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| Clarence Needley as the eponymous Secular Jesus |
The Funtime Players are a small theater Troupe out of Long Island.
Their previous original production "My Father: My Hero" was a bloated saccharine canker about the war in Iraq that inadvertently had me siding with Bin Laden by the end.
So it was with a considerable amount of trepidation that I went to see The Funtime Players latest original piece, a musical entitled "The Ballad of Secular Jesus".
To say that "The Ballad of Secular Jesus" is bad would be incorrect or at the very least, insufficient from a linguistic standpoint. Doing so would be like calling the planet Jupiter "large" or the great, frigid vacuum of infinite space "cold".
In fact, "The Ballad of Secular Jesus" is, without a doubt, the single worst piece of art I have ever seen.
Keep in mind that I have been reviewing art performances and gallery openings for over 20 years. I have written literally hundreds of reviews for every form of art imaginable.
I have watched a man eat a jar of caviar while reading Lenin's "April Thesis" only to shit into his own palm nine hours later in order to symbolize how the Bourgeousie and the proletariate unite within the body of the middle class.
I have watched a twenty hour video of a man watching a 20 hour video of himself watching a 20 hour video of himself.
I had thought these incidents to be new lows for the art world but after watching "The Ballad of Secular Jesus" I can see how wrong I was:
"The Ballad of Secular Jesus" is literally worse than watching a man shit into his own hand.
This observation alone should be review enough for many, but for those who are somehow still unconvinced, by all means read on.
As the title implies, "The Ballad of Secular Jesus" is essentially the story of Jesus Christ told in modern times but without any of the religious trappings.
What we are left with is the incredibly bland and morally vapid tale of a 33 year old bearded carpenter who is essentially just a nice guy but: "not the greatest carpenter!" as J.C. himself exclaims every five minutes or so in an on-going song and dance number entitled "Hammer and Nails, it never fails!"
Through the production's alarmingly self-indulgent 242 minute run time we follow Jesus from childhood to adulthood.
A single actor plays the parts of both child Jesus and adult Jesus and the actor, a Mr. Clarence Needley would be well advised to not only not quit his day job, but to never act in anything ever again.
There's a Mary character (played with ear-ringing shrillness by Mandy Draper), a Judas character (Kevin Saint) and an ethereal father character who may or may not be the head of the carpenter's union and is played with all the bravado of a handful of gypsum by Roger Dodds.
There's a whole lot of other useless crap that basically exists only as an excuse to knock-up the already swollen run time with as many song and dance numbers as possible.
By the end of the show the audience was understandably exhausted and visibly angry.
I personally felt violated, poisoned from somewhere deep within my soul in a way I haven't since watching my father die slowly from cancer.
In both cases I was forced to witness something awful that I was powerless to stop. In both cases I raised my eyes to God to beg for mercy and received nothing but silence.
And perhaps this is the point of "The Ballad of Secular Jesus": if there is no god, it follows that there is no soul and if there is no soul then all the horrors in all the world are illusions made by man for the sake of tormenting himself during his brief tenure on earth.
If that's the case then the Funtime Players have certainly succeeded in their mission.
I humbly suggest therefore that we take advantage of what little moral authority we do have by arresting those responsible for this horror and hanging them by their necks until dead.
The Ballad of Secular Jesus is playing at the New Town Theater located at 344 Skillman Ave.
Brooklyn
Tickets are $15 at the door, $10 in advance.
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