Outdoor Theater

Strix and I have gone to see two outdoor plays recently at the Lions Wilderness Amphitheater.  The first one we went to see was Cyrano de Bergerac.  As most everyone knows the basic premise, I won't bore you with it, but it was very well done, and the lead role was very expertly played by Brian McCann, an actor from Philadelphia who is spending the summer in New Mexico.  I was also quite impressed with the swordplay.

On a side note, I didn't know until I just looked it up know that the play Cyrano de Bergerac was based on a real person.

The second play we saw was Crazy for You.  This is a cobbled-together musical, recycling a number of old Gershwin toons like "I Got Rhythm" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me."  The plot of the play is that a young man who wants to sing and dance on stage, but really works for a bank that his mother owns, is sent to Nevada to foreclose on an already-closed playhouse in a little dying town called Deadrock.  Predictably, he falls in love with the woman whose father owns the playhouse (the only woman in Deadrock) and decides to try to put on a play in the playhouse to raise enough money to save it from foreclosure.  The woman won't have anything to do with him, and while she's secretly smitten with him she thinks he's a crackpot.  The man then does what any sane person would do, and dresses up as a famous producer from New York and tells her that he is there to help her put on the play.  Eventually, of course, the real famous New York producer shows up, and wackiness ensues.

I will say that I was in a bad mood at the amphitheater when we watched this play, anyway.  There was a busload of ill-behaved teens from a church youth group there that night, and then the family in the row in front of us and to our left kept talking during the play and jostling the bench back.  That being said, I don't think I would have liked this play under the best of conditions.  It is just a contrived, empty way to reintroduce old songs from old plays.  The lead character, Bobby Child (played by Robert Mitchell), was as ridiculous a character as I've ever seen, the total stereotype of the young man with stars in his eyes who just knows that if he got his break he could make it big!

That being said, the actor Robert Mitchell does know how to tap dance, quite well, and the actors did the best they could with the material they had.

The amphitheater itself is quite small, and the only seating is in the form of stone benches, so bring a cushion.  If you're lucky, you can get one of the benches with a wooden back to it.  Unless, of course, the people sitting in the same row as you keep jostling the wooden back, in which case you are unlucky again.