West Quad Story

Hi Everybody!

As I'm sure you're well aware, Sandi and I share a birth month and year. Since my birthday happened recently, it of course follows that so did hers. I cleverly hid the fact that it was my birthday from my co-workers (by taking the day off and going to Amsterdam) but Sandi didn't have to go to such lengths because her birthday fell on a Saturday. Nevertheless, these German Kindergartens keep extensive records apparently (or they understand the mechanisms of the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability a little too well) and they were hip to Sandi's birthday game. The good news that came out of all this though is that in discovering her birth date, they felt so bad for her that she had aged by another year, and showered her with gifts. One of those gifts (well, two) was/were tickets to a musical that I had already seen back in 2000, but was eager to see again (especially the fact that it was the German version): West Quad Story.

The play took place at the recently re-opened Deutsches Theater. It was last Wednesday and the whole event was pretty exciting. We started off with drinks and Bretzeln in the courtyard, and then were ushered in to find our seats at the links Balkon.

Now, as Barack and all TV politicians and characters in 24 would say, "make no mistake": I enjoyed this performance. It was a lot of fun to hit the town and take in a performance. At the same time, however, I am not at all a fan of what they've done to the show in porting it to a German audience (the dialogue and songs were all in English, but they clearly made some alterations to the story that I presume they imagined would help the German clientele connect with the characters or something).

First, it's no longer about Engineers vs. Artsies. It's something like Jets vs. Sharks. And (now this I can understand because who's really heard of McMaster outside of the Rust Belt?) the story does not take place at McMaster; instead, it seems to take place in an imagined 1950's New York. Finally, worst of all (besides what I found to be fairly overt racism against Puerto Ricans) they cut my favourite song by far: the Little Mermaid-inspired song about vectors or some such thing (at least I think I remember that being from this MacEng play).

All in all, a bit of a let-down as in my opinion they played too fast and loose with the original spirit of the production. Oh ya, and the guy who played Tom was pretty weak: I didn't even notice him chug a single bottle of beer on stage. Lame!

[Update: it turns out that apparently West Quad Story is actually a parody of an older musical called West Side Story which is the play that we went to see on Wednesday. Who knew? If I had known that ahead of time there's no way I would have agreed to go though, so no harm, no foul I guess...]