20-JAN-25 MLK Day and Discord Server

[DiveMilw]

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr Day.  The National Civil Rights Museum is hosting an in-person and virtual event "Community Over Chaos: King Day 2025" which seems doubly significant today.  

In weather news.....it is FREEZING here in Texas.  Insulation is something only the homes of the "privileged" were built with so the rest of us need to drip the water taps overnight and into the late morning until the temps rise above freezing.  In about two days the temperatures will soar back into the 50s.  The weather here is chaos.  

As an alternate to the Facebook group, Jennifer started a Discord server.  It is set up similarly to the board with the primary difference is it is more mobile technology friendly.  If you'd like to join here is a link:  https://discord.gg.EwGYnY9T   It will be active for 7 days.  I am not going to hyperlink it to try and foil the bots.  

[KathyB]

Freezing would be a nice temperature to reach. It is 10°F here. I believe this is the warmest it has been all weekend, but I don't feel like doing the research necessary to confirm this. I just know it's been frigid since Saturday, but I do have a furnace and an insulated house (and a dog).  

[AmyG]

I'm thinking of closing this site due to lack of interest. The domain is $12 a year and the server is $6 a month. I have two other sites on it but I don't really need those anymore. If it weren't for this forum, I could probably just get rid of the whole server. I just checked out discord and I see there's a big group there at least for now. Maybe you guys can go there instead. Since even with the mass exodus from Facebook, nobody has any interest in the forum save for you three, it's hard to justify the cost and effort. Incidentally, if you want to join the discord Jennifer set up, you need to replace the last dot in Tom's link with a forward slash. So gg/Ew....

[scenicdesign71]

Oh Amy, I'm sorry to hear this.

Given how much of the word-count here has been mine for quite awhile now, it's hard not to feel responsible for the deafening lack of interest.  (Not fishing for reassurance, just wishing my skillset included a talent for social media that might've helped keep a few more people on here).

I do get that Discord is more phone-friendly — although, to me, that's almost more of a red flag than a selling point; maybe I'll eventually get used to the interface there, but at first blush it feels structurally closer to what I hate about Facebook and farther from what I like about old-school chat forums like this one.

I'd be happy to chip in to cover costs, but I understand the effort would still be hard to justify for a user base of three.  I'm incredibly grateful to you, Amy, for having stuck with it this long.  And maybe it is time to move on, but I will miss this forum terribly.

[AmyG]

Well it's still just a germ of an idea. But if there is a major issue that needs addressing or the price of any of this goes up, that may be time to shut it down. 

I don't really do much on social media besides read stuff so I'm not sure what makes discord better for the phone. This forum has a lot of layers that you have to drill into whereas discord and Facebook are flatter. Maybe that's better for phones - and doom scrolling. But it's also worse for serious discussions. What I really don't like about Facebook is too many strangers that either take things personally that weren't meant to be or make personal attacks. It just gets too ugly. There are occasionally interesting discussions there. Though if someone posts something that I disagree with I am disinclined to say anything for fear that I will be vilified by the OP and all of his supporters. For instance, one of our old forum buddies made a statement in praise of Adam Lambert, who, as the emcee in Cabaret admonished the audience for laughing at the last line of "If You Could See Her." I did not agree with that. First of all, you don't know why they are laughing and second, if they are laughing and they shouldn't, that's on you (or the director). And third, it takes everyone out of the play and into real life. It's just wrong on so many levels.

[scenicdesign71]

For instance, one of our old forum buddies made a statement in praise of Adam Lambert, who, as the emcee in Cabaret admonished the audience for laughing at the last line of "If You Could See Her." I did not agree with that. First of all, you don't know why they are laughing and second, if they are laughing and they shouldn't, that's on you (or the director). And third, it takes everyone out of the play and into real life. It's just wrong on so many levels.

Yeah, I saw that FB post too.

On one hand, for all the reasons you describe, I probably would've found it distracting and annoying to have been in that audience.

On the other hand, I'm not sure one does Cabaret in the 2020s without some urgent desire to rub the viewer's face in its alarming relevance, especially in a situation like this one (at least as Lambert perceived it).

But on still a third hand, I'm not sure his specific way of dealing with that situation was necessarily helpful, either aesthetically or politically.

This can hardly have been the first time in the show's history that an audience's response to the punchline in question failed to conform to the "laugh-then-gasp" or "horrified silence" ideal (which, itself, has by definition become more performative as the percentage of non-first-time viewers has grown over the decades).  The moment has traditionally been understood as Ebb's extradiegetic bait-and-switch, but if there's value in making it the Emcee's as well — and if blind faith in the effectiveness of this nearly sixty-year-old "bit" is indeed no longer tenable (as it arguably hasn't been for years) — I doubt such value is to be found in veering off-script just to scold viewers for veering off theirs.  (Assuming for the sake of argument that these particular viewers were in fact shameless antisemites, their views would probably only have become deeper-entrenched after this encounter).

True surprise — on which this moment, or at least its "ideal" effect, depends — is a tricky thing in theatre (or film, for that matter; Psycho's effect on its earliest audiences in 1960 can't be recreated today), especially when it proves successful enough to attract a wide and lasting audience.

[AmyG]

I suspected you would have some intelligent thoughts on this. Thank you. I hear the emcee is played very differently in this production than in the past. Some on that thread seem to say they thought that it was not out of character to address the audience in this way given the way the character is being played. It's hard for me to say since I haven't seen it. There are people who posted who agree with me and even pointed out that the direction of the scene was at fault. People might laugh automatically because they are expecting a punchline there. They should realize their mistake as soon as the reality sinks in. That can be more powerful than being told by the actor that it wasn't supposed to be funny. At any rate, I'm shy about introducing a dissenting opinion on Facebook. Just too many people who don't know me might think I'm an antisemite (I'm Jewish by the way) for having a different opinion.

[scenicdesign71]

The recent Cabaret brouhaha turns up in this article about the debasement of humor in American public discourse:

The New Yorker:  The End of Seriousness
                                        Our times are rife with laughter that seldom offers relief.


About halfway through, Cabaret is cited — along with similarly callous reactions to recent screenings of Haynes's May/December and Lynch's Blue Velvet) — as exemplifying the sort of "bad laughter" that has gradually (over several decades, according to the writer), and then less-gradually, come to supplant any other kind:

...There have been similar reports of excess laughter among Broadway audiences at Cabaret, especially during "If You Could See Her," the ridiculous duet with a gorilla that ends on the thud of an unfunny joke, a dose of antisemitism that is meant to jerk the audience back into the realities of late-Weimar Berlin.  In each case, humor is proper to the unease — one cannot have their expectations (of a publicized scandal; of an American suburb; of a German night club) unsettled without first getting too comfortable.  But each of these works asks audiences to attune themselves to on-the-dime shifts in atmosphere, to the psychodramas thrumming beneath the rituals of ordinary life.  And, in each case, the audience seemed to only see a joke.

The whole article is worth a read.  It's a bit depressing, like everything else these days; but it's neither overlong nor reductive.