Musical Review: Jesus Christ, Superstar

That's right - I went to see one of my favourite musicals of all time. It's hard to pinpoint exactly *why* I love Jesus Christ, Superstar so much. Possibly because it's a little sexy. Possibly because it's a little bit blasphemous. But more probably because it's really campy, and is full of the long, high loud notes that win you American Idol (hang in there until 1:35 - totally worth it).

So I was of two minds when I arrived in "downtown" Invercargill at 9:45 on a Monday and heard the JC Superstar was coming to town. My thoughts were as follows:

1) Curse my luck - I really wish they'd been doing Joseph. I saw an excellent version of JC Superstar in Kingston, and this one probably won't be as good.

2) Well, i better go, since the only musical I've seen in the past year was My Fair Lady. And we all know how that turned out.

I'd pretty much determined to go, and found out that night that the lovely young woman I was staying with was part of the backstage crew for the production. So I ordered my ticket online that week and went to see the show. Which, incidentally, was on Kyle's 28th birthday.


A real WTF query

Note: this image requires a bit of explanation. Yes, it's a random mis-mash of things on the web. As per usual when I do posts, I tend to just Googleimage whatever I'm looking for (with the Safesearch off, of course) and pick the image that's closest to what I'm looking for. Sometimes it yields hilarious or awkward results, like for a time "hot guy pancakes" brought up this image as hit #3.


Someone's horny.

However, if you do this today you end up getting pictures of pancakes, pictures of sausages, a girl in a tube top, a cartoon of Obama with a pancake on his head and a link to the Historical Love Fiction "Mission of Hope." Try it, I dare you.

So . . . cheer if you love tangents . . . or pancakes. Anyway, I ended up posting the JC Fabulous search page because there was nothing even close to what I was looking for. I was hoping for a cute cartoon of Jesus, maybe dressed in a big purple robe, or wearing glitter and mascara, looking something like a cross between Dr. Frank N'Furter and the runway coach from America's Next Top Model. You know, the little Hispanic one with the silver dyed hair who's actually the most sane person on the show.



As you can see three images ago, my image search was "Fabulous Jesus Christ." I think this is an appropriate place to do the breakdown ala Tosh.0. Oh, and if you don't know who Daniel Tosh is, you should Youtube some of his comedy when you're done reading this post. He's *almost* as funny as this blog. And you should also check out his show on Comedy Central, which is sort of like Joel McHale's The Soup for the Interwebs. If you didn't understand this entire paragraph, I would suggest you need to watch a lot more of Kathy Griffin's stand up. God I miss American television.

Down here all we ever get is Coronation Street.



So getting back to the Tosh.0 Breakdown, let's refer to the original "Jesus Christ Fabulous" search. You will note that my SafeSearch is off, as always, for maximum opportunity to invoke Rule 34.

Top line: This line was actually pretty close. There was a "Faggot Jesus" in one of the boxes, what appeared to be three stills from actual stage performances, and a link to the TV Show "Absolutely Fabulous" (which is terrible, by the way, despite Jennifer Saunders being an awesome vocalist). Dammit, now I'm wishing she'd been in the cast of Jesus Christ, Superstar.

Second line: This is where the search really falls apart. The image on the left is a guy we'll call "Mario" and we'll guess that he lives in West Hollywood. The 2nd image is a doodle of some special needs version of Skeeter. The third one is either the cast of Big Love, three generations of Mennonites, or three generations of Mennonites on Big Love. The 4th image is a happy couple, the 5th a ceramic of the last supper, and the final one is some guy we'll call "Bolo" who has a new hat and wants to use it to pick up ladies on the internet.

Third line: This one just got weird. We've got two pencil drawings, a couple on vacation (in 2004, it looks like), a coed in a hoodie, an image of the Ambassadors for Jesus Christ motorcycle gang, and what appears to be a bald Twilek with a horse-hair wig singing Don't Cry for me Argentina. This one should have been the money shot, but failed miserably. What kind of a drag queen wears white when you're NOT doing "Barbra Does Celine?"


For those of you who got laid in high school, the Twileks are the blue Star Wars race with the weird tentacle things coming out of their heads.

So, yeah . . . Google Image FAIL.

I actually had to pour myself a glass of wine because this is taking so long. I'm at 913 words already, and I haven't even started on what was wrong with Heaven on their Minds. Or begun to complain about the lady who sat beside me. Mmmnnnn $8.99 Pinot Gris.

It's probably a good time to set the stage for this review. The show was put on by the Southland Community Theatre group, which is comprised entirely of volunteers who have real lives and jobs, and pour their hearts and souls into two productions a year for the community as a whole. Keep in mind that Southland has a population of less than 100,000 people and roughly 5.7 million sheeply. Hilariously, it's the same size as Maryland, which has 5.7 million people and, you guessed it, 100,000 Cubans. Getting back to my main, and slightly less racist point, I tried to keep my expectations as realistic as possible.

To be as fair to this production as possible, I'm going to note instances where I thought the Kingston JC Superstar was brilliant, and then outline how my each aspect was not paralleled by the Southland version.


Misses - Costumes

Costumes for this production can be admittedly tricky, as it's a period piece from a time when wearing flip flops and a cloth diaper were all the rage. For those of you who still live in Dunedin, you will appreciate that flip flops and a cloth diaper do seem to have made a comeback. In JC Superstar, you expect to see this:



Not a guy who looks like this, wearing what appears to be this. Pacific Guy Mesh Shirt sort of did the trick, Google Images.



Yep, Judas was wearing a mesh shirt during Heaven on Their Minds. At the end of the Kingston production, Judas (who looked like David Arquette) was wearing this for the title number Superstar.


Nice and fancy, a bit ironic to be worn by a dead guy.

Judas in Southland, by contrast, was wearing this.


See? I can be sexy . . .

I wish to Baby Jesus that I was making all of this up, and I also wish that these had been the only two mesh tops that Judas wore that night. They weren't.


Hits - Costumes

Some of you may remember, way back on my first ever post on this blog, when I started off a review with a disclaimer about partial nudity. What I experienced in Southland was a bit of a cultural difference between Canada and New Zealand.

Canada - the programme warns about partial nudity, but in reality there's just a whole lot of smoke and the stage is dark while Hotty McHotterson runs off in his boxers (FYI - this dude is Matt Cavenaugh, and he performed at the 2009 Tony Awards as part of the West Side Story cast)


Not sure if he did the pull-ups on the balcony like the guy in Stratford. But I like to imagine he did

New Zealand - no mention of partial nudity, even though there's a scene where all of Jesus toga-bearing worshipers lie down, more or less on top of one another, on the stage, and claw and reach out towards him like the Inferi reaching for Harry when he was trapped in the sea cave. Wait, that might have been Dumbledore reaching for Harry. Either way, it kind of looked like this.


OK, I just wanted to show a screenshot from Spartacus: Blood & Sand

Overall Rating
Music - 3/4
Staging - 2/4 due to me not really getting it

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Captain Awesome's Final Thoughts

Once again, Kiwi audiences nearly ruined the performance. The couple sitting beside me was unbelievably annoying. You know how you can attend a performance, and plan to clap at the Intermission, and the Finale, and possibly after Fantine sings I Dreamed a Dream? Yeah, that's called a classy evening out.

But occasionally, you get stuck in a performance where the audience decides to clap after Every. Frigging. Song. It's just embarrassing, to be completely honest. How is the cast supposed to know if they did good when you're clapping for everyone? What I'm saying is, they basically turned it into American Idol without Simon. So I'm stuck in this performance, where the audience is clapping after every damn song, and the lady beside me is actually the person starting the clap. Seriously. About halfway through eachsong, she get her hands up in front of her, like this, just to make sure she'd be the first one:


Wait for it . . .

Then she'd wait until she felt the song was sufficiently over to clap. But the thing with Andrew Lloyd Webber, is he loves to modulate. Often three or four times in the same song, and occasionally after only an eight-bar measure in one of they keys. So for one song she got two claps in before she realized there was a whole other stanza. The twit. I couldn't feel sorry for her, but I think the point she was trying to make was "I came on opening night, and I'm the first one to clap after every song, so I must have excellent taste in music." You know, because it's as important to have good taste in 2011 as it was in Jane Austen's Bath.

From this same evolutionary failure, I get to repeat my observations from the last review I did. South Islanders: I did NOT spend $50 to hear your dumb ass explain the plot to your deaf husband. It's a musical, not a movie with an incredibly deep, complex plot. It also means that I don't want to hear your deaf husband point out stuff that's happening on stage, while something ELSE is going on on the stage. Sometimes in musicals two things have to happen at once. Seriously, whenever the stage started spinning, or a character snuck onstage while someone else was talking, the husband felt the need to point, and say loudly mumble something to the effect of "there's someone coming onstage."


Bitch, this aint TV. When you talk - I can HEAR you.

That's it for me, and the next review will quite possibly be the gayest musical on the planet staged in the queerest city in the planet. New South Wales, bring your A-Game.

Book the Third: Hockey Players, a Cowboy and the Projectionist

After my little adventures to the West Coast and up the East Coast, the next stop was a work conference in Queenstown at the start of February. This was ideally timed, because Queenstown is packed full of boozy, loud (and mostly English) people in December and January, then it largely clears out until ski season kicks off in early July. In February, however, the weather is still incredibly sunny and warm – which makes for a perfect vacation spot.

The conference was held on a Thursday & Friday, which is more than enough audit updates for the year. Back when I worked at the other place, training was usually one week per year plus another three days for audit and accounting updates. It’s notable that the accounting standards in New Zealand haven’t changed for five years, and the assurance standards changed in 2010 for the first time in about that long.

The conference was at the Millenium Hotel, and was overall quite nice. However, their building inspector failed the accessibility test on two accounts. First, the accessible guest rooms were on the 5th floor of the hotel – and thus only accessible by elevator. Which is great, unless of course there’s a fire. The second fail was for the restaurant bathroom, which has wide hallways and push-button doors, but forgot about the three steps to get up to the hallway. Maybe there’s a back way through the kitchen, like Café Nova. As a side note, I now freelance as an occupational therapist in my spare time.

Anyway, the conference was Thursday-Friday, so the Group (big G since I now work for a publicly traded entity rather than a Firm) put on an Amazing Race hunt which led us to the dinner restaurant. The Amazing Race thing was pretty cute: you had to direct a blindfolded team member to put together a puzzle, identify five flavours of chocolate, set a formal dinner table based on a provided model (with fancy napkin folding and fork-angling) and count the number of lampposts in the Mall.

The most annoying “task” was to go to Wine Tastes, which is an actual store in downtown Queenstown. The idea is tourists go in, give them $15 and sample six wines or something, then buy some of the wine at a 200% markup (they will ship overseas). This is a country where you routinely find decent, drinkable wine for $9.00 NZD ($7.50 Canadian) including tax at the grocery store. Wheeee.

So anyway, the challenge is to go to Wine Tastes, then taste and identify two wines, one white and one red. The problem, though is you need to identify the following:
• Type (pinot, merlot, etc.)
• Year (2003, 2006, 2008, 2009)
• Grape
• Flavours (oak & rose, pear & grass, etc.)

So, the first and last bits are relatively easy since the type of wine and flavours can be smelled and tasted to your senses. But when you’re trying to match up one of four years with one of six grape varieties, there’s 24 more or less indistinguishable combinations to choose from. And we unfortunately got stuck with an attendant who was less than encouraging. Long story short, I wanted a beer after about five minutes of this.

And luckily . . . the Group had arranged for us to have beer & pizza at a bar which sports the largest retractable roof in Queenstown. So when the weather’s nice, they just open it up and it becomes an open-air pizza patio. This was a really clutch decision, because pizza meant that dinner wasn’t going to be marred too much by manners, and it took away the trouble of ordering – they basically just kept bringing out pizza (and beer) until we couldn’t do any more.

Ice Hockey Win
This was Thursday night, and the Group got us nice and liquored up with a bar tab throughout dinner. The service was pretty good overall, it’s always pleasantly refreshing to get good service in a country where they’re not working for tips. Although, to be fair, I think Queenstown gets a lot of tourists who tip out of habit. Anyway, as soon as dinner was over I was 100% into the excited-drunk-wandering mode that most of you know so well. I saw a pool table, and fully intended to use it. And by pool table, I mean I spotted a hottie sitting across the bar from me, which was conveniently next to the pool table, so I came up with an excuse to get a better look. There’s something really fun about a hottie in a plain, tight grey t-shirt drinking beer by himself.

I dragged the rest of the Dunedin office over to play a few games of pool, which quickly got other conferenceers involved, and it basically turned into a mini-tournament. My favourite quirk about pool is how people react; there’s basically a split between people who are fanatically competitive and people who are really drunk. Anyway, pool happened for a while, and a bottle of wine was finished along the way, and eventually the grey t-shirt hottie had two friends show up. Because I’m me, and I was really slogged, the following conversation happened with my seat-mate at work.

“Go talk to them – they’re really cute!”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Because they might hit me, but they can’t hit a girl.”

[side note: my strategy had not been updated since Snooki got KO’d by that dude in Miami]

Fortunately, my dare was accepted and about 15 minutes later we were playing pool against the too friends. Who turned out to be ice hockey players. For Team New Zealand. And possibly 20. And were totally cute.

Cowboy
Queenstown being only a few hours from Dunedin, a co-worker had arranged to meet friends who lived there at one of the many, many pubs in town. At this point, I was probably 5-6 beer and a bottle of wine into the evening, so I wasn’t going to say no to very much. Promise a mechanical bull ride, however, and I couldn’t be dragged away. Yes, we went to Cowboys, and yes, I fell off almost immediately. Then I stumbled back to my oddly shaped hotel room (seriously – it was shaped like a cowbell) and slept it off.



Queenstown
So the conference ended after a day and a half, and I had part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday to get back to Dunners. We were let go at 3pm on Friday so people could catch flights, so I stopped by an empty hair salon for a quick cut. Then I defaulted to the “spend less on accommodation than you do on food” strategy and found the Bungee Backpackers near the city centre for something like $22. On Friday night I kept things pretty quiet, and went hunting for fish & chips and hottie-spotting down on the lakeside. I think I ended up on my top bunk bed by about 10:00pm.





The Projectionist
On Saturday morning I was up and in the car by 8am, as I had a hot date with Wanaka. To set the scene for those of you who haven’t been to Kiwiland, Wanaka is kind of like Queenstown’s Niagara-on-the-Lake. If you aren’t really up to bungee jumping, river rafting, or drinking your face off with 19 year old English backpackers, you would enjoy Wanaka more than Queenstown. It’s a sleep little lakeside town whose primary industry seems to be vacation homes. It’s also at the gateway to several national parks and tramping routes, but I’m not particularly interested in that.





I had two reasons to go to Wanaka

• Buy a specific puzzle at puzzling world as a gift to me
• Watch the Social Network at a renowned movie theatre

So I drove into Wanaka early over the Crown Ranges, and took some pretty cool photos. This is a winding, sometimes unsealed road with many, many switchbacks leading up over the mountains. Stunning scenery, but a terrible road when it ices over in winter.


Wanaka, home of the "aspiring" pharmacy.

Leaving so early put me into town early, so I stopped and had a $10 breakfast and watched rugby highlights. Then I drove out to the Toys, Antiques and Collectible Car Museum, which was hugely fun. I’m not really into cars, but I got excited every time I came across a toy I used to have.



Apparently Mattel released a line of Barbie Star Trek Toys


This made me think of Arrested Development


Also, they have a tank.

Then I stopped by Puzzling World and took another run through the illusion rooms, and bought a really neat brain-teaser puzzle called the Octagon.



This puzzle has over 100,000 different solutions (fit them all into the square). The tricky bit is it usually takes almost an hour to find one. REALLY fun coffee table game.



At this point, it was time for the Social Network. I was going less for the movie itself, and more for the cinema – which is listed in every Lonely Planet, Eyewitness and other travel book about the South Island. The cinema was started by a young Scottish guy in the mid-late 80’s, who basically wanted to reinvent good cinema. So he rented a garage, acquired a bunch of chairs, couches, and other seating items through donations, and started screening movies. Eventually, he moved a convertible car into the garage (so you can sit in the car and watch) and three seats from an old airplane. Personally, I chose a squashy armchair that wouldn’t have been out of place in my grandma’s living room.

The movie itself was excellent. As you all know, I’m a huge fan of anything featuring Emmy award winner Justin Timberlake. And I found the script and pacing well done, which is code for I DIDN’T GET BORED.

If you have ADHD like me, a 2-hour movie is more or less the bane of your existence. That’s a REALLY long time to focus on anything. To combat boredom (and possibly sell more snacks), the owner guy he put back in the Intermission when the reel needs to be changed. If you’ve seen Rent: Live on Broadway, you’re more than aware of how awesome a full intermission is in the middle of a movie. Accordingly, when you buy your ticket you can order a warm cookie, coffee or other snack to be brought in on a little cart.

[side note: YES! I'm watching TV right now and Miss Kathy’s going to be on Graham Norton this weekend with Cameron Diaz, and a guy who sort of looks like a young Ed Burns]


Anyway, back to intermission . . . because the place runs on two staff, it’s usually the projectionist who goes out and serves the moviegoers at intermission. And our projectionist . . . might have been 17, and was wearing stubbies and a singlet. And looked good doing it. All I’m saying. Actually, he kind of looked like this guy from Home & Away


Mmmnnn . . . Romeo

And that was vacation the third, barring a rather boring drive back to Dunners through Central Otago.