We Love Arts

We Love Arts: [Title of Show]

Erin Driscoll, Sam Ludwig, James Gardiner and Jenna Sokolowski
in Signature’s production of [title of show].
Larry, as always, was excluded from the shot.

[title of show] is a musical that purports to be the actual events revolving about four people writing a musical about writing a musical.

Or something like that. Or more accurately, sometimes like that. The self-awareness of the characters that they are, at that moment, performers, comes and goes. I can only think of one moment where someone actually breaks the fourth wall but there’s many moments where the characters discuss the fact that what they’re doing will later be performed in front of said fourth wall.

If you’re already annoyed by this description you might want to skip it. [title of show] is sometimes painfully meta and if you’re irritated at just how twee it is in its description then you certainly aren’t going to enjoy it being milked for laughs for over an hour. If you’re willing to let the show wink at you fairly incessantly and prepared to overlook some imperfections in both the production and the underlying material then it can be a good time.

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Robo-Poll


Clockwork Robot…
Originally uploaded by law_keven

I have a landline, but I rarely use it. Usually it’s for stuff like calling the Chinese delivery place a couple blocks over, and so I have something that really works well in my Condo. It’s not that I get calls on it. Except this morning when it rang about 10:15am. It was a robo-call, I could tell immediately, but I gave it a second to rattle off its spiel before deciding it wasn’t going to waste my time or try to sell me more credit than I need.

It asked five simple questions and the whole thing took 30 seconds:

– Who would you vote for if the election was today?
– Which party do you trust with the economy right now?
– What’s your gender?
– What’s your race?
– What’s your age group?

And away it went. But it was all automated. It wasn’t a real person making minimum wage in a call center, it was a robot doing the polling. I got a little sad. Are you telling me there’s no Josh Lyman standing over a group of midwestern transplants and telling them to spit out their gum?! Sigh. The price of progress.