Silence! The Musical

Autumn is the only season worth having. If you have to have seasons, I mean, and not just live in the bliss of eternal summer where the year cycles through in a blur of seasonal fruit and flowers. Hawaii has no spring or winter, just coffee blossoms and coffee cherries, Ka'u oranges and ripe mangoes, waves on the south shore or waves on the north shore.

I don't much care for winter, but autumn almost makes up for it. Leather coats, soft scarves, leaves shruffing underfoot like a brochure for a small New England liberal arts college. I visit a lot of bookstores in autumn, stocking up for the winter, and make vague plans to visit museums with friends. Museums look tempting in the cold weather, big and warm and slow-moving like hibernating bears.

But enough with the metaphors and similes! Onto the weekend round-up.

I went to see "Silence! The Musical" with friends on Saturday. This was supposed to be our Halloween activity, but we all know how that turned out. "Silence!" is a musical based on "Silence of the Lambs," and yes, it's fully aware on the inappropriateness of its subject matter. When the male lead reprises "If I could smell her cunt" twice, it's safe to say that the camp is intentional. The music was done by Jon and Al Kaplan, who you may recognize as the people behind the Arnold Schwarzenegger musicals if you spend as much time on the Internet as I do.

How does it compare to say, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"? That greatly depends on your tastes in musical theater and how funny you find tongue-in-cheek re-imaginings of movies from 20 years ago. I almost wrote that the Internet invented this genre, but then went away from this page to watch a live-streaming video of a litter of kittens jumping around their pen, and realized that the Internet didn't invent this genre at all. Mel Brooks did it back 1974 with "Young Frankenstein," a tongue-in-cheek re-imagining of
James Whale's classic 1931 "Frankenstein" with Boris Karloff.

Because when I think kittens...

So if you liked "Young Frankenstein" and you're okay with seeing a man tucking his penis between his legs while singing "Would you fuck me?" then I think you'll like "Silence!" The songs are catchy and the actors are all professional and having a good time. I'd recommend watching the movie again before you go, especially if you haven't seen it in a few years; the jokes and songs are very specific to the movie. And seriously, prepare yourself for that penis-tuck, because it's a shocking thing to see in real life, no matter how many pictures of naked people you look at on the Internet.

I'm not ending with a picture of a naked person. Shame on you.