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FASS 2004: The company of FASS 2004

FASS 1999 - Imprint review

This review appeared in the February 5, 1999, issue of Imprint.

No conspiracy here

Mark Besz, Imprint staff

Every year, students and faculty from all departments and all walks of life come together to do one show to entertain the masses because they can. Sort of like Fame, except these people don't dance on top of cars or anything like that.

This year is no different. One can go into the Humanities Theatre and catch their production called "The F.A.S.S. Files," a parody of all paranoia, conspiracies, and millennium-fever movies and books coming out right now. Russians trying to bring communism back, marines looking for something to blow up to keep the impeachment trials out of the papers, a Mulder-Scully team searching for anything out of the ordinary, and cults on campus trying to find more reasons to part with their money.

Confused yet? I was. The plot really didn't seem to get anywhere close to what was going on until the very end of the play. Hints were dropped throughout the play about the ending, but to connect them with the real answers takes having the script in front of you. The actors seemed confused about it too, since many lines were flubbed throughout the production. But no one was more confused about anything than the band was, who needed a very loud and vocal "one, two, three, four" to get any of the music started, and then couldn't seem to keep to the beat. This caused more confusion to the players, who couldn't help but mess up their songs since they had no idea where the band was in the song. I may not have had great experience in musical theatre, but even I cringed when the music started (my guilt was alleviated by the fact that the players also cringed before most of the problem numbers with me, mostly the horrible version of "Tubthumping" and the entirely off-time closing number).

Not that there wasn't anything good in the play. The Russian spy team was great, with fantastic timing and chemistry between them, and with some good musical numbers. Also good was Nash, the romantic reporter who is looking constantly for a girl who is "strong, beautiful, sensitive, and with a certain childlike innocence." Same goes with his sidekick photographer who is the most bitterly cynical character to hit the stage in quite awhile, conspiracy theorist Tav, All-American Major Dick, and UltraWoman, who somehow met Nash's requirements. These actors make this show bearable, but many things work against them, like scene changes that seem to take forever, dance numbers that contain one main dance move (arms sway up, arms sway down, arms sway up...), and the players not being able to keep the dance move synchronized.

My biggest problem came with the weapons in the show. There was an obscene amount of guns in this show, but when fight sequences happened where both sides were armed and ten to fifteen feet away from each other, they instead chose to punch each other or use the guns as clubs. This is more a problem of logic more than anything else, and doesn't concern me half as much as the fact that there are guns there. Yes, it is hard to run this kind of show without them, but I really don't think that the amount of guns helped anyone if only five shots are fired at anyone (all being accurate unfortunately bringing a total death toll in this show to seven or so people). Hopefully this popular culture trend of holding guns ends soon.

Overall, this is an entertaining, if not painful, viewing. And I don't think there's any conspiracy behind that.