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Never heard of
the musical Altar Boyz? Go ahead and Google the title, and you'll
find site after site, detailing every aspect of this sight comedy
musical about a struggling Christian pop boy band (with one Jewish
member). The official site is On stage, Altar
Boyz is a gentle parody that never moves into biting satire
and The slim plotline
follows five young hopefuls, who are on the last stop of their
nationwide tour to celebrate Jesus, and save souls. To assist
in the latter, is a In New York,
at a much smaller venue, AB can do that in more suitable surroundings,
where expectations are lower, or at least based on a different
set of values, and the long version of what would probably be
a successful SNL skit would be better suited. |
http://www.altarboyz.com/,
and there you can read the Audience Confession of the Week ("I
told my family I was going to 7:00 mass, but I came here instead.
This counts. It's holy! Right!?! Tara), link to the
MySpace AB site, download dreamy pictures of the cast, or buy
merchandise. Be sure to turn down the volume on your speakers
first, though. Now, everyone at works think I like boy band
Christian pop. All this kind of makes the show beside the point.
The cross promotional selling and hype, however, is part of
the story, cleverly interwoven into the whole boy band phenomenon.
that's the point.
Here's a show that will entertain the 10 year old girls, because
the boys are cute and sing like they're on American Idol, will
entertain Grandma, because, after all the jokes, the show's heart
is pure and the morals are clear, and will entertain show tune
loving gay men, because, well, HELLO, the whole boy band thing,
show tunes, cute men.
device
that measures the number of souls in the audience that are in
distress. While this provides the set-up for a dig at the pre-scripted
nature of this tour, it turns out, disappointingly, that the
calculator actually works. There go any chances for send-ups
of the whole staged process, instead focusing on the same level
of gags all the way through. Instead of building in comic or
emotional tones, the play is a somewhat monotonous journey, with
a few blips, as characters experience small revelations. One
learns his birth parents have been found but are dead,
leading to actual moans of sympathy from audience members who
were clearly experiencing deeper emotional connections than I.
This is no fault of Altar Boyz, in that its ambition is failry
low, and just aims to please.