Theatre: A Strange Loop

Overall I thought this musical play was awful.

Theatre experience: I couldn’t decipher the lyrics of most of the songs, which was a combination of my deteriorating hearing and the sound system. One of the friends who accompanied me confirmed they struggled with the actors’ lines and song lyrics. One of the actors’ voices was so shrill, she was difficult to listen to and understand.
The audience didn’t know when to laugh which made for many awkward moments. More often if they did laugh, it was at something that felt inappropriate.
We sat in the back on the uppermost level and I was surprised that the view wasn’t that bad.

The musical play: This is a semi-autobiographical play about an overweight, Black gay man and aspiring playwright named Usher struggling to find success and love in NYC. An ensemble of actors called the Thoughts, bring to life Usher’s inner voices and his ghastly and offensively stereotypical family. There was an unnecessarily graphic sex scene that bordered on rape. A jarring set change evoking a Tyler Perry gospel play. And then it just ended.
It was so depressing with nothing hopeful and barely any humor. The funniest lines were in reference to Tyler Perry always using quotes from The Color Purple.

 
You can scroll through my other posts and learn that I don’t need everything I watch or listen to to be hopeful and/or positive, but I do need something to hook me. There wasn't anything like that in this play. I found this possible explanation for its existence in the program: "... the act of bringing people together from all walks of life to witness a story is still radical and art can still touch each and everyone of us if we let it.... And it is through this act of you sitting here in this theatre that we can all begin to peer through a window into someone else's life, someone else's story, and realize the world is big enough for all of us"(From Come Together: Creating Community by Zach Stafford). Okay. I get it. 

I saw A Strange Loop at the Ahmanson Theater with the East LA Power Couple. This is the only show I saw in the Center Theatre Group 2023-24 season.

Movie: Deep Water (2022) and The Ritual Killer (2023)

What it’s about: A strange man who collects snails and who seems to be only half-upset as his wife flirts and flaunts her extra-marital activities in front of him and their group of friends. The other men seem to keep dying mysteriously. Everyone thinks its snail man killing them off, leaving the audience to wonder whodunnit.
The moral the story: Sometimes divorce is the answer.

This movie was so slow. It took one hour before something actually happened after an over-extended set-up. Everyone and everything were weird and not in an interesting and quirky way (e.g. Dogtooth, Lemon, Art of Self Defense, etc.). I don’t know why I kept watching. I should have stopped it.
Too much of the story was spent on things that didn’t matter in the end including a lot of stray storylines and character vectors that go unaddressed or unresolved. What was the point of the group of friends if they didn’t play a role in the ending? It seems like they just wanted to show off the cast they were able to assemble to distract you from the terrible writing and excessive color filtering. What was the point of the snails?! What a waste of a potentially intriguing plot!

I streamed this from Hulu. It was a Hulu original production. 

The same night I also attempted to watch The Ritual Killer, another Hulu original. The story set-up was going all wrong and the acting was pretty bad. Even though it looked like they had a good production budget, nothing came together and nothing pulled me into the story past 18 minutes, not even Cole Hauser.