"Arsenic and Old Lace"

This evening, I saw "Arsenic and Old Lace" with fellow CPA members at the Knightsbridge Theatre in Los Angeles. (Going to plays in small venues can be pretty cool.) This play was performed in its traditional manner (as opposed to being updated for the 00s). The movie of the same name was based on it.

Anyway, the play was an enjoyable dark comedy, which definitely was the right kind of play for my current mood. I like dark comedies anyway (though when I'm in certain mood, I seek them out even more than usual), and morbidity was the order of the day. A couple Loreena McKennitt songs were playing while we were in the waiting room, although as it turns out they were accompanying some ad being played by DVD that was on infinite repeat. (Still, when I enter a play and I hear Loreena, I take it as a positive sign.)

A couple of the play's actors have been in commercials or had (very) brief roles in movies (like as a dancer in the background of one scene). One person's bio advertised how he had played a transexual on the 100th episode of CSI.

There were a couple characters who had the Tom Lehreresque opinion that poisoning people is ok but fibbing is a sin (although this play was written before Lehrer sang "The Irish Ballad", which was an 'ancient' Irish ballad that was written a few years before he started singing it). These were a pair of giggling old sisters, who were giggling like schoolgirls throughout the entire play (the teeheeing got on my nerves a bit; to borrow some words from Harlan Ellison, it was so saccharine that I thought I might get diabetes from listening to it) even when they were talking about their murdered victims, whom they always gave proper Christian burials as they buried them in their cellar.

Anyway, I enjoyed the play a lot.