I’ve been sitting on this Superamas blog post for two days, hoping that in sleeping on it–and sleeping on it again–some strikingly intelligent or insightful way to describe this show would occur to me.
That did not happen.
As far as I can tell, this bright, superficially stunning show sets up several scenes and then, through repetition, unpacks them, laying out the often dark and occasionally absurd forces that lie beneath our day-to-day expectations of both life and entertainment. In the first scene, four shirtless men in blue jeans practice the intro to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” stopping each time just before the vocals kick in. One of the men isn’t playing well, because he’s upset: He’s just found out he’s gotten a woman pregnant. His three bandmates console him, in a manner of speaking–they mostly just encourage him to convince the woman to get an abortion, in a blatant display of bro’d down misogyny that’s complicated by the realization, at the end of the scene (which is repeated several times) that the woman in question is the band’s lead singer. This scene culminates in a sexually evocative, lip-synched version of Cobain’s hit in which the vocalist masturbates with the mic, band members feign performing oral sex, and the audience is left to wonder if this is really the point that “Here we are now/ entertain us” has brought us to.
The next scene takes place in a club, with a dancefloor full of women busting moves to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” What follows is a completely, unabashedly awesome (there is no other word for it) dance off that sees the two competitors doing pirouettes and backbends, popping, breakdancing, and more. This is one of the few scenes in the show that only gets one run through, and it ends with bunch of dudes rushing the dance floor, raised beers in hand, as though these women were dancing for the benefit of these men all along. (A glowing bottle of Trumer Pils sits onstage, giving scenes like this an advertorial quality as well.)
Then it’s on to the dance studio, where three topless women are preparing for dance class. It’s super hot, on purpose–all the women are gorgeous; one of them demonstrates how to use a new vibrator she’s just received–and it’s interrupted at various points by a scene from What’s New, Pussycat? in which Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers discuss why men go to strip clubs, and a video from a dance class in which the hilariously New Age-y “dance of liberation” is being taught. The deliberate sexiness of the scene between the women, meanwhile, is undercut in repetition by the inclusion of melodramatic elements–one woman describes an upcoming surgery; at one point a spectacularly well-orchestrated car crash (represented powerfully through light and sound) tears through the scene.
I don’t think I understood this show particularly well, and I certainly haven’t figured out how to talk about it in a way that makes me sound, you know, smart–but I loved every minute of it and was actively disappointed when it ended. The hilariously protracted ending credit sequence gave shoutouts to Sex and the City and Milan Kundera, a pairing that nicely captures the show’s overall effect: It’s a perfect balance of crowd-pleasing spectacle and heady attempts to deconstruct audience expectations of (and for) happiness.