summercomfort | (no subject)

CUSA show was decent. So decent, in fact, that it became irritating that it's "not quite perfect". It hovered in the limbo between utter suckiness and total goodness, which is a bad place to be. The dances were pretty good, but there'd always be that one person who's half a beat off. The martial arts stuff was excellent, but I couldn't help but sigh when they attempted to pull off a very traditional Chinese-Opera-like set of moves, but came off slightly stilted. The zither playing had the right mood setup and everything, but she couldn't pull off the difficult fast parts. The story/plot had a few decent actors (Peng was awesome as the Monkey King, French-Chinese accent and all. He has obviously studied well, and did all the little monkey things like the crazy laugh and the scratching and the jumping around. The girl also wasn't that bad, either), but some parts of the dialogue just sagged. There were obviously some lines that I'm sure would have sounded great on paper, but just didn't happen on stage, thus generating awkward moments and strange pacing. Also, the desire to appeal to both Chinese with little "in" jokes, and appeal to the masses with visual gags resulted in an overall cheapened plot.

All in all, though, it fully surpassed my expectations. Amazing that they managed to pull all this off in one quarter. Crazy.

"This play is about achieving immortality -- about ascending heaven and missing by a couple steps." -- from the program. Couldn't have said it better myself. The pain of falling after catching a glimpse of heaven is all the more painful.

</being all critical and nitpicky>