Review: Center-Cut Ham Dinner Night Slide Show. Conceived, written, directed and performed by Dr David Mitsuo Nixon. Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Annex Theatre now through November 17.
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| Dr Nixon heals thyself… |
David Nixon is awesome and he’s also OF “Awesome” the musical/art collective that makes interesting music and theater performance pieces like last spring’s “West” at On the Boards. He’s working solo in his new show, “Center-Cut Ham Dinner Night Slide Show” currently on view Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Annex Theatre now through November 17, but that’s no hardship for him. Nixon is an actor, writer, singer, musician, composer, artist, cartoonist, dancer, filmmaker…I’m forgetting something….oh yeah: he’s also a philosophy professor at the University of Washington-Bothell, (yes, he really is a doctor).
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| The Face of Shiva holds many secrets… |
So, what’s a funny, smart, talented, philosophy professor do in his spare time? He puts on a show! But funny, smart, talented philosophy professors can’t just put on any old show…it should touch on cosmic themes…like, The Meaning of Life! (Hey! It worked for Monty Python!) And, like the Pythons, Dr Nixon has created a clever, entertaining, charming show that touches on some big themes, but it doesn’t hit you over the head with them. It’s a show with brains but it’s also a show with heart and emotion. Also…it’s funny. David Nixon is a gifted clown with a knack for physical comedy; he opens the show as a cat writhing across the stage and more than once he collapses to the stage in most John Cleese-ian manner. There’s also quite a lot of animated film, a la Terry Gilliam but sadly, there are no “Pepperpot” Ladies in drag, exploding penguins on the telly, or Pantomime Princess Margaret’s…perhaps he is saving those for the sequel, “David Nixon and the Quest for a Decent Chinese Restaurant in Seattle?” (actually, that is my quest…)
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| “Magma Power” is apparently one of the keys to the Meaning of Life… |
Please don’t get me wrong…I am not saying this show is derivative or imitative of Python but it has Pythonesque moments and it’s not surprising. (The Python guys were brainy dudes from Cambridge and Oxford, remember?) It’s a loosely structured show consisting of observations, stories, animations and films. Like most solo shows, it doesn’t all work and it could use a bit more structure and coherence, but it was a fascinating and charming performance piece. I enjoyed the filmed bits very much, though a couple were a little long, (especially a trippy one towards the end) but the highlights were the stories Nixon told: his experiences working as a phone psychic and talking to lonely people on the phone and being uncomfortable they were spending vast sums of money to ease their pain. Or revealing his fear of fatherhood by comparing the raising of children to the making of art. Or talking about his father and reading some of his father’s work as a writer. They were personal and intimate stories, albeit frequently very funny, and while they might not have revealed to me the overall Meaning of Life, they did relate that life is all about the small moments, good and bad/happy and sad, that make up our existence. What more is there to know about the Meaning of Life than that?
Oh. Yeah. One last thing.
Always look on the bright side of life…aka, MAGMA POWER!
– Michael Strangeways
