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| There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: tmdonahue (tmdonahue@yahoo.com) 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Except it was well-danced and energetic. Oh, one might say one thing: how could you do the Agnes de Mille ballet in this production, even if you could afford the dancers? By itself, that doesn't justify the ballet. Boring after a few moments. | |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Last Edit: lordofspeech 01:05 am EDT 06/21/19 | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 01:03 am EDT 06/21/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I think maybe the young bald creature in the “ballet” might be supposed to represent Laury. They’re both female, and the “ballet” creature in her underwear had dark tones to her skin which, in the play, told me that we the audience were supposed to have been reading Laury within the context of the African-American female in the Old West. Before that, I hadn’t realized that Laury was supposed to reflect something about “race in America” in some kinda essay-ish way. Also, I didn’t think Laury gave Jud a bl*w-job in the black-out. I thought, from the sounds, that he had kissed her very mushily and then he had unbuckled his pants and she’d pushed him away and then the lights came up. For those of you who think Laury went down on Jud...well, if she wanted to go down on him so much, then shouldn’t she have tried to save him from being murdered at the end? Or is she just sort of serial man-hater and can we expect her to go down on Curly in the sequel, post-wedding, and then engineer his death later on too...? And, though there was an intense homosocial energy between Curly and Jud in the earlier black-out-scene, I think it was definitely homosocial rather than homosexual. |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: NewtonUK 11:35 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| Well - they weren't going to use the De Mille in this production, thats for darn tootin sure. But the dream ballet is a famous element, adding pure dance to the storytelling world of a musical. To be honest, if I had been directing this production, I would have the perfect opportunity to deal with the ballet - take intermission before it, come back to the scene after it. We wouldn't have missed it. If the 'ballet' is there, and takes up its full 14 minutes stage time, then it needs to have a purpose other than to show us an angry, frustrated black woman. Laurey is played as an angry frustrated black woman for 95% of the production. We don't need 14 minutes of acrobatic dancing to remind us of that. In great musicals - musicals written by people who write great musicals - everything in the show explains, plot, character, inner life. The dance in FISHLAHOMA does none of these things. It just exists, in a musical world totally out of context with anything that has come before or after. |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: aleck 09:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - tmdonahue 09:13 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I was baffled and bored by that ballet myself. But I was sitting in the middle of a group of high school students and the dance was the part of the production they liked the most. Otherwise, they were mostly bored, although some were engaged and others not. This was a mixture of both boys and girls. The girls seemed more bored than the boys, which I thought was interesting. Later, thinking back on the production (and actually the material itself), this is more of a play about the hopes and fears of men and how they interact with one another to get what they want. The women might be the target of these interactions, but the hopes and dreams of the women are limited and not very deep. So, you have Curly vs. Jud over Laury and Will and Ali over Ado, plus the farmers and the cowboys (men) fighting for prominence. There is almost no conflict among the women, except for Aunt Eller who serves as the arbiter of frontier social behavior and justice. The boys in that high school group seemed to be engaged in sorting out all the behavior clues of the men. The girls were mostly thrilled by that "dream" dance, which, other than Aunt Eller, provided the only expression of female strength. | |
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| re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. | |
| Posted by: ryhog 12:18 pm EDT 06/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: There's nothing to be said about the ballet. - aleck 09:31 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I think you've hit on an important observation about resonance. I think the "anti" sentiment here reveals a lot of anger that someone has had the temerity to stage a show for a demographic with which they cannot identify. Kinda like my great grandmother thought Gershwin was garbage. | |
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