Perfectly Horrible

I just saw a horrendous performance of Cabaret last night. It was kind of a mesh of the original, revival, and movie scripts all rolled into one.

The only reason I went at all was because a friend of mine had a student playing the part of Cliff. He was actually decent, although the production was so terrible it would have been hard for Lawrence Olivier to do a good job.

I would probably just write this off as just a bad community theater experience, but this kind of crap is what gives community theater a bad name, and that makes me sad. There are plenty decent community theaters out there. Why didn't this audience patronize those theaters?

The other thing is that this theater is on Staten Island, which is a hop, skip, and a jump from Manhattan. There are plenty of Off-Broadway and even Off-Off-Broadway productions that aren't too expensive and which are really, truly good. And yet the audience there loved it. They were positively overflowing with praise for this no-good, two-bit, piece of 狗屎. I just don't get it.