I'd rather have had Dengue Fever I'm at work, doing, per usual, fuck all. Joe calls. Ms. Hedwig requires our services in a production meeting. I inform him of my limited availability that evening. I'm going to see Saturday Night Fever.

An awkward pause. Joe: 'WHY?!'

Because, quite simply, it was free. And we all know that I am constitutionally incapable of turning down the free.

Joe snickers at me in barely veiled contempt. I suddenly realize I have said, out loud, in work, that I was going to see Saturday Night Fever. I terminate the conversation. Later that evening, as I reluctantly abandon the pleasurable company of the Making Strange posse to head to the show, Cian says, 'Enjoy!' I say, with a smile, 'I'm sure I won't.'

Little did I know.

It begins. Tony shows up and strikes his I'm-a-little-erect-teapot pose. The crowd goes wild. I had forgotten that a Gaiety audience treats everything in that theater as a panto. This does not bode well.

The cast assembles onstage. I count a Bebe Neuwirth lookalike with less net charisma than the original has in her fabulous little finger; an assortment of indistinguishable blondes desperately broadcasting their sexpotness; a deranged, unwashed simulacrum of Lionel Richie on crystal meth; and a chorus of vigorous, athletic males who have been directed to demonstrate their manliness by frantically thrusting their pelvii at phantom horny babes. They all maw and yap a panoply of bad Noo Yawk accents ranging in timbre from marble-mouthed Bwooklyn to vaguely Swedish.

The set is of the stuff-on-platforms-with-wheels variety, with the barest minimum of props attached to give the illusion of many locations, rapidly visited. I'm sure some designer somewhere thought it was minimalist and striking and boldly theatrical, but instead the effect is anemic and cheap. Ditto for the sad painted cyc that I believe is intended to indicate a bustling Brooklyn street but looks somewhere between the Old West and Blaine, Missouri.

During one set change, some techie bangs the setpiece of Tony's bedroom into the steel scaffolding while dragging it offstage. There is a tense moment while they swivel it back and forth to renegotiate the exit. The actors stranded on the platform pretend it's not happening. It is the most amusing moment of the show.

The dance numbers are wild and flashy with women being flung about and offering crotch-flashing splits in mid-air. More pelvic thrusting from the men. I don't remember the movie being so obscenely soft-porny, but, then I also don't remember tender moments and major life events being crammed into three lines of wooden, stilted dialogue to huge comedic result. The effect is somewhat like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), only without, you know, talent. The humor is unintentional.

Neither humorous, talented, nor even comprehensible was one particular character, and there's really no easy way to say this so I'll just have to come right out with it: the token black female. Yes, in a show about New York City, they had one, count 'em, one African-American couple, and one, ONE, Latino couple. Naturally for a show incapable of depth and subtlety, each minority couple were relegated to dance in what the choreographer must have thought was the style of their ethnic origin: the Latino couple in a strangely desexed, generic variant of salsa, its inherent smoldering swiveling robbed of its power by the trashy bumps and grinds of the Pelvic Patrol, and the African-American couple in... I don't know what to call it, but it made me cringe. I suspect that there is no way to adequately describe its vile offensiveness without getting really offensive myself. The guy of the pair was actually a really charming dancer with lots of impressive high kicks and smooth grooves, despite being saddled with a four-foot Afro wig and stuck in the background the whole time. The woman, on the other hand, seemed to try to compensate for her lack of dancing skills with sheer wanton energy and 'LOOK AT ME!' faces, no matter what else was going on around her; her 'character' seemed uncomfortably, inappropriately obsessed with the Lionel Richie greaseball and spent most of the time waving and giggling at him in the manner of a young girl in her first dance recital spotting her parents in the audience. With a shapeless shock of fried hair and smears of white eyeshadow that seemed to extend even higher than the brow line, let's just say that the overall effect was seriously pre-Civil War. At the interval, my neighbor will ask me, 'Why did they have to make the black couple only dance with each other?' My response will be, 'Why did they make her act like something out of Amos and Andy?' I genuinely cannot understand why anyone, even the least competent or sensitive director, would direct anyone to behave in this manner. What year is this?!

I guess at some point, even professional face-pullers have to take a break from their frenzied attempts to destroy theatre, so a listless watercolor of a bridge on a wrinkled backdrop is dragged across the back for what they doggedly indicated was a wildly romantic scene. As if the fact that a West End show is using set pieces not even worthy of Waiting for Guffman was not insulting enough to one's intelligence, the sad painting does not even represent any actual New York bridge (let alone the Brooklyn Bridge that Tony is constantly romanticizing); rather, it's some generic Golden-Gate-cum-Metropolis yawning grey arc. Guilty of such bombastic, reckless stereotyping and crimes against basic human decency as they were, I am actually surprised that they did not include some background scrawl of the Twin Towers to complete their fetishization of not only Dusty, Brownish '70s Nostalgic New York and by extension that old gray mare, The American Dream (may it rest in peace), but also of relentless, pathological phallic thrusting.

Ballads ensue. These poor performers (on whose faces is an expression of 'My agent told me I'd be famous') are forced to stand alone, root themselves somewhere onstage and sing plaintively into the middle distance. Then they make to run offstage, seemingly to pursue the object of desire or perhaps throw themselves from a precipice, but at the last minute they CHANGE THEIR MIND! And face some other random point and wail, stock-still, some more. And then they go to run offstage but HA! FOOLED YOU AGAIN! This grows tiresome.

The interval. I fire a desperate salvo, via text messages, to my loved ones that say, simply, 'OH MY GOD'. Nobody responds. I am cold and alone in a cruel world.

The second half starts with the five main boys clambering about on the 'Brooklyn' 'Bridge'. I wish they'd all fall over the edge.

The Lionel Richie wannabe increasingly acts like a ferret in spandex. The audience loves him and his vulgar readjustings of his ostensibly male area. One particularly protracted wiggle and tug brings down the house. I turned to my neighbor. 'I am not applauding a wedgie.'

More ballads, more crotchular obsession, more hoots and hollers from the audience, the Ambiguously Swedish Moaner bleats that 'noooo wuurrrrn keeeeerz' one last time and flings himself from the bridge. I manage to restrain myself from applauding. Amos and Andrea reappear and inspire visions in my head of anonymously sending a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings backstage.

Then it ends. I flee.

To its credit, the dancing was entertaining, when it wasn't insipid, insulting, or repetitive. However, in a show with no real heart or soul, the only effect of such spectacle is to intimidate the audience into feeling inadequate somehow; it neither inspires nor uplifts the spirit. I left feeling frightened of and sad for this cheap version of male sexuality, and vaguely dissatisfied with my own inability to be an adorable, energetic, 'woo!'ed-at dancer: in short, all I left feeling was the capitalist directive fulfilled. To say this was two hours of my life I'll never get back is the most charitable statement I can offer.  ¶ 9:30 AM