The Full Monty at Melbourne Civic Theatre
Linda and I attended a performance of THE FULL MONTY at Melbourne Civic Theatre last weekend. It was extremely well done and we recommend it highly.
There is some adult language and naturally there is some skin on display (it is a play about guys stripping, after all), but don’t let that deter you. MCT has added Thursday night performances because the scheduled shows were all selling out. I suggest you hurry if you want to see it. Continue and you can read Linda’s musings after seeing the show.
Melbourne Civic Theatre Box Office 321-723-6935
From: Linda Brandt
Sent: Sunday, October 04, 2009 1:21 PM
Subject: THE FULL MONTY
The implications in The Full Monty are even more poignant at this point of this year, when months of suffering over job losses across the country, not just in select pockets, signals the eroding effects of passing time and wearing emotions on so many families in our communities.
I found this in the NY TIMES today: “In fact, thanks to disproportionate job losses in predominantly male industries, women now exceed men in the labor market for the first time in American history.” — Dalton Conley, dean for the social sciences at New York University, is the author of “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”
This fine musical play, The Full Monty, creatively offered to us by Peg Girard and team at Melbourne Civic Theatre, reveals an intimate familiarity with the emotions of the handful of men (and their families) displaced from jobs on the floor and in the management of a factory somewhere. The people feel as real to us as our neighbors, due to the incredible casting of an ensemble that looks and sounds like ordinary hard-workiing people who were unprepared for the shocks and stress of the financial knock blows that just keep coming. But who is?
The predominantly labor-class viewpoint in the play is revealed to extend uphill and behind the doors of the offices to level the playing field and adds breadth to our understanding of the CONNECTIVITY of us all, whether putting the tire on the car, selling the tire to the dealer, working on the line manufacturing the tire, or any of the decision makers along a supply chain and down to the individual owner that buys the tire and drives to work, school, dinner or… a play…we are all part of the same system, dependent on each other’s contribution and subject to each other’s loss. (Substitute any product, industry, geography or economic sector for this tire example and truly feel the complexity of our economic connectedness.)
Peg’s delivery of this fine ensemble (and this sensitive, full-bodied interpretation) is a gift to us. We must remember to treasure the artistic excellence this community can and does deliver. And as to the actors who bring it home, there are simply too many genuinely wonderful performances by these actors on that stage to talk about properly. So many are just so good in the roles cast so perfectly, it would take two more pages. But you can’t write about The Full Monty at Melbourne Civic Theatre without mentioning three: Alfie Silva, Dana Blanchard and Alan Selby.
You have to see them. I’m not going to even try to compact their characterizations and the nuances of their portrayals into a little paragraph on each of them. Not fair. To think that is enough–or passes for what really happens in the intimate space that is theater anywhere–is wrong, especially this time. You have to go — see for yourself what they do with the roles; learn what you learn, feel what you feel, and be better for having been there.
You just have to see what all six of these guys do with the roles (and meet the women who support them painfully, quietly and sometimes not so).
There are three Thursdays Melbourne Civic just added to the schedule, because there is such good word of mouth and such demand for “more, more, please give us more.” Call now. If you wait, you’ll really miss out this time.