As the Cardinal Flies

This is probably not the post you were looking for from me after the last couple of months (it's been an Adventure on this end, but things are in fact more or less under control at present, if likely to involve a fair amount of metaphorical tap dancing for the foreseeable future).

However, I find myself a trifle confuzzled, and I know I have a fellow theater geek or two in the gallery.  So here goes:

By more or less random happenstance, this past Thursday evening found me at a local high school musical -- specifically, a production of Legally Blonde.  It was an enjoyable evening -- packed house (for opening night, no less), lots of enthusiasm, and pretty good production values.  I need to note here that I am spoiled when it comes to both high school and college theater, having had the unusual good fortune to land in schools which had -- at the time -- both academically excellent drama departments and seriously talented student performers.

The result: I have to work a bit to avoid being hyper-critical of what I'm watching when I see a student production these days (this being the first in much, much too long).  Some issues are easy for me to set aside; there were a significant number of glitches with miking and sound tech all through the performance, but I have a feeling a good bit of that may have been hardware-related and thus not really anyone's fault as such.  And I can't expect the casts I watch to have the same astonishing polish and presence of certain of my classmates of old (some of whom now list Broadway credits on their resumes).   On one hand, I don't know that I saw any incipient Broadway stars onstage this time out -- but the young lady playing Elle Wood and the young man playing Mike-the-UPS-Guy were both particularly good, and all the performances were entirely respectable.  In point of fact, I think the student performers were uniformly better than the material they were given.  Speaking as one who hasn't seen the Reese Witherspoon films or read the original book, I found the music lively but not memorable (not even up to, say, the Galavant standard) and the script lacking both in focus and consistency. 

And then there was the exercise-video number.

Perhaps it's just me (speaking now as a middle-aged bachelor), but if I were a high school drama teacher, I am not sure I would costume six or eight of my most well-endowed female students in sports bras and sweatpants, give them jump ropes, and arrange them in the front rows of a troupe performing directly facing the audience.  The bouncing effect was, inevitable, enthusiastically vigorous, and struck me as entirely gratuitous in the Not-In-A-Good-Way sense.  And have I mentioned that this was happening at a Catholic high school?

Understand, I emphatically do not object to high school theater programs tackling mature subject matter, or even musicals with mature content (I have see three or four different high school productions of Pippin over the years, some pretty much unedited and some significantly massaged, all very good).  But Legally Blonde?  Just doesn't strike me as a strong enough show to merit wading into that briar patch in the first place.

Now if I could just nudge one of the local high schools into reviving Finian's Rainbow....