The Big Broadcast of 1938

[prog]

The first act was ingenious, wonderful, and perfectly paced. derspatchel has such an affinity for both creating and delivering radio comedy that one is tempted to conclude he was born 70 years too late. The music from Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band was hot, and fit in perfectly as a buffer between the vocal performances. I would have happily sat through another two hours of any material, had it maintained the pace of the first.

Unfortunately, acts II and III - the headline acts, really, involving the War of the Worlds adaptation - needed some seriously fierce editing. I know it's easy for me to say, down here in the audience, but I think it would have been possible to compress them into a single act, or at least into two significantly shorter ones.

Now, there were many strong moments (the scene at the site of the first cylinder landing was particularly memorable, with excellent sound engineering from both Foleys and performers), and the use of the Martian Chorus and the Crazy Sound Dood to represent the Invaders was just wonderful. But: there were many scenes that should have been cut, compressed, or combined, not just to bring the three-hour running time down (not counting intermissions), but to better emphasize the cool stuff.

I would have dropped stuff like the mayor's monologue and at least one of the professor's monologues, and ground more out of the three(!) lengthy doomed-news-reporter sequences. I envision the latter two reporter scenes overlapping or interleaving quite nicely, though I realize that's my film-editing experience talking, and that it would be harder to do on-stage.

I would even consider completely removing all the scenes involving the North End mobsters' club. The moll's introduction would then occur when the professor meets her, letting her mob connections (as well as the mobsters themselves) become revealed as a plot twist later on. I would have found the mobsters' motivations stronger if those characters all showed up as a late-game surprise, fighting side-by-side with the army but also trying to get at each others' backs from the get-go.

But, all this is just me sitting in my comfy chair making sniffing noises about how the great and talented me would have done things, when the fact of the matter is that the PMRP has outdone itself once again with a hell of a show, no matter how much tighter it could stand to be. I'm proud to be able to say I worked with them when they were getting started years ago, and prouder still that they just keep getting better.

Comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, lillibet explained it as "They didn't have time to write a shorter script, so they wrote a long one." IOW, clearly it could have been tightened, beneficially; but knowing how and where takes time (and energy) that they didn't have by the time the whole thing was even *written*.

Maybe for the revival... or the touring production... ;-)

[mangosteen]

"They didn't have time to write a shorter script, so they wrote a long one."

...and that's after cutting paragraphs and lines from the script. The fact that cuts like that are an incremental process as people hear it played out again and again, only means that it takes more time.

or the touring production... ;-)

Now wouldn't that be a hell of a thing. :)

[spatch]

Byfar Hour writer here. (Hello!) I had written a comment here about how chanaleh was right about the time constraints and the editing process, but ironically the comment was too long for LJ to post.

I've since posted it in full on my own LJ.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I just edited a story for a submission down from a little over 3000 words to a little under 2500 to meet editorial guidelines, and oh man do I feel for them. It's hard enough when you're just cutting words on a page, making sure you aren't accidentally throwing out some crucial bit of information that turns an insight into noise. With cutting in theatre you're cutting people's lines, you're throwing away hard work that other people have already put in. Necessary to do, but it makes an intellectually challenging task emotionally challenging as well.

[xach.livejournal.com]

Topsy Turvy is one of my favorite movies exactly because it shows this kind of behind-the-scenes theater agony.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's true that stage shows usually evolve significantly over time on the basis of audience feedback if the run lasts more than a few nights. Wouldn't it be great to have that luxury?

You can learn some technical stuff even over a short run. When we did Countdown to Chaos/Chicken Heart for First Night, I remember feeling frustrated that we only had this one shot and wouldn't be able to correct our inevitable planning screwups on the second night. Actually, that was PMRP's third live performance of Chicken Heart, but there had been a gap of years since the second one and they were all under radically different conditions...