Slide

I'm a little late in posting this, but better late than never.

I caught the opening of Slide on Monday and Tuesday of this week, and have to say I was really impressed. The show has grown considerably with the addition of actors, such that what was an extraordinarily rough script with music that didn't quite manage to tie in when last I was involved in the project, has evolved into a very interesting sort of staged concept album. The music and the script still don't tie together in a neat little brown-paper package, but on an abstracted level, they work together, they feed each other, and the end result is something like The Darkside of Oz, which is to say it is rather like ...i think not generated an album that happens to fit a play written by Kalena Dickerson, as opposed to being like a musical the two wrote together. For an audience willing to give up concise narrative story telling for a looser more sensory experience, it's a bitching show. But only if you're willing to do those things.

This is not to say I felt that Slide is complete yet, or that it's reached its full potential. For a show designed to be a bar act, it is far too large in scope. Bar acts are intimate, minimal affairs, wanting for nothing more than a front man and a band to tell their stories. While Slide makes an admirable attempt at keeping the cast tiny, through double casting and by employing any actor not present in the scene to play in the band, the stage is still too small to comfortably hold the eight cast members/band members, and the stage frequently feels cluttered.

In all, Slide is well worth the price of admission, and is a good reason to get out and have a drink on a Monday or Tuesday night, but if I were in the company performing it, I would suggest that it go back into workshop for a month or so after the run to iron out the kinks, tighten script and music, and to figure out this crazy thing that isn't quite a bar act and isn't quite a full-theater musical. If that happens, it will become a full-on cult phenomenon, ready to stand among Hair and Rocky Horror as one of the greats.