The Clothes Have No Emperor.

Nobody's perfect.

I’ve been an avid theatergoer for well over a half century.  In that over fifty years, there hasn’t been one year when I didn’t see at the very least ten live stage performances, drama, comedy, musical play, and in more than one of those many years, I was in my seat for over two dozen productions.

Much if not most of what I’ve seen over the course of my life has been fine, sturdy stuff.  A lot of it mediocre, Some utter dreck.  I’ve only walked out on a few productions, one being a complete fucking up of what is among my favorite Stephen Sondheim shows.  And there have been a few exemplary and transformative experiences, in most but not all performance based, that have led me to stand up and cheer.

Ian McKellen in RICHARD III, the original cast of A CHORUS LINE, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in FROST/NIXON, Susan Stroman’s CONTACT, David Cromer’s staging of OUR TOWN, Daniel Fish’ nearly hallucinatory reimagining of OKLAHOMA, to name a few among those few.

These and a few others that have been lost to memory were rare experiences, worthy of a standing ovation, in my opinion.  A well informed opinion, to be clear.

But some three decades ago, the barrier was broken between the merely sturdy and the truly transformative, to all too often include the simply lousy.  Nowadays, everything gets a standing ovation.  From the most heartbreakingly second-rate, its reach exceeding its grasp regional theater in my little home town, to the most average simply just okay musical performance of whatever is wowing the low expectations, all too easy to please with bullshit razzle dazzle spectacle crowd on Broadway, the reaction is worthy of the second coming. 

Everything. 

Now for the first couple of years of this I simply assumed the level of taste was bottoming out. And let’s face it, there were a number of shows where all those people standing and cheering for everything from utter crap to just fine left me momentarily grateful for making getting out to the street that wee bit faster…

…Until I realized they weren’t standing and cheering for the show at all, as good, bad or misbegotten as it might be.  Rather, they were cheering en masse in self congratulation for having the good taste, as they perceived it, for showing up for this, for paying for this, whatever this might be. 

And that cheering encouraged others, perhaps the weak of heart, who might not have thought what they’d just seen was really all that worth the money, let alone the nearly three hours of their lives they’d never see again, to rise and cheer with the rest.

Like the rest of us, or at least the rest of us who take our all American version of this international disaster seriously, I’ve been isolated and housebound for a year.  My last trip was to New York, where I saw three shows in three days.  I had tickets for four shows for a trip back east in May that evaporated, naturally.

I miss a lot of the familiar aspects of my seventy years on earth, and among those, I miss live theater an awful lot.  But in that regard I don’t miss those people who think that request about cellphones doesn’t really apply to them, or those people who talk as if they were at home, or those people who sing along…and I really don’t miss that perfomative group think of self congratulation that ends every fucking performance.

That mass triggered reaction to every single stage production I’ve seen in the past few decades has been brought to mind recently by the rapturous near hysteria that’s greeted a number of streaming and broadcast series.  Average and sturdy at best, leaden and obvious at worst, and, despite, or maybe because this stuff provides little more than fan service, the gushing audience is apparently so easily pleased that it just can’t seem to lavish enough ecstatic praise and love on these simply average and adequate presentations.

Despite being raised by wolves, I was trained early on to be passingly polite, but to never overpraise cooking, as an example.  It only encourages further kitchen based lousiness.  

In my professional capacity, if someone asks me what I think of their work, I ascertain out front whether they really want to know, or whether they simply want their own deep satisfaction with that work confirmed by a supposed expert.

If I say good things about something, whether produced by someone I know or not, you can take me at my word.  I am not now, nor have I ever been a log roller.

We are, for better and to be sure mostly worse, a culture in which everyone gets a trophy, whether entitled to it or not.  Our standards of good, let alone best, have plunged to the point of rewarding just showing up as enough, and all too frequently then some. 

And yes, this is all completely subjective, only my opinion, yes, yes, yes.  That said, having spent my entire adult life in a particularly frivolous outpost in the frivolous business of entertainment, I’m arrogant enough and confident enough to believe that my informed opinion carries a bit of weight.

Extravagant praise, and its occasional equally extreme sibling, eternal damnation, when applied to what are really little more than expensively manufactured middle of the road corporate entertainments, lower the bar for actual transcendent excellence, often making that excellent experience invisible by those standards that make mountains out of mediocrity.

As annoying as it may be, it might be wise to once again point out that “favorite” doesn’t mean “best,” and love, unconditional or otherwise, isn’t an imprimatur of quality.  I like, maybe even love, some things which I know are absolute junk.  My affection for those things doesn’t improve their value in the least, and I’m okay with that and with my love. 

I would invite some of you to join me in this.  The rest of you are of course perfectly welcome to continue to applaud yourself and your exquisite taste, lowering the bar with every performative clap.

And, in full disclosure, I occasionally mistake “favorite” for “best” myself.

As noted, nobody’s perfect.