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12 Angry Men ★★★★☆
12 Angry Men is one of my favourite films and this was a respectable effort to do that story, but this was a local production so it was a bunch of Irish guys doing period American accents to varying degrees of success. As much as I think it didn’t live up to the film the stage does lend a lot of advantages to this story. Without the constraint of the camera frame each of the dozen mad lads gets to embody their character at all times. Their reactions, their mannerisms, their character is on display at all times, regardless of who the focus currently is, and I think that’s very valuable in a lot of ways.
Happy Days ★★★★☆
Filled me with existential dread 👍🏻
The Play that Goes Wrong ★★☆☆☆
I was in London for two nights last year and my plans fell through. The first night I went out the closest gay bar to my hotel and caught an all-Italian cabaret night that happened to be on in the basement. The next evening I checked what shows were on in the more professional, West End side of things and found that I either missed the start of most of them or would not be able to get to the theatre on time anyway and The Play that Goes Wrong seemed like the only thing left that seemed at all interesting.
So I head over, get my ticket, sit down in my seat, and in the middle of a ruckus of staff asking about a missing dog some guy comes on stage and introduces the show not as The Play that Goes Wrong but as some murder mystery thing called The Murder at Haversham Manor. What the hell! And get this, right? That play? It went wrong.
Okay actual review: the play was fun, but it felt like half an hour of funny material stretched out over two. They did keep escalating the physical comedy well past how far I thought it was going to go and it was impressive in that way, but I was also just kind of wishing they would wrap up for a while before they did. And while I did enjoy the physical comedy and farce, I never really enjoy the joke of an actor playing an actor who is incredibly bad at acting, nor the joke of the writing being just deliberately bad and clichéd.