CHRISTMAS, GASLIGHT STYLE

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I pick through the Thanksgiving leftovers and come up with a review of Gaslight Theatre’s holiday show:

    Does a Gaslight Theatre show have to be funny? For a very long time, Gaslight has specialized in send-ups, first of old Western melodramas and eventually of all sorts of genre movies and TV shows. The scripts are full of jokes and splattered with anachronistic asides. They have always been funny, even if the jokes tend to be groan-inducing.
    But Gaslight's current holiday show, Christmas in the Big Apple, isn't very funny. It's not that writer-director Peter Van Slyke has gone for laughs and failed miserably; it seems that he simply hasn't really tried for much humor at all. The show is designed to be lively, heartwarming and clean fun for the family, but the laughs are few and far between.
    So I sat there a couple of weeks ago, stuffing free popcorn into my mouth and wondering if something had gone wrong, or if I had become more of a curmudgeon than usual, or if Van Slyke had merely changed his approach for the holiday season.

SEX AND MUSIC ...

posted by James Reel

    ... don’t mix, says Terry Teachout. One’s a distraction from the other. I agree. If you’re attending to both simultaneously, one of the two elements has to be pretty bad.

PHOTO FUDDLE

posted by James Reel

    An example of not thinking at a daily newspaper: The Star carries a story about a decision not to tear down a library building because of its architectural significance, and accompanies it with a photo of people browsing in the stacks. That shot could have been taken at any library in town. Readers, I think, would rather see what the library’s architecture looks like, since that’s the subject of the article. But Star photo and design editors have a history of wanting to tell their own story, regardless of what those pesky words are about.