The General is Good

When Sarcasm Girl was in high school she was a member of a youth-musical-theatre troupe, The Event Players. This summer, as a fundraiser for the program, they invited program alumni to come back and participate in a concert-performance of Guys and Dolls. As always, the people who run the program have their favorites, and by the time SG got involved all the principals were already cast (the guy who played Nathan Detroit, and his Adelaide, were knockouts; the Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson were serviceable) but they cast SG as General Cartwright, the head of the Mission Society who is planning to close down Sister Sarah's mission on 49th Street. And in the opening number, "Runyonesque," she was the distaff half of the "rube" couple who are gawking at the sights and having their pockets picked. The kid can sing, her dancing is serviceable, but she has serious comic timing, and managed to sketch characters without stepping on the people around her--which is harder to do than it sounds.

The whole show was great fun (it was amusing to see that the guy playing Nathan, who we remember from SG's tenure in Event Players as a short, talented, baby-faced guy, is now tall and rangy. Still talented, though) but as always, when SG was on stage it was hard for me to look elsewhere. Maybe that's just because I'm her mother, but maybe it's simply that the kid is good.