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spoilers!!! i wondered going into this show how it would be received by a modern audience. anti-semitism is not the lurking spectre that it was in the mid-50's. sure it's still there, but at the time this show first arrived, not long (5 years) after
gentlemen's agreement played out the ugliness under the surface of american life and before ed murrow took on tailgunner joe's the anti-semitic fueled huac hearings, anti-semitism was much more in the public eye. not to mention the twist that turns the show on its head. how would a modern audience, at a time of war, an increasingly unpopular war, react to the seemingly quaint notion of patriotism as embodied by barney greenwald? i'm not sure i got an answer from the audience i joined last night at the shoenfeld.
sure, they cheered david schwimmer as soon as he got onstage (thanks to the staging that allowed him to goad them into doing so). yes, they applauded zeljko's descent into madness (which i felt ended with him a bit too broken, but that's just a personal preference, his performance was remarkable either way). but i didn't feel the sense of shock that i expected at certain points. i didn't feel the indignation. i think part of that was due to schwimmer's performance, another hangdog, woe is me, rote schwimmer characterization. i didn't think his performance did justice to the character and because of that some of the points of the play were softened and or missed entirely.
how much of what i felt, or didn't feel, in the audience was a result of the performances and how much was a result of a modern audience's cynicism, i'm not sure.
i enjoyed the production, but then i'm a sucker for a military court-room drama. tim daly gave an underrated performance. i haven't really heard much about him in this production but i think he's really the glue that holds it together. without him, you'd have schwimmer and joe sikora (look at me, i'm a dumb guy...until i'm not that dumb) standing around waiting for zeljko.
as far as the comedy, i think it's intentional. lightening up the mood for sucker punches and allowing these characters to not be completely dour for two acts. the script is dark enough, let a little light in once in a while.
r.i.p. marco, my guardian angel.
...global warming can manifest itself as heat, cool, precipitation, storms, drought, wind, or any other phenomenon, much like a shapeshifter. -- jim geraghty
pray to st. jude
i'm a sonic reducer
he was the gimmicky sort
fenchurch=mejusthavingfun=magwildwood=mmousefan=bkcollector=bradmajors=somethingtotalkabout: the fenchurch mpd collective
