Sadly, the highlight of the show was the architecture of the theater. I nabbed this flash-free shot (and one more) before the usher saw me.
Returning to the putative entertainment. The story is told with live music accompaniment. It could have been told in 15 minutes, maybe half an hour with all the sound effects. Instead, it is strrrrrrrretched out for a full 60 minutes. The storyteller kills a lot of time doing slow silhouetted pantomimes against a large video backdrop.
In brief, the story is this. The king instructs his three sons to shoot arrows into the air and marry whomever brings back the arrow.* The youngest son is too lazy to do this properly, so his arrow lands in a swamp and is retrieved by a frog.** The king then sets the three brides a task: whoever makes the best shirt overnight makes her husband the next king. The frog comes up with the best shirt,*** so the king changes the rules. Now it has to be a loaf of bread. When the frog wins again, the king changes the rules again. Now the kingship will go to the husband of the best dancer. So, of course it turns out that the frog is really a beautiful and talented woman when she takes off her frog skin. So she wins again, but this time the king says OK because she is in human form. Then her husband ruins it all by surreptitiously going and burning the frog skin, thinking he can keep her in human form this way. Nope! So he loses her, and suffers for 7 years until he can find her again and break the spell. Then they live happily ever after. The end.
It felt like the story was supposed to have a message (celebration of differences or something) but the fact that the frog turns out to be a human puts the kibosh on that. Then it seemed like maybe the words on the video backdrop were supposed to have meaning -- "warmth" was flashed on the screen during the shirt task, "food" during the bread task, and "joy" during the dance task -- but that went nowhere too. And there was no lesson learned about learning to love someone for who they really are despite external appearances, either, since the prince never learns to love his bride as a frog, but only accepts her in human form. I suppose there could be a lesson here about the importance of open and honest communication -- if the prince had bothered to talk to his bride, he'd have known about the curse and might have kept his paws off the frog skin for 3 days so the curse would run its natural course.
Then in the Q&A session, the author of the piece all but admitted that he had put no thought into it whatsoever. One kid asked why the woman had been cursed with the frog skin spell - the guy basically said "write your own backstory". Another kid asked what was the significance of the "land of three times nine" - the guy said it had no meaning, so you might as well sleep on it and take your dream as your answer. Pathetic.
Footnotes:
* It would seem either the king is exceptionally open-minded or there is a tradition in the kingdom that only women may retrieve stray arrows.
** OK, I admit it: I typed "The Frog Bridge" instead of "The Frog Bride". I thought it sounded cooler. So sue me.
*** Technically, the frog bride should have been disqualified. She did not "make" the shirt. She just hopped out to the swamp and yelled, "Nurses, bring me a shirt!"
Postscript: For all you faux-Romantic architectural flourish buffs out there, here are some cherubs that adorn the ceiling of the theater:
2 comments:
The message is obviously, "bring back stray arrows, and be good at producing shirts and bread."
That sounds like a very disappointing play.
Intersecting Stanislaw Lem, the Frog is actually a rat who only looks like a princess when the King eats the bread which is actually mud from the pond that the arrow of time has cooked with yeast made from eons of evolution since Earth was destroyed for the 100th time.
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