goestoshow

After being overloaded by plays with an activist theme last year, I had intended to avoid theme this year. I guess this one was my exception for this year. Mostly this play was good. It started off fairly strong with decent performances from the young actors and pretty good singing. The songs were all well written and very listenable, but I think they maybe had a little too much range for the actors who struggled with the highs and lows.

Where the play kind of fell apart a little bit was in the ending, where the main character, up to that point a street urchin with a heart of gold, seems to make a rather selfish decision and abandons the one person he could have — and should have — helped. I had a lot of trouble understanding this decision and the play didn’t really help me make the leap. I also found the apparent sentiment of the last song — that the problems of a street kid can be somehow resolved by uprooting and moving somewhere else (north, in this case).

I’m just not really sure what moral we’re supposed to take out of this play, but I still felt like I was being moralized to. I found that a little frustrating.