Sunday, February 25, 2007

Another Crazy Night at the Theatre, or Why You Should Maybe Avoid Starbucks and "Antiques Roadshow"

Well, the second and final night of the one-act festival was much more sedate than the first. One show dealt with an about-to-be-divorced woman holding a garage sale. Blech. Good acting, but blech. The second show was dull for about 20 minutes: A woman gets into a nasty fight with her boyfriend over the phone, then her local barrista drops in to return the purse that she left in his coffeeshop. They start watching Antiques Roadshow together while guzzling G&Ts and making bets on what each antique is going to be worth. (Gawd, I HATE Antiques Roadshow. Even that theme music makes my skin crawl. And it would be easy to guess what all that junk is worth, 'cause the uglier and more worthless it is, the more valuable some fossil of an appraiser believes it to be. I mean, you could bring in Napoleon's birth certificate and it wouldn't fetch as much as a vase made of out of laquered monkey toenails or some sh** like that. But I digress.) The girl and her barrista discover that they knew each other as children; he had a wicked crush on her until his parents moved away. They start to make out. In walks the boyfriend, already grumpy because she persuaded him to give up a job in oil industry to work on a road crew. He starts slapping them both around. She brains him with a tacky vase, probably one that would be worth 4000 pounds, and kills him. Slowly, the audience is made to realize that she planned everything. She tracked down a childhood crush, forced her boyfriend to move to his city, hung out in his coffeeshop til he noticed her, then left her purse there intentionally so that he would follow her home, kiss her, and give her an excuse to kill her boyfriend and get all the insurance money. Amazingly, the barrista doesn't catch on and agrees to run away with her to Mexico. Or, as the adjudicator put it, "Crazy, meet Crazy." This, folks, is what you get for watching Antiques Roadshow.

Ruby, last night's "heckler", won the best actress award. :)

5 comments:

tweetey30 said...

Sounds like a load of fun. Hopefully next year is better if they do it every year. LOL...I have no idea how the theatre works really. Well hope all is well. Maybe when you mom calls me or I call her back one of these days I will ask her about the dishwasher that tried taking baby out of town in a snow storm. People. They will do anythign in this weather. Its terrible. Tweets.

Wandering Coyote said...

That sounds like the craziest play ever!

I've watched a few episodes of Antiques Roadshow, and it isn't my fave, but sometimes they do have intersting historical information on them.

S.M. Elliott said...

The craziest play I ever saw involved a bomb shelter, baked beans, a blind gay messiah, and cannibalism. I liked this one better. It's called "Frappe".

Gardenia said...

It all sounds like some wild underground production! Fabulous. Antiques Roadshow - gets boring after a couple of pieces - probably would be much more successful if they showed some behind the scenes drama like this! Clever.

R said...

laquered monkey toenails.
Hee! Awesome.