Wisconsin Death Trip at the Gonda theatre on campus. Apparently over course of the performances the show has changed shape - what I saw was a different version to what people saw the week before. I guess, like an out of town opening, they were able to use these performances to gauge reactions.

My reaction was extremely positive. A friend from English found the narrative a little too fragmented, but that didn't bother me. It wasn't, just like the book wasn't, a single narrative, but a way of imagining the trials of a community. I felt there was a lot to like here. The music was great: I would probably put it in the category of music theatre rather than "folk opera," as Tim Raphael (the director and writer) billed it, but it wasn't in any way cheesy: I feel that it really imagined how something like the musical could be theatre art, rather than glitz. That said, while I understood the rationale for the musical eclecticism (while one might imagine that late nineteenth century Wisconsin would be a fairly homogenous group in terms of ethnicity, that wasn't true: the musical ragbag was meant to reflect this) I felt that there could have been a greater unity to the music: using the different styles, but blending them a little more, to mirror the way different people came to be part of one community.

For the most part the students acting were great: they were obviously very taken with the material, and wanted to serve it well. There were moments at the start where, as the ghosts of the community arose, a few of the actors were oddly stiff or overdramatic: they ruptured the surface, the texture on stage, so that you couldn't help being distracted by their awkward postures. I wonder if this was simply warming into it, or reflective of the fact that they are, after all, student actors.

It's exciting that after Tim Raphael had been thinking about how to do this for so long it got to appear for the first time at Georgetown. It's made me want to see more student theatre (although I've been warned some of it is terrible) - but then, I'm also more generally getting involved with seeing stuff around DC. I'm getting so busy - frazzled - with university work, that it's great to put that aside for a breather now and then and jump into something cultural.