By: Jack Marshall

Jack Marshall — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 06:07:09 +0000

Interesting take. A Chorus Line, of course, is completely filled with stereotypes, is absurdly melodramatic, and is nonsense besides: no audition was ever held like that. Marathon .’33 is accurate, and the audience learns about as much, actually more, about the participants as the spectators would in an actual dance marathon…which was the idea of Havoc’s play—to give playgoers the experience, as well as the guilt, of the people who paid money to watch starving fellow citizens dance til they dropped.

Sorry that she didn’t concoct a phony happy finale like A Chorus Line’s—she was teaching as something about the seamy side of desperation—so the critic could go home humming. Similarly the story–stories, actually, about ten of them, are subordinate to recreating a genuine American horror story—with music, songs, jokes and tap-dancing—that is all true, and that we forget at our peril.

Joe missed all this. Most of the production’s overflow audience, however, seems to get it.

(Editor’s note: Jack is the director of this production.)

Comments on: American Century Theater Marathon ’33

By: Jack Marshall