review: 6/21, 22: Melted Men

[Tom Ritchford]

[I decided to post a review of a show I saw.  I might do this again.  /t]

I saw the Melted Men twice a few weeks ago and there were huge lessons to be learned for performers.

The idea of the show is to constantly keep you as an audience member on your toes, keep you from falling asleep, keep your heads up.

• You never saw the performers' real faces, always full masks.
  
• 12-20 different costumes with over a dozen scenes, all playing on the floor.
  
• Over three series of shows I've seen in about 7 years they re-use about a third the costumes each time. 
  
• Only one did they use each time, a full head mask of a very realistic old threatening bald man - he went around with very few clothes on, naked the second night.
  
• All the costumes were threatening, mythic or grotesque.
• They prevented people from photographing, going as far to hit one guy on the hand with a stick!
• This was the first night - people on the second night were much cooler.
• They explained exactly why:  "You should fucking it watch it yourself with your own eyes." (paraphrased)
  
• Even after having had the rather scary lead singer bound off stage and hit him on the hand with a drumstick, this guy persisted in holding his stupid camera up (right in front of me, I'd add).
  
• After he kept going, I politely mentioned to him that I felt that the singer had been clear.  His girlfriend came up and started talking to me at great length about something I was unable to hear a word of, I assume justifying it all.  After a couple minutes I turned politely to her, smiled and politely said, "Fuck off!"  She looked a little baffled and said, "What?"  I smiled even more politely, turned on all my charm, and said, "I said, "Fuck off!"".
• While I certainly tell people to fuck off all the time, to my knowledge this is the first time I've done it when I wasn't even a little angry, just to see the reaction.
• The reaction was completely worth it.  The ultra-politeness was the key.  A++, would tell her to fuck off again.
  
• I'm thinking of having cards printed up that say:  "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but if you don't intend to watch the show, would you please fuck off?  Thanks, and have a nice day!  :-)"
  
• They'd added live drums and a gamelan thing and more electronics.
• They were more bold in the use of Balinese influences.  One of the costumes and scenes in particular used a very specifically Balinese influenced costume with lots of wiggly bits on it.  I felt it was great,
  
• The music was extremely chaotic;  it's hard to describe - and if you know me, that means it was REALLY weird.  there were clearly "songs".  I felt they'd advanced musically from last time, I really did like it.
  
• huge numbers of specific bits
• they are constantly testing the edges of your perception.
• cast members would constantly leave and then re-enter from somewhere else in different costumes.
• I'm pretty sure there were three of them.
  
• they wave threatening things hanging out on poles over your head where you couldn't see them.
• another costume was like a tree with huge forearms leading out to hands that would clutch out over your head.
• the bald scary guy kept reappearing with nastier and nastier-looking tools, the last two being a huge pair of (plastic) scissors that he ran back into the room with and then reappeared later with a running chainsaw! (I think it was just the motor but you could smell it) and then chopped off George Washington's leg.
• another character was a mostly naked man crawling on all fours with a humanoid dummy on his shoulders with a fairly realistic face on it, counterweighted so it bounced fairly naturally -- the human's face being obscured, it was hard not to see it as a centaur character.
  
• there was a George Washington character in a diaper with an artificial leg.
• One of the characters did more of the DJ/instrument things and had less elaborate masks at the start.
• there were several other hard-to-describe costumes, "weird critters".
• in the ending, they turned on a strobe, and a cast member came out in a costume where the body was under a black cloth and the hands were a pair of giant teeth which menaced the audience and then ripped apart a bag of white stuff up in the air under a strobe.
• People screamed a lot and loved it.
  
• All done for very little money.