Leaderboard

Enjoy some excerpts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yabmXuDN5Zg I was out of TWI by 1985, or I might have been in this. Definitely dodged a bullet there. A couple of random thoughts for this thread: the lead dancer/choreographer had already put together a version of AOS back in 1979-80 with a different male lead. Backstage after the performance, I recall Craig asking the choreographer if "we" invented the flexed foot! No one more surprised than I was to later learn that Craig became the lead. Perhaps he thought he was cementing his position as a ministry rockstar. about this same time, asking if I could join Way Prod. as a dancer, I was asked if I knew anything about clogging, because VPW wanted cloggers (**sigh**) AOL was a production of amateur dancers with a lot of money thrown at stage sets and lighting. I give the choreographer credit for trying to fulfill LCM's larger vision with the cast she had, but she just didn't have the cast that could work at that level. The choreographer carefully put the better dancers in front of each group of devil spirits to give them someone to follow, but the longer they danced, the weaker it all got. Ditto the music. Maybe Socks can weigh in, but it seems to me that most of the professional-level talent was gone or going by then. The musical score is pretty repetitive and simplistic, nothing for John Williams or Leonard Bernstein to worry about. But there was also the problem that Wierwille wasn't much for complex music that didn't feature "rightly-divided" lyrics front and center, so there may have been a lot of pressure on the composer to not go too far afield. (Side note -- does anyone have any evidence, other than VPW's say-so, that he actually played an instrument? When he would warble with the singers or walk around snapping his fingers off the beat, it sure didn't look like it.) back when I first saw the video production, I was struck by how much the demons were glorified, both in having the better dancers doing those parts and in the length of time they were onstage. Dancers simulating sex seemed unnecessary, but giving HQ's fixation on all things sexual it is not much of a surprise, I guess. It was a part of the doctrine, this fixation on the devil, that I didn't buy even when I was in. What happened to "greater is he that is in you...?"