth doing some sounds live, and I could tell that the timing was a tiny bit off. Not a huge deal, and obviously one that won't be recurring. The sounds themselves were funny: each time someone mentioned particular things, there were the sound effects you'd expect for it. There were one or two times when people's timing for their lines was off, talking over someone else's end-of-line. The last thing that I didn't like wasn't a glitch at all, just a costuming choice. One actor plays two roles, a very short one at the beginning, and another through the rest of the play. And though the costumes were different, the hair combs were the same, which made me wonder a bit longer than I should've whether they were the same character. Oh, and I'm assuming it's because of the genre being spoofed, but there was a conflation of cross-dressing with gayness that is obviously not correlated.
Everything else, though, was great, two thumbs up, a really enjoyable evening.
The space at the Black Box Theatre is set up with woodwork around the whole space, the audience seated either at little tables for two (with little lamps on each), or the one row of chairs along the perimeter. The performance space is at the bar, and a little circular stage space in the middle. The audience becomes part of the play, the audience for a variety of singing performances. It totally works. Of course, there are the usual issues with working in the round, making sure that no one is blocked from seeing the action for too long, but they did a pretty good job of that.
The dialogue is fun, being over-the-top parody of lesbian pulp fiction filled with innuendo. And the music was impressive: these actors can sing, too.
The glitches: there was a screw-up with the sound, which lead to them having to rerecord a lot of the incidental sounds. Even though we started half an hour late (luckily, it's about a 90 minute show, so it didn't make the night too late), they'd gotten only 75% done, so the composer was in the sound booth doing some sounds live, and I could tell that the timing was a tiny bit off. Not a huge deal, and obviously one that won't be recurring. The sounds themselves were funny: each time someone mentioned particular things, there were the sound effects you'd expect for it. There were one or two times when people's timing for their lines was off, talking over someone else's end-of-line. The last thing that I didn't like wasn't a glitch at all, just a costuming choice. One actor plays two roles, a very short one at the beginning, and another through the rest of the play. And though the costumes were different, the hair combs were the same, which made me wonder a bit longer than I should've whether they were the same character. Oh, and I'm assuming it's because of the genre being spoofed, but there was a conflation of cross-dressing with gayness that is obviously not correlated.
Everything else, though, was great, two thumbs up, a really enjoyable evening.