Malloyiscal Fan
Your place for all things Dave Malloy!
(DISCLAIMER! This is a Dave Malloy fansite. His real website is here)
Can you do something for me? Make me a promise?
I want you to promise me that you will remember that theater is an ephemral art form. Believe me, I am a supporter of getting it out to the masses, I love a good slime tutorial and I love a good proshot even more. This is something that applies not just to the questionable side of theater fandom. No matter the medium, film or cast album, professionally recorded or bootleg, the recording changes the way we experience a piece of theater. It is now a static form of art. A form we can go back and experience in the exact same way over and over again. That cast and that line delivery and that loud laugh in the audience are backed into one, unchanging experience.
Which is wonderful! But now it is a different form. It's a different beast. Treat them with the seperate respect that they deserve. Do not judge live theater against the ghost of its older brother that stood on the same stage ten years ago. Judge it by its own merits. As an archivist and a hoarder at heart, I truly believe preservation is only a moral good. But don't let one version of something burn its way into your head. You can go to a show because you heard about an actor or an artist you like, but don't let that thought ruin your evening. Let the stakes be low. Let the piece speak to you, let the actors make their art.
Don't let theater turn into high art. Trading bootlegs of LuPone and Minnelli like they're Warhols and Picassos. Only in it for the names.
I know we can't all see the show's we're obsessed with. But do me a favor, go see something local. Original, if possible.
"remember, remember, when the artist was an anonymous drunkard, unwashed and unshaven, slaving over their sculptures in a bubonic haze, begging their dinner of meat on the bone, crusts and rotten cabbages, and in the moonlight sleeping with blossoming blushing barkeeps on beds of stolen wine? and never ever once believing that they deserved anything more than this? that anything more was possible, or even desirable?
perhaps: artists dont actually, really deserve to be paid for their work, any more than the bleeding mother deserves payment for her just suddenly breathing child. what is nice and what is deserved, are just, not, the same.
take it! take it! take it!
i dont want it!"