Kurt Vonnegut Reviews Theater With His Feet
Though we know saying so irrevocably labels us as pretentious, if only upper-middle-brow, snobs, we admit that we rather enjoy City Center Encores — a series of one-weekend-only concert versions of old, relatively unheard American musicals. There's a huge onstage orchestra and always a great cast, and it just feels like a very New York-y kind of evening, at least if your image of very New York-y evenings was shaped by a childhood of New Yorker cartoons. And so we thought it was an excellent sign last night when we walked into the first performance of Kismet and rather quickly noticed among our audiencemates Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Vonnegut, and the once publicly editing Dan Okrent.
These sightings, however, turned out not to be such accurate indicators. (The strong performances couldn't outweigh the largely forgettable score and book, something about beggars and princes and conniving in a fantasyland Baghdad — essentially a cartoon about Muslims too banal to incite riots.) Which made us realize we should have more carefully noted another sign:
Vonnegut left at intermission.
