"The Flood" and "Annie Hall"

It was a fun Sunday indeed.

I slept late and then went to see The Flood , an off-off-Broadway musical by young writers Peter Mills and Cara Reichel at Prospect Theatre Company's Chernuchin Theatre on W. 54th Street. I had read really, really good things about the score and was intrigued to see an original musical that hasn't yet been cut down and packaged for the masses. That's definitely what I got, a wonderfully theatrical and appropriately folksy score that was just infectious and effective.

A'lisa D. Miles as the River and Matt DeAngelis as Raleigh in The Flood.

On the whole, the book needed a bit of tightening and tweaking, with a few too many details for the audience to latch onto in order to take in the plot in its entirety, but that's pretty much part of the developmental process of a musical. It's all about finding what little brilliant bits need to go to make the work as a whole more succinct and effective.

It was a very interesting subject for a show -- a flood threatens to overtake a small town in Illinois, and, in the second act, does. The main focus of the show was on a middle-aged couple trying to find a way to see eye-to-eye on turning up the burner on their relationship and a young couple in the throes of new love. In Caroline, or Change anthropomorphic style, a black woman played the Mississippi River, historically suppressed and, in overtaking the town, cleaning its slate and showing what, of all our responsibilities and burdens, floats to the surface as truly significant. The cast was uniformly excellent, performing excellently despite the fact that the lighting of the show experienced technical difficulties during the first act, and the show had to eventually switch over to being performed without professional lighting, but, rather, in "work light" (flood lights). Oh, off-off-Broadway, how I wish thee were better funded.

Nonetheless, there were plenty of brilliant bits, especially those between the character of Rosemary (played by Jennifer Blood, pictured with A'lisa D. Miles at left) the mentally challenged sister of the young female love interest, and the River. Early on in the show, they do a sort of choreographed mirror sequence that's really very fascinating, and the flood scene where Rosemary is overtaken was very well done. The use of flapping fabrics to represent water is so often misused in theatre, but this was a case where it was really stunningly put to use.

Anyway, a very, very good day of theatre.

Afterwards, I studied for my midterm tomorrow and bought Annie Hall for $8 at Virgin Megastore, which I watched with Austin. I had pretty much forgotton everything about the movie, but it's really quite funny. It's nice as well that it has a realistic ending that doesn't feel sappy and saccharine. Bravo to Woody Allen!