Through his work, BJ got free tickets to this show so, even though I was never a big fan of the movie, I agreed to go.
Did I mention this Seattle production stars Mo Brady as youngest brother (and true romantic) Gideon Pontipee? It does! So of course I had to go.
In case you're not familiar, let me break down the plot of this little show: A mountain man goes into town to find himself a wife to take care of him and his six grown brothers. The lady he marries is not exactly thrilled to be taking care of seven slovenly dudes, so she helps the brothers shape up their act so they can go into town and find their own dern wives. Unfortunately, the other town girls are not so easily won, so the brothers take a cue from a story they read in a book (Plutarch's Sabine Women) and decide to just kidnap the girls and carry them back to the mountains. Just your standard romantic abduction plot, I guess.
The show's jokes pretty much revolve around how clueless and horny the brothers are (except for Mo's character, the youngest brother, who is clueless, yes, but more lovestruck than aching for any available warm body). You'd think that a bunch of jokes about dopey, sexually frustrated mountain men would be kind of one-note, and you'd be right, but I had a good time.
The misogyny in the book and lyrics runs pretty deep (to illustrate: at what is probably the emotional crescendo of the play, Mo and the female lead are singing about being deeply in love while the male lead is singing the musical theatre equivalent of "one bitch many faces"), but the whole thing is so lighthearted that it's hard to take it too seriously.
Besides, though the softer sex gets short shrift in the play, the male actors have to dance around in various degrees of undress, making them more the objectified than the the objectifiers (at least from where I was sitting). There is something icky about romanticizing the sexism of olden times, but if I'm watching a lot of hot, shirtless men do flips while it's happening, I get a little distracted.
