Last night, Mrs. That Dan Guy & I took in a Stage West Dinner Theatre production of Sweet Charity, the hit musical currently being successfully revived right now, on Broadway. The show we saw last night couldn’t have been revived with a defibrillator and massive quantities of nitro-glycerine…

The show was our first disappointment at this venue, which has had some rather professional productions the past few times we’ve been there. The show we saw last night couldn’t have been improved with a trap door and a bear on a unicycle…

What can I say? We were both bored out of our skulls. When the lights came up for the first intermission, you could tell that we had both been occupied with something other than the show – if we were going to have a second cup of coffee/how do ostriches breath when they stick their heads in the sand/what flavour gum do you suppose this is, stuck under the table??

We snuck outside in the balmy -40° Celsius weather for some “fresh air”, and to let our vehicle run for a bit (frozen battery acid doesn’t do a very efficient job of starting a car), and we found that several other folks were doing the same thing. Unlike us, they all headed for the exit, once their vehicles warmed up.

So, what was the problem? Weak casting for sure. You never believed that the lead actor would have trouble finding a partner, and for that matter, you never developed any feelings at all for her. She could have been trampled by a herd of elephants in the first act, and we’d still have been more concerned with trying to figure out the flavour of that damn gum underneath the top of our table…

This production couldn’t have been saved by a herd of stampeding elephants.

Troopers that we were, we stuck in through to the end, when many others were quietly picking up their parkas, and walking backwards towards the exits. The pivotal point in the show arrived, and with no emotional attachment to the lead character, the ending was as heartbreaking as discovering that professional wrestling is staged. As a matter of fact, after such a tepid closing scene, the actors all started to come onstage and take bows, and you wondered if several of them might have started their own cars during the intermission, and gone home themselves.

Hey, I think I may have just written a negative review! Take that, argy.ca!!

Chow for now!!