Friday, February 23, 2007
"The Producers" WON'T change your life shocker
Last night we went to see “The Producers” at The Palace Theatre in Manchester. It was fairly amusing, but I don’t think it was the “greatest musical in the world,” as proclaimed by lots of reviewers. It was also slightly worrying that a number of audience members left at the end of the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence, clearly failing to grasp that this wasn’t the end of the entire show. They hadn’t understood the satire, which made their laughter at the Nazi jokes a bit concerning – they obviously didn’t get the irony, and saw the Hitler sequence as the natural conclusion to a show about how great Nazism was…
We seemed to pick the night when various local “celebrities” went as well. There must have been a fair number of famous people, because every couple of minutes there was a series of flashes, jostling and shouting from men with expensive-looking cameras, before someone was ushered under a velvet rope into a bar that would've laughed me back out onto the pavement had I tried to gain entry.
Maybe I’m showing how out of touch I am, but I barely recognized any of them. Tam got excited by some Coronation Street people, all of who looked significantly younger than me. And there was the guy from “Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere” who isn’t Peter Kay (which prompted me to say, sadly within his earshot, “Look, it’s Max or Paddy from Max and Paddy!”). At one point we asked a photographer to identify the girl he’d just accosted and photographed. He mumbled “Shameless,” but I wasn’t sure whether he was describing the TV programme she was in, or his own profession.
The musical is worth a gawp if you've nothing else on, but since the tickets sold out in the time it takes to read this sentence, it's unlikely you will be able to buy a ticket as a result of reading my blog... But, as ever when something I attend is hyped-up to such an extent, it leaves me feeling a tad disappointed. One day I'll go and see a play, or a film, or read a book, that genuinely changes my life or leaves me joyous with some earth-shattering idea. It hasn't happened yet.
Rick
We seemed to pick the night when various local “celebrities” went as well. There must have been a fair number of famous people, because every couple of minutes there was a series of flashes, jostling and shouting from men with expensive-looking cameras, before someone was ushered under a velvet rope into a bar that would've laughed me back out onto the pavement had I tried to gain entry.
Maybe I’m showing how out of touch I am, but I barely recognized any of them. Tam got excited by some Coronation Street people, all of who looked significantly younger than me. And there was the guy from “Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere” who isn’t Peter Kay (which prompted me to say, sadly within his earshot, “Look, it’s Max or Paddy from Max and Paddy!”). At one point we asked a photographer to identify the girl he’d just accosted and photographed. He mumbled “Shameless,” but I wasn’t sure whether he was describing the TV programme she was in, or his own profession.
The musical is worth a gawp if you've nothing else on, but since the tickets sold out in the time it takes to read this sentence, it's unlikely you will be able to buy a ticket as a result of reading my blog... But, as ever when something I attend is hyped-up to such an extent, it leaves me feeling a tad disappointed. One day I'll go and see a play, or a film, or read a book, that genuinely changes my life or leaves me joyous with some earth-shattering idea. It hasn't happened yet.
Rick
# posted by Richard Baum @ 17:53 
