New System To Rate Broadway Shows

Oh, this reminds me of the day I was doing a report at the library my sophmore year in high school. In walks Kathy Garrity and her mother and they start getting periodicals from the librarian looking for reviews of the musical we were going to see a few weeks later, "Pippin." Mrs. Garrity was incensed because friends of hers had seen it and walked out because of the "shocking" subject matter and, I suppose, the inherent sexiness of Fosse dances. "You kids shouldn't see that crap, why can't you see 'Shenan-dough'?" That's really how she pronounced it. And we had seen it already on an earlier class trip. So, of course, because of somebody else deciding what wasn't appropriate for us to see, we ended up with a choice between Godspell and Shenan-dough.

Except for Mrs. Garrity's intervention, it was really fun to come of age in an era when it was sort of expected that we could see adult subject matter and not have our delicate little minds shattered by art.

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Rating System should be general:

M - Mature Audiences
G - General Audiences
A - All Audiences

And include:

N - Nudity
O - Obscene Language
S - Sexual Content
etc.

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"Obscene Language" capn? Come on. "Obscenity" is in the mind of the beholder.

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timote:

Then why have a rating system for movies and television? I guess people are too dumb to research those as well.

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See? Here we go! "I wasn't bashing your idea!" Can't we live in a world where we can strongly disagree with somebody's idea without threatening them or frickin going on and on and on about how we don't mean to hurt them?

The movie and television rating idea is a failure too, capn, and one of the reasons is that the people who are big on restricting other people's access are never satisfied. There was a time when there were NO movie ratings. Then they added two. Then they added X. Then Siskel and Ebert campaigned for NC-17 because they felt that there were arty movies that didn't deserve the scarlet X. So NC17 was created but because reactionary theater chain owners didn't want to upset the people who like ratings they decided not to show NC17 movies. So it ended up essentially being the same thing as the scarlet X anyway.

Also, who is the "ratings board" that passes judgment on the content? It's totally subjective. The way they try to address this is by creating subcategories with all the codes that you mention, "violence," "language." But who is the arbiter who decides what gets applied. How many f-words are acceptable?

This creates an atmosphere of self-censorship. Which is the antithesis of what theater should be.

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I dont think this would be a good idea. It might influence writers in a negative way. For example they might cut out a brilliant song or scene because it would mean the difference between a M or a G rating.

And kids can just walk up and see a movie whenever they want with friends.

It's a little bit more involved for a bunch of teenagers to walk up and plop down $100 a ticket to see a show.

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