The overall tragic theme of that series is how bad theater, musicals, drives out the good and the role that money and how maintaining grand institutional edifices and programs work to insure that. And so it is in real life, the reason that theater as a serious and intelligent part of the arts will have to be a theater without money, certainly as compared to salable lightweight crap. You have to see it from the very first scene in the series to get that theme.
I don't have a theater background, unlike the Slings and Arrows songbird and Simps, but I know the difference between a musical "based on" a play and the real thing. Apparently Simps the theater major doesn't, even though we've been through that before, George Bernard Shaw didn't write My Fair Lady, Alan Lerner and Frederick Lowe did. I'm not saying the score doesn't have its moments, The Ascot Gavotte is amusing enough, especially as filmed by George Cukor and whoever it was who came up with those absurd hats. The tacked on ending where Eliza goes back to Higgins is ridiculous and demeaning to Eliza in a way that even the asshole that Shaw was wouldn't have agreed with, it's been reported he didn't like it when they did it in the movie they made in the 30s. I think his preface to that play proves that it is a complete misreading of his intentions. He explicitly says she married Freddy and that after the early attractions had faded she ended up supporting him. His real aspirations for improvement didn't rest with the lower-class flower girl, it was with Freddy's upper-class sister. He was a friggin' Fabian, in the end. But you can find that online so I'm not going over that again.
My point wasn't that an idiot whose knowledge and appreciation of theater is limited to the world of broadway musicals shouldn't indulge their childish tastes, it was that George Bernard Shaw advocated Nazi policies before the Nazis stated them and it rather put me off the old goat. He wrote Pygmalion in 1913, by which time he had been publicly advocating the mass gassing of the poor, the disabled, those he deemed economically unproductive for at least three years, his having publicly called for that dating, if my memory serves, from March of 1910. As I pointed out, his preface to On the Rocks proved that his moral degeneracy didn't get better as he saw actual regimes doing pretty much what he had advocated, he had no problem with Stalin or Hitler murdering huge numbers of people, as he stated in that preface. He had the typical Fabian hatred of poor people and the disabled and decided to outdo the rest of them in depravity. That the Nobel committee who gave him the Literature prize in 1925 talked about his idealism and morality proves that either those idiots didn't know what they were talking about, which is doubtful, or that the modernist conception of both of those realms of virtue included the kind of mass murder for economic utility that Shaw advocated.
I guess Simels, who has that American habit of seeing antisemitism wherever he finds it convenient to throw the accusation, isn't bothered that Shaw advocated what Hitler did before Hitler did it and approved of it while he was doing it, explicitly approving what he was doing in Germany. What can you expect from someone whose view of the world is based in the more vulgar parts of Anglo-American dreck? Me, I disapprove of mass murder, it puts me off of someones work when they advocate it.
Pop culture make people stupid when that's all they watch and listen to. Materialism does that to people, too, it makes them morally retarded. It's ruining the chances for democracy. If the idiot wants to watch the movie or listen to the album, I'm not keeping him from doing it. I got tired of it a long time ago. Sugar poured on battery acid
Update: 2 Comments
Note: I did think he'd do it and, indeed, he did.
Update: 2 Comments
Note: I did think he'd do it and, indeed, he did.
Seriously, Sparkles, you are now officially the stupidest person on the planet, but because I pity you, here's a clue: My deliberate reference to MFL, rather than PYGMALION, was what we call a reductio ad absurdum. To demonstrate the ridiculousness of your argument.
It kinda boggles my mind that this continues to be beyond your ken, but that's why I still hang out here.
And there it is, folks, that great sophisticate, that theater major, Steve Simels confirms my point that he doesn't know the difference between the original and the knockoff, the play and the song and dance derivative of it, complete with the tacked-on ending that totally changes the meaning of the thing. And he's so stupid and clueless that even when that is pointed out to him that he's the living embodiment of the cluelessly comic musical dolly bird-brain who the writers of Slings and Arrows wrote who we were supposed to find funny because she was so ignorant, vacuous and silly.