One friendslock, two friendslocked posts!

Last night I went to see my daughter in her high school production of Edna Ferber and George Kaufman's Stage Door. It was EXCRUCIATING--allow me to enumerate:

• The plot centers around the goings-on in an off-Broadway boardinghouse for aspiring actresses called The Footlights Club, run by a former actress named Mrs. Orcutt. To explain the voice that Mrs. Orcutt used, I must impart an entertainment history lesson: In 1993 Alec Baldwin appeared as the host of Saturday Night Live, and was in a sketch called "The Mimic," where he played an actor who was supposedly excellent at copying voices, which he was supposed to use over the phone to rescue a kidnapped Cavenaugh child. Only he was a lousy mimic, so he failed to rescue the child. He then confided that he'd tricked Mrs. Cavenaugh into hiring him by pretending to be his own reference over the phone, but she was completely fooled, because he was such a good mimic (of a crappy italian accent). Subsequently, he did Mrs. Cavenaugh's voice by going into a broken falsetto with an affected upper-crust accent. That voice is the voice that a teenaged girl used to play Mrs. Orcutt, in addition to other over-the-top embellishments.


• Among the seventeen (!) tenants of the boardinghouse are apparently two (2) high school princesses, one of whom was a nice shade of orange. Amanda Bynes in Hairspray orange. The other was Blair from The Facts of Life.


• The romantic lead, Terry Randall, is courted by an aspiring playwright named Keith Burgess, played by an actor with an Ian Cameron chinbeard, and about as much personality as Ian Cameron himself.


• The critical moment of the show is supposed to be the suicide of Kaye Hamilton. In the movie, this provides an emotional focus for Terry Randall (played by Katherine Hepburn) so that she can learn to act. I don't know what purpose it serves in the play, because it was cut. Kaye Hamilton walks offstage at one point and never appears again, although there's a reference later to a "terrible tragedy" nobody in the audience has any fucking idea what they're talking about.


• In the middle of a couple of expositionary scenes, one of the aspiring actress tenants comes onstage in a leotard and ballet skirt and sings "That's Life" at full volume while dancing all around the stage, over the dialogue.


• The set dressing included a Georgia O'Keefe-esque painting of a stamen penetrating a huge lily. Perhaps this is supposed to be a reference to the famous line from the movie, "The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day and now I place them here in memory of something that has died." This line was either cut from or does not appear in the play version.


• Each of the seventeen actress-tenants in the show were capable of accurately portraying two moods: Pretentious and Annoying. I've not seen the film version, but I'm going to assume that the thirty pages of dialogue about how much movies suck was at least trimmed for the screenplay.


• All of the factual information contained in this list had to be painstakingly researched by yours truly via Wikipedia and Google Book Search, 'cause I had no idea what was going on onstage last night.

Afterwards, I told everybody (I knew three cast members, including my daughter) that they did a fine job, because you really don't want to shit all over the hard work of highschoolers, even if they suck.

In my daughter's defense, she didn't actually suck, but her lines were pretty much relegated to "yes ma'am" and "dinner is served." She did get the only genuine spontaneous applause of the night when she accidentally spilled a cup of coffee on chinbeard.

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In the break room this morning, we discovered that our anal-retentive (no, really, I'm pretty sure he's an unmedicated OCD) controller had placed all the dishes that were in the sink into a box labeled "Dishes that employees are too LAZY to wash."