New Acts!

We had waited for it for seven and a half months and were finally rewarded with it in the last cruise’s passenger talent show: the dramatic monologue. The actor was a thin-faced college student with shaggy brown hair. We had noticed him earlier in the cruise because he wore a tight-fitting vest to formal night. His slot in the talent show’s running order came about midway through; the tech crew had outfitted him with a lavaliere mic and placed a chair center stage to set the scene. His monologue was from a play called “The Owl and the Pussycat.” At first I thought he was going to recite the poem from “Alice and Wonderland,” because the cruise director had announced he was “performing a monologue, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat.’” I thought that was kind of endearing, that a twenty year-old would recite a poem more commonly associated with childhood, and I imagined all of us in the audience being gently reminded of the need to connect with memories of our childhood. This version of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” however, was a mentally unhinged man’s consideration of the best method to commit suicide. It’s what we in the biz refer to as “dark.” If you were ever wondering whether a theater full of one thousand cruise ship passengers, most of them elderly and a healthy minority non-English speaking, is the ideal audience for an edgy and intense monologue about offing oneself, it isn’t. To their credit, people in the audience were respectfully quiet. One grandmother did escort her four year-old granddaughter out of the theater, and as she walked by me I could hear the little girl ask, “But why are we leaving? Why?” The actor must have sensed he was losing his audience, but his energy never flagged. He determinedly used the stage, perching on the chair and then dramatically crossing stage left, arms gesticulating expressively the entire time. The monologue ended with him running off stage (dramatically) and then saying in a meek voice, “That’s it.”

Other acts included a man in a leather jacket singing “Hoochie Coochie Man,” the Martial Arts Instructor from our improv show singing “Blue Suede Shoes” with a tribute/history lesson about Carl Perkins before the song, a college age girl singing “Astonishing” from the new “Little Women” musical (consensus was that she could have won if she had sung a more recognizable song), and the winner, a man who did a number of very intricate yo-yo tricks. The last act was an elderly German woman who sang “Que Sera” and demanded that everyone sing along with her during the chorus. This was complicated by the fact that she sang pretty far away from the meter of the song and had changed the lyrics to the chorus. She was pretty frail so did not get back to her seat when the cruise director came back onstage to wrap up the show. The cruise director kibitzed with her a little bit, and the old woman took this as an imprecation to perform an encore. She sang an a cappella version of “Shalom” as the cruise director and audience looked uncomfortably on.