| re: Purlie Victorious painful to watch | |
| Last Edit: portenopete 11:11 am EDT 05/25/24 | |
| Posted by: portenopete 10:26 am EDT 05/25/24 | |
| In reply to: Purlie Victorious painful to watch - adeliciaboy 01:05 am EDT 05/25/24 | |
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| Just started watching the first scene on Great Performances and I'd forgotten how incomprehensible it was. It's like watching a cast do an Italian in rehearsal! I think that knowing the PBS broadcast needed to come in under two hours, they were going particularly fast for the taping. And I was immediately confused about how run-down the shack is supposed to be, since it looks like a rather chic Pottery Barn loft rather than a decrepit backwoods cottage. And it's distracting that Heather Alicia Simms appears to be wearing false eyelashes and looking very much a Broadway actress rather than a worker on a Georgia plantation. The whole thing smacks of slick acting choices and pointlessly orchestral line readings that sacrifice sense and motivation for cheap style. None of the performances rang true for me with the exception of Billy Eugene Jones as Gitlow, who didn't stint on style but managed to seem like a real person. I was mystified by the reaction to Kara Young, both by the critics' reviews and by the audience the night I saw it (in late December, so four months into the run). She was so broad and weird and grating that- not knowing the play- I assumed Lutiebell was an actress pretending to be a guileless yokel and just doing it very badly. She keeps fluttering and closing her eyelids as if she is about to swoon or is channeling messages from another planet I don't know if the performance "grew" over the first four months but what I saw may have been the single most irritating performance I have ever seen on a Broadway stage. (If the audience had been as silent and disbelieving as I was it might not have seemed so surreal but they were falling out of their seats laughing and applauding.) And why the addition for this production of a laboured subtitle (a laboured subtitle which I believe was part of the official title cited at the Tony nominations announcement). What does "A NON-CONFEDERATE ROMP THROUGH THE COTTON PATCH" conjure that 'PURLIE VICTORIOUS" doesn't? "PURLIE VICTORIOUS" sounds like a lot of fun and I don't need to be told that it's a "romp". |
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