'Jihad: The Musical' — Terrorism as Musical Comedy
Years ago, my brother and my sister and I wrote, produced and performed a satirical look at our hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The great thing about satire is that there are no sacred cows. We tried to offend everyone we could think of, in a funny way, of course.
But even I might think twice before creating a musical about terrorism. Not the producers of Jihad: The Musical, though. The satirical musical comedy is playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is billed as a "madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism." It's already drawn protests, of course, from people who don't get the joke.
Which is great for the show because, as Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
And uneven reviews, I'm afraid. Some folks loved it; others thought it was stupid.
It seems most reviewers actually wanted the show to be a little more offensive than it is. Alan Chadwick of the Evening Standard described it this way: [The protests were] reminiscent of the furore surrounding Monty Python's Life Of Brian, which the show resembles in style and tone if not quality. But Zoe Samuel and Benjamin Scheuer's knockabout musical comedy — in which a naive Afghan flower-seller finds himself co-opted into becoming a suicide bomber — no more causes offense or offers a Jihadi blueprint than The Producers advocated Nazism, or The Sound Of Music nunneries."
In his piece for All Things Considered, Rob Gifford says the real target of the show seems to be terrorists and the rightwing media in America who — a song in the play claims — can't live without one another.
Well, you can judge for yourself. The link to Rob's piece includes a couple of the toe-tapping numbers (including a tune sung by a Frenchman called "Turned and Ran," a joke that, I confess, is getting a little old). And here's a YouTube video of the big number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama." Pretty catchy, actually.
But you're not going to want to be singing it to yourself as you walk around, OK?
4:59 PM ET | 08-24-2007 | permalink
