Word: scripting
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This is precisely the reason why the Loeb Mainstage production ultimately proves so ineffectual: director Daniel Berwick '01 has a style which approaches the material solely on its own terms, allowing the script (or rather the songs) to drive the show rather than maintaining control over the theatrical experience. This approach results in two things: a pervasive sense of confusion and a profound lack of connection between the audience and much of the action on stage. The palpable anticipation of what is arguably this season's major theatrical event was met with, and disappointed by, the repeated failure...
...situation was not abated by the excessive cast: the chorus is referred to in the script as "The 50,000," and Berwick seems to have taken this a bit too literally, casting a truly overwhelming number of actors. Although a large cast, directed so as to focus rather than diffuse the audience on the central action, can work to a show's, this production's overabundance of actors only bolsters the audience's already confused state. Is the crowd happy with Jesus? Angry at him? Leprous? Is their back-slapping friendly, or is it violent? Although the level of dissonance...
...upstage a CEO keynote that includes a live appearance by George Lucas (playing hookey from the script for the next Star Wars movie), an extended solo by guitar demigod Steve Vai, and the public debut of both the Playstation2 and a digital music player barely bigger than a stick of gum? Apparently it's not that hard - if you have an operating system named after...
Smith calls the film "a bizarre mix of lowbrow jokes and highbrow concepts and then vice versa." Ain't it, though? He mixes poop and prophecy, scatology and eschatology; he crams his script with enough belly laughs for six Adam Sandler movies and enough citations of angelology and the Gnostic gospels to make a Jesuit's head split. This is a Shavian debate--Don Juan in New Jersey--with potty mouth. Dogma, recall, comes from the Greek word meaning "to think." And that's what Smith wants the viewer...
Sometimes my main characters are men," he says, "and the script is written from their masculinity--a very testicular movie. But I do prefer to work with women. Maybe that's because when I was young, I was surrounded by strong women, real fighters. This was in La Mancha, a very machista and conservative region. There, the man is a king sitting on his throne. And the women are like the prime minister; they are the ones who govern the house, resolve the problems...