The Falun Gong Show

We caught the Divine Performing Arts show when it came to Providence last week. It's billed as a celebration of Chinese cultural heritage through music and dance. What's not mentioned is the Falun Gong proselytization that pervades most of the show. While I don't support the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong practitioners, I also don't like how the Divine Performing Arts troupe isn't upfront about their ties to Falun Gong in their promotional materials. Of course, even if you stripped all of the Falun Gong material out of the show, I still wouldn't have enjoyed it very much. The music was bland and the sets were awful. The entire show was performed in front of a giant screen that had cheesy renderings of Chinese landscapes projected onto it. The format was incredibly tedious as well, with the emcees coming on stage between every single number and talking about the next one.

The Roof is on Fire

We saw Fiddler on the Roof at PPAC last night. It was my first time seeing Fiddler. My family went to see the local high school's production of it when I was 13, but I had no desire to see a musical or hang out with my parents and I managed to weasel my way out. Since then, I've developed more of an appreciation for musical theater (as well as being seen in public with my family). I went into the show with high expectations and I wasn't disappointed. Compared to most musicals that I'm familiar with, Fiddler on the Roof is more understated and dark. I enjoyed that and I also enjoyed seeing Chaim Topol playing the role that he's played for the past 40 years. I've always wondered how actors can play the same role night after night. It seems like it would get boring after a while. If Topol is tired of playing Tevye, it didn't show on stage. You could really tell that he was enjoying himself up there and his performance exuded a lived-in kind of quality that an actor who has only been playing the Tevye for six months (or even six years) wouldn't have.

Spam

We went to see Spamalot at PPAC last week. Neither of us found it to be all that funny. It wasn't horrible, but after seeing it, I can't really see what all of the fuss is about. I think my biggest problem was that while I've never been a huge fan of Monty Python, I've known a lot of people who found the troupe quite amusing and often interjected quotes from their skits and movies into conversations. A lifetime of this has exposed me to most of the jokes that were included in Spamalot, but since I never got to experience those jokes on my own terms, I really didn't appreciate seeing them done on stage set to music. Even worse, I've had the misfortune of meeting several Monty Python fans who happened to be rather annoying (imagine that), so the numbers that they did on stage sometimes reminded me of those people, which did nothing to enhance my appreciation of the performance. If you're a big Python fan, you'll probably enjoy it and you might like it if you've never really been exposed to their humour before. Otherwise, it's probably best to save your money. If you are on the fence, perhaps this timely article from the A.V. Club that names 20 pop culture obsessions ever geekier than Monty Python will help you put things in perspective.

Extrême limite

If the world ended tomorrow, my one regret would be that I never got a chance to see Point Break Live! on stage. I'm being facetious here, but only a little bit. I learned about this absurdist reality-play today on Deadspin and I have been barely able to contain myself ever since. The saddest part of this story is that I've never even seen the movie Point Break. I saw the commercials for it hundreds of times back in 1991 when it came out. I remember thinking how ridiculous it looked, but at the same time, I must have had some desire to watch it and experience the absurdity firsthand. The show is out in LA right now so it doesn't look like I'm going to get a chance to catch it anytime soon. Here's a teaser from the YouTubes.



One more thing: the subject of this post is the title under which Point Break was release in Francophone markets, but you knew that already.