The Producers

For those of you who don't know me well, let me explain: I love musicals. I grew up watching The Sound of Music, Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cinderella (the Rodgers and Hammerstein version, not Disney). Some of my best childhood memories are times that I went to high school musicals at PHS with my mom. As a preteen and a teenager I lived to be on-stage and I was in The Sound of Music, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Annie, The Music Man, and The King and I (among others) in community and high school theatre productions. Mike is learning to appreciate the wide variety of show tunes that I sing to him in the shower, in the car, and in the kitchen. We've seen quite a few musicals together, both live and on film, and he's really coming around. Last night, however, his budding enthusiasm for the genre may have been dampered as we saw a so-so touring production of a not-very-interesting musical, The Producers. (See here for a plot synopsis.) Wikipedia explains the popularity of the musical (of which there are two film versions) like this: "The humor of the show is accessible to a wide range of audiences, and draws on ridiculous accents, caricatures of homosexuals and Nazis, and many show business in-jokes." That pretty much says it all. Basically, this musical appeals to the lowest-common-denominator humor-wise and made both Michael and me roll our eyes repeatedly. I'll avoid total snobbery and admit that we both laughed several times, as well, so the show was not a total bust.

We saw the show at the Assembly Hall on campus, where the Fighting Illini play basketball. They do a lot of shows (both concerts and plays) there as well, but it's not a totally successful musical venue. Basketball court acoustics are not so good. The Assembly Hall is a pretty cool building, though. I always think it looks like a giant UFO.