“The Musical,” and More
February 28, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Music, Psychiatry, Psychology
Some interesting reviews from Toronto of Autism: The Musical which (EyeWeekly notes) offers a “real life alternative to Rain Man.” And, while I’m on the subject, two more musicals: In Brick Township, NJ, a “rock opera,” Day After Day, that is about “the daily struggles the families of autistic children face”; it’s being performed this Friday and has also been performed eight times in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York over the course of two months in 2004.
On a slightly different note (sorry for the unintended pun), in New York there’s Next to Normal, the city’s “first mainstream musical about manic depression.” Housewife Diana is manic-depressive and, it seems, undergoes electro-shock treatment in the course of the show (someone it seems a little off to have just written that); one supposes taht a dance of “pill-proffering pharmacologists” will not exactly enchant the “this vaccine thing is all a conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government” lobby. Notes the February 14th New York Times:
………“Next to Normal” assesses the fragmenting effects of mental illness within a family. It also, in an honored tradition of all-American hometown weepers, makes a high school dance an acid test for a central character. And the lyrics traffic in Lifetime-style buzzwords. People sing with some regularity of wanting to “begin to heal,” and they ask questions like: “Who’s crazy: the one who’s uncured? Or maybe the one who’s endured?”
Schmalzy stuff but “the uncured” and “the one who’s endured”: Those phrases resonate around here.
Jeff Stimpson
Jill Cornfield