skygiants

genarti and I went with a friend to see Plexus Polaire's Moby Dick on tour today, ft. "seven actors, fifty puppets, video-projections, a drowned orchestra and a whale-sized whale," (to quote the press copy) and now I have been sitting here for several hours trying to figure out how to express how incredibly effective this was as an adaptation.

( write-up includes spoilers for Moby Dick... )

Before I saw the show, I was thinking to myself, 'I'm very glad I've read Moby Dick but also it would have been very funny to base my entire sense of Moby Dick off the Dave Malloy show and the Plexus Polaire puppet show.' But now I can't think this because I have no idea if this show would have hit at all if I hadn't gone in already knowing some of the themes -- the way it's working with the text is brilliant if you know what you're looking at and I truly don't know if it makes any sense if you don't -- and I would have been so deeply sorry to miss the experience of it hitting right, which the vast majority off it really and truly did! Love to be emotionally compromised by whale puppetry!

Anyway. Unfortunately I cannot tell everyone to go see it because I don't know where or when it will be next; we all desperately wished afterwards that there was a recorded copy we could start foisting on people but instead I will just drop the trailer which at least conveys the sense of underwater haunting.

Watch on YouTube