last night i went to see the HOTTEST SHOW ON BROADWAY, spring awakening. it was pretty great, though the second act seemed strangely non-existent. microphone rock dancing, teens pounding their boots on the floor, working really hard, very exciting. the mics are a nice touch...especially when the guys put them back in their breast coat pocket when they are done. though one cant help but notice that the voices are mysteriously miced even off mic. hm, blech.
the much hyped sex scene is certainly exciting and dangerous- thank god broadway is taking chances like that, a furious blinding grope on a teen breast. even more dangerous is the girl duet hard rocker about child abuse, which just fucked with me in so many ways...these two teen girls are singing about what happens to them at night, while behind them the 30ish white male drummer is rocking out. just totally joyously obliviously rocking out. whoa. (while talking about the band here, ill also note that i have a monster crush on the uncredited, im guessing sub, pianist/conductor {uncredited unless her name is adam} the way she would duck down and groove, very hot. call me!)
one thing thats been really scaring me lately is the idea of genius decay...the late works of artists getting worse and worse. miles's 80s-90s studio albums are a fucking joke; paul mccarteny is recording for starbucks. what the fuck? cant they hear any more? the gradual blindness into mediocrity, its a scary thing, and i fear the day it happens to me. i already have the seeds of it, i know: the artistic blind spot, that moment that in retrospect is just so obviously terrible and yet cannot be seen at the time of creation. spring awakening has two of them...the first are the absurdly horrible schoolteachers, complete with funny, overpronounced german names, facial ticks, and most horrendously the single moment of "lets party" dancing during "totally fucked" that we all saw 20 years ago in a hundred teen comedies, the crusty old dean finally cracking a move at the final jubilee. are you fucking kidding me? when so much else in the show was so real, do we really need the adults to be trite, totally unbelievable caricatures? do you really need that cheap laugh so badly?
worse for me though was the act two homosexual seduction scene, which is played strictly for laughs. after such a tender and true, awkward and terrifying hetero dance in the first act, to go to cheap "im like a pussycat, i skim off the cream" land, with two again caricature voices, is just fucking insulting.
cmon! if youre gonna go for it, FUCKING GO FOR IT. actually much of the show seemed to play this uncomfortable dance, lodging it in this strange netherworld where parts took bold chances and rocked, while other elements felt like halfbaked concessions to an earlier broadway, one of overacted hilarity and euphemistic broadness to gloss the unease. one can imagine the agehardened producer trying to inject some lightness, something familiar into the show. or maybe the creative team had their own issues with bipolar pussiness. who knows.
its just so weird to me; how can someone (myself included) create something so very very good and yet have such egregious lapses? is it because we see too much, or not enough? i guess i know the answer to this...theres not just the forest, not just the trees, theres the roots, the incredible complex system of inspiration and thought that bubbles underneath, that looms so blindingly large in the artists mind but that the audience never sees. id like to take this blog out with one of my trademark "new hyperplatitudes", but am now plagued with doubts that those are artistically poor. and even more plagued by how exactly the phrase "forest for the trees" maps out metaphorically. too plagued to continue.
dude i love matthew dear!