Summer Concert Series 2008

Well, it is officially summer as the Vaughn 2008 Summer Concert Series has kicked off. We actually started this one off with a double dose of music and theatre. On Wednesday, Diana and I took in the Broadway musical "The Drowsy Chaperone" and followed that up Thursday with a little trip to the House of Blues Dallas for Augustana.

The Drowsy Chaperone was one of the most interesting musicals I had seen just from the way the story is told. It begins with a lonely, depressed narrator who is so down that he decides to listen to an old recording of a play titled "The Drowsy Chaperone." He would start the record and then give a play by play of the show throughout. His comments would range from, "The music is lovely in this but I have to warn you, ignore the lyrics" to "I have to go pee" and all the while you could see his love for the show. Of course, the show was actually being performed on the stage.

What was most interesting was that the narrator interacted with the play as it was being performed. The performers never acted as if they saw him but he constantly paused the record and moved in between the actors to tell us interesting tidbits about them. He also joined in on some of the songs, which was hilarious.

The best gag that was employed was the use of the record as a storytelling device. It would skip and the actors would get caught in a loop of the same song, the narrator would stop the record and replay pieces of it to show the audience something, and at the intermission(of the record, not the show as there wasn't an intermission) he accidentally started the next act with the wrong record and we were shown some old Japanese musical that had a song called "What is so interesting about Asians."

That is part one of the Summer concert series. It will continue tomorrow. If the "Drowsy Chaperone" comes to town, go see it would you?

That is all,

Newt