Four Weddings and an Elvis

This is a review of this play put on by our local theater company. I am generally get impressed by any talent that I know is way beyond my own. I can report that this leads to enjoying a greater percentage of everything. It also means I am in the right frame of mind to see layers of success working in to achieve a greater and more sophisticate, polished product.

What i appreciated here was the intelligent understanding of audience expectations, analysing them accepting them and then exploiting them. The pop culture, indeed the cringe when central institution like marriage are lampooned by a Vegas kitsch, drops your guard as classical devices are snuck in.

The first of four acts, a wedding for each, giving you the impression that there will be nothing so see here, move on intellectually, does some heavy lifting of getting key characters onto the set. This includes Elvis. Now I note this is a full constume 70s Elvis and the subsequent Elvis references are light with an action or a phrase. Good audience education, then pulling back to let other devices grow. I only appreciated this on reflection.

The second act expanded the dimensionality. In Greek plays this is done with the chorus, here a more extreme presence was introduced that recast our acceptance of the central thesis as we rejected the new entrant. The casual celebrant, shared the audience's position through a measure of disconnect to the new thesis of feeding celebrity.

The device of characters analysing and appreciating situations was slowly established until in the third act, new characters were introduced and interest sustained as there was an agenda of finding out more, that was transferred to the audience. I must say some of story conjecture, then informing was very precisely executed. There was an economy at one level that left little margin for error.

As you were concentrating, the fourth act was like a magic trick and genuinely surprising. Like a magic trick, there is a pause and then reconstruction and detailed analysis. It sounds heavy and boring, however there are many quickly crafted or rebadged fast food equivalent instances of art that are really nothing more than a byline competing for attention.

I think that as the high level synthesis is nailed, the actors really attended to the central task, which the audience was unaware of. I think the big star, industrial art from Hollywood achieves this but it is not and intelligent team effort of people live in the room with you.

Do go and see this. It closes next week so you will have to get on a flight to Sydney Australia pretty soon.

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