We're in California for a while continues...
Sometimes I just need to rant and this is one of those times. It's a long one so get yourself a cup of coffee. Or a valium. Bathroom breaks are also recommended. Berkeley is going to hell in a handbasket.
But first: last night we saw All Wear Bowlers at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. What an astonishing piece of absolute crap.
Here's the thing: my perfect, wonderful, fabulous husband wanted to surprise me with tickets to something cool so that we wouldn't miss London so much and to show that "hey, Berkeley has great culture and we're so happy we live here." Not.
John is such a sweetie and when I saw the look on his face after 15 minutes of this theatrical poopie I knew that he knew he failed in his quest. He knew that I knew that he knew...
The first 10 or so minutes were ingenious. It involved them appearing in a film on an onstage screen and then walking out of the film onto the stage and back into the film, etc. It was clever. Very clever. In fact, it was the only clever and funny thing in the show. It went immediately downhill from there.
It was 75 minutes of complete torture. We've walked out of things better than this. But we couldn't walk out because there was no intermission. We were trapped.
Note to self: whenever there isn't an intermission be suspicious of the quality of the production and do more Google research before buying tickets.
We have never seen such an amateurish, pathetic, obnoxious and badly performed stage piece. Correction, yes we have. But not in a place like the Berkeley Repertory Theatre where we expect to see professional, polished, world-class productions. Come to think of it, we've been disappointed at Berkeley Rep several times which is probably why we we took them off our donation list.
However, even more shocking than the badness of the production was that most of the audience loved it! WFT? The woman next to me was laughing herself a hernia. We were completely baffled. Now, everyone who knows me and John know that we are big on laughing. We laugh a lot. We laugh at nearly everything. I am particularly fond of poopie jokes. But this just wasn't funny. It was stupid. Perhaps it was the bad acting, the amateurish bad timing, the poorly performed slapstick. Yea, all of those things. Horrible.
For future theatre, we are definitely going to do a little Google research. Although the reviews I found online praise the show there was an obvious clue that, if we had seen it, John and I both would have screamed in terror: "Beckettian vaudeville." We are not fans of Beckett. We were trapped at one of his plays a few years ago and couldn't leave because there wasn't an intermission and... hey wait, I see a pattern...
There's a reason some shows don't have an intermission. It's because they know that it's so bad that people will leave if they have a chance. This has happened so many times that I am convinced it is more than a coincidence; it's a strategy.
Part two of my rant is the photo above. It's from Wikipedia and has been placed into the public domain by its photographer. Thank you!
Since I wasn't able to take a photo of the theatre last night because it was teeming rain, I decided to find an appropriate photo of the production online. No can do. The photos of the production at the Berkeley Rep web site are nice but fiercly restricted. (BTW, I'm sure the photos on that link will change once this piece of crap production moves on but I suspect the nasty "terms of use" will apply to whatever is there.) Do I qualify as a journalist or media and can therefore use the photos? (If I loved the production then I suspect the answer would be "yes" but if they saw how much I hated it then I suspect the answer would be "no.")
Or am I personal use? And why does it matter? The only thing they are doing with their strict control is preventing people from promoting them and publicizing them for free. They are restricting regular people, in fact, their audience: the people who buy the tickets. That's another reason for Berkeley Rep to not be on our donation list.
Now back to my Berkeley-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket rant. It's worse than ever.
Even more stores have closed and are still empty. Many new buildings have gone up, with housing that appears fully occupied but their street-level commerical space remains empty. There are buildings on major streets that have been empty for years. Years.
The homeless camp out along the main street downtown and there are screaming crazy people all over the place. We actually don't go to downtown Berkeley anymore. Besides there isn't much of a reason to go there, it's really unpleasant. The idiot mayor they've had for the last few years just got re-elected so I don't see things changing soon, if ever.
While we were walking to the store the other day, a woman driving an SUV nearly ran us over. She was the typical calvin-klein-wearing, crispy-haired, toddler-toting yuppie that lives in most of suburban America and, sadly, has infiltrated Berkeley in large numbers. The thing is, she was on her way to the organic grocery store which is the beacon of Berkeley political correctness. In her SUV. Her particularly large SUV. John and I decided on the spot that someone needs to create a support group called "Buddhists who drive SUV's: Learning to live with the hypocrisy." Whoever starts that franchise is going make a fortune.
Below are just some photos I've taken recently of our garden, Clyde, etc. That is the one thing about Berkeley that we cannot deny: it's lovely. Well, our garden is, at least.
Flickr
