Why was there Kung-Fu in a Christmas musical?
(unreleased material from "GLORIFIED DISASTERS" by Ashley Strand)
Glorified Disasters
Feb 3, 5pm
Crocker Memorial Church
1260 12th St, Sarasota, Florida 34236
Buy tix here:
https://www.sarasolo.org
Feb 3, 5pm
Crocker Memorial Church
1260 12th St, Sarasota, Florida 34236
Buy tix here:
https://www.sarasolo.org
The next thing I knew, Stratton was making fun of how bad my Kung-Fu was in the show, and everyone was laughing at me.
Why was there Kung-Fu in a Christmas musical? Well. The show was called "The Story of Christmas.” And Brita’s story was comprehensive. No Greatest Story Ever Told is complete without an account of Herod’s army murdering the babes of Judea. But Brita had an extreme aversion, which I, personally, cannot understand, to exposition. She believed absolutely in the good old dramatic principle of “show me, don’t tell me.” Which left the problem of how to depict the slaughter of infants in a manner appropriate to a children’s musical.
Brita’s solution was Kung Fu. Fun for the kids, no weapons, and of course it gave her son Gay an outlet for his hostile tendencies. Brita even removed the babies. It was very impressionistic. The army rushed the stage, a mother screamed and the stage went dark. Crashing piano music and fog rolled out under a strobe light with Herod’s army following in slow-motion, throwing chop-kick combinations as it advanced.
The slo-mo/strobe combo was meant to give the illusion of heightened speed and ferocity, while minimizing the actual damage the kids could do. This plan didn’t work for me. Slo-mo turned into fast-mo, and trying to alternate chop-kick, chop-kick across the stage was asking too much of my feeble coordination. My body just wanted to chop and kick at the same time. I looked like an ambidextrous Nazi at a dance contest, spastically heiling and goose-stepping, as I spun myself side-to-side with the force of my kicks. As I approached maximal effort, somewhere about halfway across the stage, my eyes would close. Luckily, since I was moving faster than the group, there was no one around for me to hit. But then there was no one to mask me when, inevitably, I would fall. Usually I only fell once per performance.
OK, there were three performances and I fell five times.
A broad impression was not necessary to mock my closing night performance, and Stratty was doing an accurate imitation, to great acclaim. The Kung-Fu sequence had been my favorite part of the show. Now I felt the terrible shame of being the least effective Kung-Fu baby-killer in Herod’s army.