Sunday, February 9, 2020

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None of the Oscar wins has aroused in me any desire to see any movies I haven't already seen.

In the meantime, I spent the afternoon at a matinee performance of a stage adaptation of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. This was perhaps a strange thing for me to attend, as I've never seen the movie (though I have read the John Buchan book: same premise, rather different contents). But the premise of the play is that it's a depiction of a production with only four actors (for a rather large set of characters) and one rather lazy stagehand, and that it becomes a farce through improvisation and miscasting.

I like that sort of thing, but found this example passingly amusing, not tremendously funny, perhaps due to an energetic and competent but not overly brilliant cast in the real acting roles. I did learn that the movie is the source of a Firesign Theatre reference I'd never known that I didn't get. I think I actually chuckled twice, once when someone playing a Scottish farmer "forgets" his Scottish accent, and the other when someone calls on a character who's gone offstage and realizes that the whole cast is now onstage in other parts, so he's run out of actors. Well, maybe you had to be there.

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