Comedy

I saw the Divine Sister today at Speakeasy, it was funny! If you enjoy broad humor ala Mel Brooks, you'd probably like it. I started into it with hesitance, wondering it perhaps was too broad, but I ultimately gave myself over to it and enjoyed it. I had a few caveats, I get that it was a send up of 60s cinema, but the sheer number of varying plot threads including brief send up of the Da Vinci Code/60s spy movies and then this extended riff on Suddenly Last Summer(?) were a bit much, but those are textual issues. And I'm not really trying to write a review. Again, if you like Mel Brooks and fairly broad comedies (which the complaint I just made fits into the framework of, ala History of the World Part 1), check it out.

It was a pretty informative experience, and served as part of my overall effort to see more Boston theatre. It's not that I don't like going to plays, I'm just pretty lazy, and that shit's expensive. Luckily I have a source for comps that I've been taking advantage of which I hadn't previously, and when a performance time comes up that I can definitely make, I'm checking it out. This is also how I saw Collected Stories last week.

Anyway, I wouldn't call the humor in "The Divine Sister" subtle, but it was very capably delivered by the cast and I laughed a lot. Maybe my favorite moment of the show is when (my friend and teacher) Paula Plum's sexually repressed nun hears a charged remark from a cast member... and I'm not doing a very good job of describing this moment. Basically he goes into detail about his member, and Paula reacted in character, and even though it was a blatant penis joke it really worked for me. So, why? Well, Paula's delivery, specificity, her commitment to the bit, and the overall strength of her character and her choices.

These are things I've been thinking about, because The Divine Sister is the kind of over the top comedy that I hope to make my living acting in, and it was informative to be on the outside looking in on this kind of show, especially on a professional scale. I did a similar production of Steve Martin's The Underpants this past April, and this occasion seems like a good time to go into something that has reminded me of that experience...

You see, a week or two ago one of my cast mates stumbled across... a review. Personally, I thought it was a pretty good show, but this person did not. You know what, I'll just link to it and you can see for yourself. OK so it's not that they panned it, but they gave a fairly mixed review. Fair enough! Here's what they had to say about me in my role: "Versati was ... a lot. The character is a self-important, aggrandizing poet, and perhaps it was that type of character that I had so strong a reaction to, but Mike Handelman didn’t help me any. The character is hugely pompous and overblown with his own “poetic” conceits: I so understand the temptation to overplay. But Handelman seemed to channel some of the insane over-the-topness of (specifically) a Jack Black-ian persuasion. Handelman’s approach, although sometimes funny, battled the type of comedy written into the script, and usually ended up overshadowing and undermining the hilarity of the written jokes."


Better then no reaction at all, am I right? That's a rhetorical question. And although I take the comparison to Jack Black as sort of a compliment, and the reviewer admits that they were perhaps reacting more to the character in the text to my performance, I don't take their remarks too seriously. In the end any performance is a collaboration, and in my audition for the role I took the material in a very over the top direction, and the director must have responded to that because she had me continue with that throughout the production and I could have toned it down but that's not what the director wanted, and I thought it balanced out in the piece, and you can't please everybody.


Regardless, it makes me just a teensy bit... insecure. Not that I'm going to change what I'm doing, but it makes one think...