30 Minute Musicals: Roulette

The premise of this show is the audience votes for which movie will be turned into a musical medley that evening and the actors deliver in a 30-minute slot. There are a number of options to vote for: Die Hard, Top Gun or Jurassic Park. Now, I am a huge Jurassic Park fan, it’s one of those franchises where I have watched over and over again. Die Hard is similar, it’s a cult classic watched again and again, and as my best friend would controversially argue, the ultimate Christmas movie.

There’s only one movie in the trio of choices that I have never ever watched. It’s before my time and doesn’t seem to be televised very much (bearing in mind I have only just bought Netflix, I’m not quite acclimatised to our modern streaming access-everything-easily lifestyle).

The movie I have never seen is Top Gun. So, obviously that’s the movie the audience on the night I am reviewing overwhelmingly chose. I watched a 30 minute parody of Top Gun, a movie I have never seen.

There’s two things I know about Top Gun: Tom Cruise is in it and it’s something about planes. It did occur to me that having seen the show, I could now retreat, sneakily watch the movie, do tons of research and subtly try to piece what I’ve just seen together to make sense, but I thought it would be much more fun and entertaining if I just wrote this review based on exactly what I just saw and my complete lack of context.

Here’s what I now know from watching the musical: they are all wearing aviation costumes, presumably in the air force. They all wear sunglasses and there were lots of aeroplane impressions. There’s some kind of love story where the main actor seems to get with all the characters. I’m gonna assume that the gold spangly hot pants, musical extravaganzas, gender-swapped characters and LGBTQ love affair wasn’t in the original movie, though.

Essentially I had no idea what was going on because I’d never seen the original film. Based on the audiences reaction, the laughter, whooping and cheering I would say it was hilarious and a really good show. The singing was also great musical fun.

There was one part about Grease, and in the words of Steve Rogers, ‘I understood that reference’. I was too distracted to enjoy it though because they had exited the stage at that point and were in the audience. They were leaning right on top of me and due to my disability and needing a certain amount of personal space I was too uncomfortable to properly pay attention to the only bit of the show that was about a movie I’d actually seen (Grease is one of my favourites).

I will add that what didn’t help my confusion with following the movie-I’d-never-seen musical was that I was watching it through a slit due to the confusing way the venue was seated, which meant I didn’t have visual on a lot of the show. I also couldn’t hear it because I am deaf and the performers weren’t wearing microphones, so I couldn’t make out the lyrics or the script at points. I could hear odd words rather than what was fully being said.

I want to be clear that this wasn’t the performers: their pronunciation and delivery was perfect, I am certain that the non-hearing-impaired individuals of the audience could hear them fine.

I did notify the staff I was deaf, needed to be able to see the actors faces and sit so I could hear, but was told that the venue had really good audio and they tried their best to seat me appropriately near the front and next to a speaker. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear or see what was going on and the bits I did catch were about a movie I have never seen.

I think it was a really good show due to the audiences reaction, laughter and general good feeling. So I’d recommend you go see and I would definitely like to go re-watch it so I can hopefully attempt to sit somewhere I can see it and hear it. The parts I did catch were fun, vibrant and brilliant so I’d definitely like to revisit.