#straightlinecrazy

Saw this about 10 days ago. This play super sold out by now, but I managed to get a front row ticket to a midweek matinee, the only okayish seats left, several weeks ago. In order to make it in the middle of the workday I had to extricate myself from a nego with an exec admin before she was done with me (impossible task) and I had to run to get there on time. I also didn't have a lot of time to compose an outfit so I had to default to a "rich asshole" look, saved by my favorite hat. The theatre is in Hudson Yards soo....just setting the stage here, no pun intended. I got there in a whole mood! They made us latecomers sit out the first 20 min and watch it on a little TV, and I didn't get in my good seat until intermission. The other late audience was...not great. Rich people and tourists. Like, really rich people. Maybe they also ran out of time getting dressed for the play and their default rich-asshole-in-Manhattan look is "emeralds and inject emergency fillers to leave the house"? When I finally got inside it was more of the same. It was fucking weird!

While we were waiting I considered buying a ticket to come back in a couple weeks, but the only tickets left were on the resale market for 3x face value, so I asked/flirted out of a(n extremely cute) usher/production manager type if she thought it was worth it to come back and she neatly evaded by assuring me I hadn't missed much. Heh. That was my fourth warning.

Alright I guess I think the story of getting there is more interesting than the play, which was...utter nonsense. On the plus side if you sit in the front row, which I did eventually, Ralph Fiennes will occasionally stare deeply into your eyes. On the downside -- everything else?!

No, no, not everything else: The inside of the theatre is actually pretty cool for all that it lives in a soulless skyscraper mall; at least for this play there's not really a bad seat in the house, including to my relief that front row. The costumes were nice and most of the actors were very good (Ralph Fiennes is incredible). Danny Webb played Gov Al Smith with a (fucking delightful) Brooklyn accent as broad as the East River and I literally (like, actually) laughed at his every line of dialogue, to the point that some biddy kept looking at me like I was committing a crime enjoying a bad play I paid hundreds of dollars to see. (It was maybe a crime.) And did I say about Ralph Fiennes looking into your eyes? He is breathtaking. Like I'm pretty sure he could compell with the power of his gaze, type thing.

But the play was utter nonsense!!! It was very much an adaptation of a veritable tome, and I can say with the confidence of one who merely skimmed it that the playwright didnt get the book. The resulting extreme abridgement felt more "textual butchery" than "high concept distillation," complete with awkward transitions, expository AND expositional monologues to the audience (uggggghhhh) and so little human insight that it rendered a biographical story nearly incoherent. I physically cringed a couple of times, up through and including the undeserved standing ovation at the end.