This is why you cannot read a play and feel like you know the play. Imagine only reading the script for Star Wars. It’s clunky and boring. Plays don’t generally work on the page the way they work on the stage.
Death of a Salesman is depressing. It’s also funny. The script is about 90% depressing and 10% funny; actors and a director change that ratio depending on how they want to, not by changing the script, but by making different choices in how to interpret it.
Waiting for Godot is funny because it’s funny. “Nothing happens,” in WfG in the way that Seinfeld is a “show about nothing.” It’s not that the actors are literally sitting quiet and still on the stage for 90 minutes, it’s that what “happens” isn’t the important part for moving the show forward - the conversations and relationships move the play, not a plot. You can sum up the “events” of the play in about two sentences: “Two men are waiting on the side of a road for someone named Godot. Two other men on the same road join them; they talk.” But you can write volumes about what the play is about.
Several times in my life I’ve had the opportunity to see Cabaret, either in movie form or as a stage production, and I’ve always avoided it because I thought of it as a frothy bouncy musical with no plot / just a skeleton plot used to string one song&dance number after another. I had no idea it was kind of dark and decadent.
And to balance things out, the other day in preparation for Saving Mr. Banks, I watched Mary Poppins for the first time. While I had expected a story with some songs mixed in, instead it’s a “frothy bouncy musical with no plot / just a skeleton plot used to string one song&dance number after another.”
Yes, totally. If I had been the author I would have behaved pretty much as she did in Saving Mr. Banks, and it was exactly the expectation that Cabaret was another Mary Poppins that kept me away.
It’s not a laugh riot, but parts of it CAN be funny. Think of Vladimir and Estragon as a classic old-time comedy team, be it Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, and see if their exchanges aren’t vaudevillian in tone.
I think the themes of spend more time with your kids and learn to enjoy life…are very well done. With a side dollop of misty-eye for the “Tuppance Lady”.
I used to think that a “Leopard-skin Pill-box hat” was a typical case of mid-sixties-Dylan’s absurdist humorous hyperbole. Nope, I later learned it’s a real thing.
