I'm off now to usher for A Little Night Music. I'm hoping it's good. It's a college production. Later. 
Hope held out in one hand....and then it's hacked off by an axe.
(I hope it WAS good, though, George...one of my favorite scores!).
It was...very much a school production. Not bad, but not great. It's a fairly small theater, only holds 218 or so. The "orchestra" was just a piano and a cello. That's it, but they were very good. The set was just the piano and cello on stage, chairs for the Liebeslieder (sp?) behind the cello, a bed on wheels and six chairs for everything else. There were no props at all...other than the invitation. The way they used just the chairs and the bed worked for the most part.
I really could nit-pick, but I'll just say that the worst directoral choice was that the director chose to do nothing with the Liebeslieder...or didn't know what to do with them. First of all, there were six: FOUR women and two men, but they just sat in the back behind the cello. Except for the scene at the theater when two of the women are actresses, they did nothing except stand up and sing then sit down. BAD CHOICE. The second worst directoral/staging choice was how the scene changes were done. For only having a bed on wheels and six chairs, they all took forever! AND Petra and Frid were the only ones who moved anything! There were a couple of changes where they had to move all the chairs out of the way of the bed, move the bed on or off, then put all the chairs back in place...and they moved the chairs only one or two at a time. AARRGGHH!!
Other than that, the performers were okay. Desiree tended to sing the early stuff an octave up in a legit voice
but from "You Must Meet My Wife" on, she sang it where it was supposed to be. Nobody had a "great" voice, but everyone pretty much was okay. Not a horrible evening (for a three hour show
) but not a great evening, either.
