Jen’s show isn’t quite like the Disney Broadway version. It’s funnier and more self-aware … |
If anyone has wondered what’s happened to Jen over the last couple of months, she’s been working 80 hours a week (or more) on her school’s production of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
It’s been a major ordeal, because she ended up fulfilling most of the production roles not just director, even though she opposed choosing this vacuous piece of theatrical crap for the school’s two-yearly extravaganza in the first place 1.
Nevertheless, she threw herself into the task with an extraordinary discipline and commitment I didn’t know she possessed, and she’s created a production that by all accounts is a triumph. I’m going to see it tonight at Darwin Entertainment Centre. Jen was interviewed for a story about the show in yesterday’s NT News:
“You’re never more accountable as when you’re on stage and you’re working with profesionals who aren’t teachers,” 2 said.
“The students get to use their imagination and they are also required to step up and work as a team.”
But a moral in the story?
“There’s no lessons in this story; it’s a fairytale,” McCulloch said. “There’s a vague lesson that things are not as they seem but … it’s in the realm of fantasy, the realm of colour and movement.”
There was a bit of colour and movement too in my own modest involvement in Beauty and the Beast.
Earlier this week Jen needed some pairs of red stockings to construct a symbolic rose whose petals progressively get removed through the show. The only place that stocked them was a local sex shop, so I bravely offered to help her out and go and get them. I’d never been to one before (honestly) so I was curious.
Turns out it was just an open, brightly lit supermarket-like place, with a couple of seedy-looking customers of Mediterranean appearance lurking by the massive porno video section. I was too disconcerted to browse. I just marched up to the girl at the counter. A chubby young thing, wearing a tee-shirt with an “Adult Shop – Hi, I’m Kylie” logo emblazoned on her left breast and the motto “Buy Me Toys” across her ample belly.
“Do you have red stockings?” I asked casually. She just looked at me curiously and led me over to the stockings section. “It’s for my partner’s school production of Beauty and the Beast“, I explained. She gave me a “yeah right, mate, I hear that every day” look and kept searching for red ones. I paid and left, abashed and mildly uncomfortable.
…he’s a simple soul isn’t he?
Actually Jen wanted to do Le Miz. I bet those kids will remember the production for the rest of their lives.
What does someone who goes to a sex shop want to do with red stockings? Tie people to the bedframe?
Given that there is always a big flat grey comedown moment after a production, maybe you should think about the possibilities of distraction.
You could post some pictures. Of the production, of course. The official production. Or at least give us a link.
‘What does someone who goes to a sex shop want to do with red stockings? Tie people to the bedframe?’ It’s one size fits all with red stockings and I know that the big girl in Ken is planning to wear those suckers.
Jen,
Just for interest’s sake, how much did you have to pay Disney for the license fee?
Ron $6000 or thereabouts also $4 of each ticket sold
Oh shit! Greedy greedy greedy! After all, you are sustaining the value of the brand for them.