Serious and silly

Two more plays were recently viewed, at a pretty wide divergence in terms of message and seriousness. We first saw "Our Country's Good," by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, chiefly performed by seniors of the UNCSA drama department, on the Performance Place Thrust Theatre stage.

We had earlier seen "After Darwin" by this same playwright, up in D.C., so thought this one might be good, too. And it was -- primarily about the "transportation" by the British of people dubbed criminals, in the late 1700s, to the Australia colony. A great deal of conflict between some of the soldiers, who were unhappy with their assignment and treated the convicts as somewhat less than human, and the governor and one soldier who saw opportunities for raising some of these people up through the power of art and theater. After a fair amount of agony, an ultimately uplifting message and moment of theatrical joy.

It seemed a little bit long to me, but I don't think that's a fault of the production, actors, directors or anything else than the fact that nearly everything I have seen lately has been a 90-to-95 minute, no intermission show. Thus, when an intermission show that runs about 2.5 hours comes along, it SEEMS long but of course, it is not. It's just normal.

The next night, we took in "Back to the 80's," a musical, so to speak, at Theatre Alliance. It bore something of a resemblance to "Mamma Mia" in that it took existing and chiefly well-known songs and tried to tie a story of high school romance around them. Which was partly successful, for me, anyway. Unfortunately, with a couple of outstanding exceptions, TA didn't manage to locate the kinds of voices that could carry that sort of music off. It was fun and upbeat, but a little hard to listen to.