The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz is a play written by former CreComm instructor, Armin Wiebe. I, along with my classmates, attended this play and had an alright time. I've not been to very many plays in my lifetime, so I don't really have anything else to compare this to, but I feel like if I did, perhaps I wouldn't have enjoyed this one as much as I did.

As far as the play itself, I could have taken or left it. I don't consider it a waste of an evening or a waste of $12, but I wouldn't be heartbroken to have missed out on the experience.

One thing I didn't like too much about the play was the use of German spattered throughout. I'm all for some good use of a foreign language, but I felt that Armin's use of German in this play was ill-placed and alienated his audience a little bit. I found that sometimes in the play, one of the characters would use a German word in a pretty important place. They would be explaining something for a little while, and then the last word of their entire speech would be a German word, leaving me feeling like I really didn't know the entire context or meaning of everything they had just said. It was rather frustrating sometimes.

Armin actually addressed this issue when he visited us during our Thursday seminar, and said it was a risk he was willing to take. Hey he's the playwright, but I felt that it was really effective at derailing the momentum of a scene at certain parts of the play.

Overall, I thought the play was alright, a little slow moving at times.

I found that during the talkback and also the seminar, Armin could definitely have been a little more enthusiastic about his work or at the very least pretended to be excited to talk to us. The snark and sarcasm in a few of his responses was a little bit unmerited, and a lot of his answers were extremely short where I'm sure he could have gone into much greater detail.

Plays aren't my bag, and after seeing this one and talking to the playwright behind it, I don't imagine that is going to change anytime soon.