Birds of Paradise 2-14-10

So, today I went to go see the musical “Birds of Paradise” at San Diego State University and enjoyed it very much. This hilarious comedy about an amateur theatre group putting on a musical version of The Sea Gull was written by Winnie Holzman and David Evans and directed by theatre faculty Paula Kalustian.

First of all, I would like to say just how much I enjoyed the show. I enjoyed all of the songs, while at the same time I really liked the story and the complex characters within the story. Each character was very different from the next and was showed very well throughout the play. Each character had their own set of physicalizations, problems, goals and thoughts about the other characters and I just found each character to be interesting and unique in their own way. For example there was the organized housewife, Stella who just seemed to have the perfect life and just wanted everybody to be happy but it turned out that her marriage was not as happy as the audience thinks and everything gets revealed later on. Also the relationship between Marjorie and her son, Homer is a lot more complicated then first thought. In the beginning we just think that it’s a normal mother son relationship but later on we realize that it has to do with Marjorie’s loneliness and sadness and her fear of letting her son go.

Each character also had very distinct goals they were trying to accomplish and things that they wanted while the other characters may have wanted completely different things. Homer, the composer, really just wanted to get his work out there and to “spread his wings” and get out into the world and he does this by using his friend Julia’s goal, which in the long run is to get out into the professional acting world. Homer’s goal is then fighting throughout the play with Lawrence, the professional actor’s actions, which includes changing the play that Homer wrote to reflect what Lawrence likes and what Lawrence wants. Everybody in the play had specific goals that the actors had to play, and what made it even harder was how each characters had goals that were crucial to story of play, so all actors had to make sure that the audience really saw what their characters wanted.

Another thing I really liked about the play was its parallel to The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov. I previously crewed for a production of The Sea Gull and thought that it was very interesting just how much the play paralleled the show and how each character went through many of the same things that the characters from Chekhov’s play went through. The plot of “Birds of Paradise” was basically a lighter version of “The Seagull” and the characters all seemed to parallel somebody from the original show.

I enjoyed this show immensely and thought it had a wonderful story, superb acting and beautiful music that will remain in my head for many hours.