Cossacks

I went to Shakespeare Theater to see a Russian play, The Government Inspector. Now I'm not a big fan of anything Russian, especially their plays, which normally involve big strapping Ukraine boys and girls walking around the stage waving giant red flags and singing songs about Lenin and the undying war against eeevil capitalism. You know, like an Obama cabinet meeting.

But I am a fan of Russian writers, and that Gogol guy was a pal of Dostoevsky and Puskin and some other crazy Russians (a repetition of terms, I know). And since I consider Dostoevsky the leading madman writer of all times, whose prose and thought and sentence structure can just knock you down, beat you senseless, turn you inside out, and then hang you up on a meat hook, then, well, Gogol can't be all that far behind.

Boy, was I wrong.

Five minutes into the first act, I was going, "What the hell is this?" You've got a stage full of people dressed in the most outlandish, over-the-top costumes (including two guys dressed like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, I kid you not) making 1st grade-level jokes and put downs while over-mugging and over-acting. Yikes. I turned to Mrs. Schlub and said, "What do you expect from Cossacks?" and made ready to leave.

Ah, but then there was the second act.

Tom Story as Hlestakov, the title character, with his servant Osip, played by Liam Craig, put on one hilarious attempted suicide scene. "Well, then, I'll give you a painful wound and beat you to death with a rock," is now one of my favorite phrases. So, I stayed, and glad, was I, doing so, because it was a very weird play with very weird phrase turns thereof, and those all, were funny.

Osip was, by far, the best character with the best lines but, sadly, had few appearances. Tom Story more than made up for that, especially during his drunken scene at the mayor's house. The rest of the characters were, well, weird. Just weird.

So, overall a good time, but not for what I expected; more because the play underscored my conviction that we shoulda nuked 'em when we had the chance.