A Night at the Theater:

A night at the theater such as it is in Pensacola can be very entertaining when all of the fashionable downtown crowd turns out for the event. Gallery Night was held this past Friday and included all sorts of festivities hosted by the posh downtown ateliers, art galleries, and boutiques, many featuring live music and performances. The stores all stay open after business hours, serving up wine all along Palafox Street in an attempt to jump start the holiday season of spending. The fun is in strolling along the avenue sipping wine and admiring all the hard work that went into the holiday handicrafts but mostly it‘s about watching the people. Pensacola is a lovely town packed with beautiful people, everyone is bleached and buffed, tucked and sucked leading you to believe that even the most ordinary of plain Jane’s can become a swan. It’s this surreal experience of juxtaposing a freakishly attractive assortment of people with artwork that leaves me thinking that Night Gallery would have been a more appropriate title for this peculiar evening.
























Pensacola is also a drinking town and most were drunk, which made the people even more beautiful and made attending The Pensacola Little Theater’s version of Sordid Lives all the more enjoyable. It’s a small town and everyone knows one another as we were milling about the lobby before the program began, sipping the last bits and spewing loud expressions like, “How are you?” and “It’s so good to see you”. The light’s began to dim, the curtain began to draw and a hush fell over the audience...
























It’s sometimes hard for me to get into a production of a play that has been made into a definably campy classic movie. I find myself comparing characters to their movie counterparts and then I have trouble suspending my disbelief and getting lost in the performance. The director of this show decided to cast the play according to the movie version. All of the actors faithfully recreated the characters in the movie as closely as possible but still retained the nuance of their own individual interpretation. Each actor managed to mine and cull from the characters the essence of what made them so over the top and campy. This gave the show a certain dynamic, a play within a play and the performers found themselves performing a play and recreating a movie performance. As a result they succeeded and I really enjoyed it but I’m still unsure about the direction this play went, and that’s why they call them directors. For those who would like to know more about Sordid Lives please see former entry.

From the Department of Redundancy Department:

And now ladies and gentlemen please welcome back to the stage for the very first time, the song styling’s of Miss Tammy Wynette as interpreted by Leslie Jordan as Brother Boy.