I just saw The Black Rider tonight and it was the worst theater experience of my life. I have a pretty open mind about theater, and am not put off by different. I have enjoyed a lot of avant garde and experimental theater, but avant garde or, as the program says, "genre-bending" is no excuse for just plain bad.
This show had no redeeming features. The music was bland and uninteresting, the book was non-existent, the characters were utterly unlikable, and only a couple of the actors could actually sing (and they could rarely be heard over the shrieking of the music and other characters).
For those of you who have not seen it, imagine a production in which every character appears like the Joel Grey emcee from Cabaret, but even more grotesque and exaggerated. Wilhelm, the character who makes the pact with the devil, does not walk, but steps sideways into a crouch as he moves across the stage. The father, who bears a strong resemblance to Beetlejuice, stutters half his lines. Some characters seem to exist only to cackle and shriek. The music is deliberately dissonant (and headache-inducing). The plot, a Faustian tale, is so thin that, at one point, they tell the story of Georg -- who went insane because of the Magic Bullets -- twice. The first time is recited by one character and then, as if you didn't catch it that time, they have another character play Georg while repeating the exact same lines. And then there is a number where characters dance on the stage with the corpses of deer, with their entrails exposed.
What an astonishing waste of talent. This wouldn't even be worth the cost if it were playing in a small experimental theater off-off-broadway for $10 a ticket. It was truly wretched.
Updated On: 5/31/06 at 01:46 AM
