Hitlerhoff

This weekend we attended another Melbourne Fringe Festival event (see last week's entry). This time we went to a show called Hitlerhoff, which, just based on the name alone (and the picture), we figured must be entertaining. Hitler and David Hasslehoff both have checkered pasts and were both at one point beloved to the German people. I thought that a play that somehow combined the strengths and humor (I guess Hitler can be funny now, it's been long enough) of the two of them would be necessarily funny. On that note, I was wrong.

Hitlerhoff was stupid. Not only did it not clearly define who the character "Hitlerhoff" was supposed to be (Hitler with a bit of Hoff?, a Nazi-inclined Hasslehoff?, their love child?, someone else completely who had an equal affinity for fascism and lifeguarding?), but it took place in an undefined time in this century (ex: he fought in The Great War while a picture of a gun-toting Sarah Palin appeared in a photo montage) and it had a propensity toward being completely unintelligible. I figure at some point, though I consider myself a generally intelligent and open minded person, willing to accept someone's strange idea for a play, there are plays that are "works of art" that are understood and appreciated mostly by the community of artists that are prone to that sort of expression. Fine, I don't have to get everything. But I'm not actually sure there was anything to get with this play.

There was really no storyline to follow, no laughable jokes (though I could feel the breeze as a few of them undoubtedly flew over the audience's heads), and no climax or real ending to the story. I can say two good things about it: the actors weren't bad and it wasn't so terrible that I wanted to cut myself or anything. I just kind of wanted to take a nap. Actually, what I really wanted was to get what was going on, a desire that fueled my undivided attention to these ranting strangers for an hour on a Saturday night. But alas, I found nothing to get and we left empty handed with only our incessant complaining to comfort us. Which it did. Thank goodness we saw this with two other couples so that we could bitch about it for an hour afterward to help cancel out the time wasted.

The funniest part of the play was actually when some poor fool in the audience decided that he had to go to the bathroom or have a smoke or answer his phone or do something that required leaving the room. This play was in a relatively small room that seated about 50 people and the entrance/exit doors were toward the front of the room between the stage and the first row. In the very first lines of the play, Hitlerhoff says something comically noting how the doors will be locked for the duration of the show, assumingly as a joke. When this guy went to leave in the middle of the show, however, he couldn't get the 1950s-style double doors to open. He wrestled with the door for about 45 seconds much to the amusement of the crowd and most certainly stealing the show from the Hitlerhoff-grovelling-on-the-floor-in-a-red-speedo scene. That got the most laughs out of the whole show, and I certainly thought it was the best part.

So, that was the highlight of our weekend, which actually was a highlight since it provided grounds to bond with our friends and something for me to blog about. So maybe it wasn't so bad after all. ...But don't go see it anyway.