Little Miss Sunshine
"If there's one thing in this world I hate," Arnold Schwarzenager told high school students, "it's losers. I despise them." Michael Arndt wrote a screenplay attacking that attitude. James Lapine and William Finn's musical version gets the hard part right: expert design work recreates a road movie on stage. What happens below the shifting mountains and green signs whizzing by, though often entertaining, is hit and miss. Some songs work; others're just obligatory or bland (the cast, to a person, does the best they can with the material). What remains consistent — an attempt to encircle real life (suicide, teenage angst, damaging ideals) with a chipper halo. The result is a strange, passive-aggressive tone — ain't life zany? The movie combined extremes, innocence and impending chaos, and gave voice to both. The stage version bounces in between the two, rarely honoring either.
Worth a try.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, March 27, 2011
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7:30pm |
| Tuesdays, 7:30pm |
| Wednesdays, 7:30pm |
| Thursdays, 8pm |
| Fridays, 8pm |
| Saturdays, 2pm & 8pm |