OlBlueEyes said: ""
I don't mean to be unkind, but apparently your theatrical education never got to Brecht, Piscator, Beckett, Artaud, Genet or even Joe Orton. There are lots of things theater can offer besides sympathetic characters.
Please. Let us call a spade a spade. If you did not want to be unkind, then you would not have written something that you thought would be taken as unkind. There are those who take pleasure in saying unkind things.
But you are correct. My theatrical education never got to any of those gentlemen, not even Joe Orton. In fact, I could never for the life of me figure out why, in the name of theatrical education, anyone would try to impose Oedipus Rex on an unsuspecting student. But you probably dug Sophocles.
Henry James has always been one of my most favorite novelists. He writes long, verbose paragraphs full of run-on sentences. The only "action" in any of his novels is psychological, and even this can be so subtle as to be missed on first reading.
An invitation to read one of his novels can send many intelligent and well educated people running out of the room screaming. That's fine. Different Strokes.
And I'm being absolutely sincere when I say that I wish I shared the breadth of your ability to take pleasure in such a diversity of musical theater.
You enjoy very much Oklahoma and also Company. The first begins with Curley out in the fields singing the lyrical "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin." The second with a group of people chanting "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby Baby, Bobby Bubi, Robby." I just can't encompass both.
"
Honestly, OlBlue, I meant what I said. The theory of theater you were taught stops roughly with the Romantics of the early 1800s and Coleridge's ideas about the suspension of disbelief. The idea that the spectator should "care" about the characters is still very popular in much of film and TV, but was discarded over a century ago by the modernists and post-modernists of the theater. (Henrik has already made the excellent point that modernists expect "caring" in differing senses of the word, but I think I understood what you meant.)
I said "I don't mean to be unkind" because the ideas you expressed are still held by many and I didn't mean to suggest you were ignorant or uneducated, just that you haven't been exposed to certain other ideas yet. Yes, I am capable of being unkind but more often a simple opinion of mine is taken as unkindness; in this case, I hoped to do neither. If you took offense, I sincerely apologize.
Especially because you do me the compliment of recalling other posts of mine from other threads. Now THAT is kindness (and also a power of recall with which I cannot compete). Yes, I do like OKLAHOMA! and COMPANY equally--because each does what it sets out to do and does it perfectly. I had a great opera course in college (composer Jack Beeson was the professor) where I learned that all art is a product of conventions. (Fine Art history classes helped as well.) Since then I have tried to judge whatever I see based on the conventions the work itself sets out.
In the case of SUNDAY, I think we're invited to expect the play will explore the static personae of Seurat's painting and flesh out their lives. This seems an exciting prospect, one that will only cause us to look anew at the overly familiar painting. But it turns out to be a red herring in a show that wants to dramatize the creative process, but ends up doing so no better than NINE. (I keep thinking of David Merrick's pronouncement on FOLLIES: "Nobody cares about the private lives of artists." I don't agree in re FOLLIES, but SUNDAY...)
The more I think about it, I'm not sure you and I disagree at all. We just have different training and tend to express our views differently.
