Review: Skeleton Crew, "The Real Good Guys" | Season 1, Episode 8
Did I do that?
“That’s the galaxy. It’s dark, with a few pinpricks of light.”
About twenty years ago, when PBS aired a multi-episode documentary about the history of Broadway musicals, I first heard an anecdote that I’ve never quite been able to shake. In the section of the documentary focusing on the immense impact that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has had on the stage musical, it inevitably features an extended section on the making of Cats, and how it so successfully transferred from London’s West End to the streets of New York. While the show did end up being a massive hit (even if it’s one of the most inexplicable shows ever mounted), there’s a brief discussion of how Webber had to find the right person to produce and direct the American version. The first man they went to was the prodigiously talented Harold Prince, who had a long partnership with Stephen Sondheim and would soon after direct the American staging of The Phantom of the Opera.
When Webber pitched Cats to Prince, he was pitching the same basic show that we all know and love (or just know and are baffled by), in which men and women would be made up to look like cats, sing and dance about being cats, and send off one of their fellow cats to the cat version of Heaven. Prince, who was being interviewed for the documentary, had the same bewildered look on his face decades later in describing this pitch meeting as he must have been originally. He said that he’d mused to Webber that something may be missing in translation in the story. Was the story of these cats meant to be a parallel to the royals? A commentary on the British class system? What was the hidden metaphor that Prince couldn’t pick up on? And then, Prince said, “Andrew paused and said, ‘Hal…it’s about cats.’”
It’s a long-winded way of saying, as Freud once did, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. With all this in mind, you may be able to figure out why this story was on the top of my mind as I watched the finale of Skeleton Crew. Was there some great mystery underlying this show, or was it truly just a throwback to both the original Star Wars trilogy and the 80s era of teenage-adventure stories evinced by Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment, and The Goonies? Yes, we can see that there was a shred or two of the mysterious, but the setup of At Attin was more enigmatic than its conclusion. The end was a lot simpler…if you’re like me and were expecting or perhaps hoping that there was more to this than met the eye.
