Thar She Blows! A Thread to Blindly Review Either of the Two (2) Theatrical Adaptations of Moby Dick that Forks Was In

Please be kind.

GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES

Theatrical appearance by one Forks

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN

The mechanical whale was a nice touch.

using the same upper platform for father coffin's pulpit and the pequod's actual crow's nest: well duh-- the real stroke of genius was using it for the floating coffin at the end, after the theater had been entirely flooded with seawater

(*mapple lol)

anyway people act like there's some kind of a line between "the cetology" and the rest of the book when obviously everything in it is a metaphor for everything else and the real reason the whale stuff has been making people mad for going on two centuries is not merely that it is "wrong" but it is wrong in a specific way that is deliberately hostile to the entire scientific project and essentially mocks it as blasphemy-- hardly a non sequitur or random digression in this story about a guy who screams at the sun for hiding what's behind it. but because the book is also a yankee hymn narrated by a schoolteacher/sailor that exults in machines and devices and processes and pragmatism (and whale butchery!) this hostility is maybe more weird or alienating than it would be in something more straightforwardly romantic? but this alienation is maybe also ishmael's? ishmael's the one who's read a lot of books, but here he is anyway.

telling you what he knows about whales.

sorry i'm a little muddy w my categories in that post but it's because the categories are muddy: the sailors' "pragmatism" is what's frequently cast against academic taxonomy-- all the "a whale is a fish because sailors say so" stuff-- but maybe these are two interlinked impulses or qualities of the same way of living (as instantiated in ishmael)

Did there have to be so many nude men covered in stage blood

Well, people complained about that during the first theatrical adaptation so they doubled down on it for the second one to stick it to them

that wasn’t blood

The ambergris budget for the first one really didn’t help our bottom line

After 3 hours of water sloshing sound effect, the line for the bathroom was insane.

Really wasn't sure about turning it into a jukebox musical, but the line "I just met you, and there's a white whale, here's my harpoon, so call me Ishmael" was pretty sweet.

literally has never occurred to me before that you can rhyme "Ishmael" and "white whale," mind blown.

really enjoyed Forks's love ballad for the whale

I thought they were kidding when they said the first couple of rows were the “splash zone”, but that’s not why I walked out early. The blowhole scene had me aghast.

I walked out because the entire mezzanine caught on fire. weirdly mostly everybody up there stayed anyway, because Forks's performance was just *that good*

Yeah he really sold that line that went “Run! Fire! Run!!”. So authentic.