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We like musicals, and since it’s one of Emily’s favorites, we went to see Camelot at the Ordway on Friday night.

Wow… lame.

First of all, I’ve seen better musical stage actors in high school performances than what I saw out of Michael York. He had no vocal presence, he was too old for the part, he didn’t fit the rest of the cast, he didn’t know how to stand (he kept doing the stare-off-into-space-longingly thing), and I couldn’t stop thinking, “But Basil, what does it all *mean*,” the entire time.

The rest of the cast was pretty good, although the entire show suffered from pacing problems - the first half seemed to plod, while the second half was performed as if the actors just wanted to get the hell off stage. You know things are bad when the actors give up.

After the show ended, only about half the audience stood to applaud (I chose not to). As Emily was looking around to find out what people were doing, she thought she saw somebody she knew in our row and down toward the center of the seats. As Emily went to stand up, she looked again and saw that it was, in fact, somebody that we knew and that this person was the only one in the audience clapping like an idiot and shouting, “Bravo!” Since the last thing we wanted to do was get caught talking to this person about a ridiculously stupid show (which the unnamed person obviously thought was wonderful), we ducked out the side exit and virtually ran out of the theater.

We’ve had tremendously good luck with the shows that we’ve seen over the years, but this one just stunk.