now anybody who knows me knows I love the musicals. I have no problem with people breaking out into song because I do that in real life.

when this show first opened off broadway I was little wary of the hype because it seemed to based on the fact that the guy who wrote it died on opening night.

Also, I lived in the east village diruing the time this may have taken place and dealt with my own housing issues. When I first heard the score I was underwhelmed as it seemed like pretty pedestrian pop/r&b stuff but fine. whatever. so many people I know hated the movie to I avoided it for a while until recently I was flopping on my futon and rent came on one of the cable channels. I dug the art direction and the location shots. Some of the musical numbers were pretty nifty, some were cloying and treacly.

But the thing that really "got my goat" as it were was the "filmmaker" characer, Mark (Anthony Rapp) and his 16mm movie camera.

I'm not looking for total verisimiltude in my movie musicals, but come on.

So there's a scene where the "performance artist" character, Maureen (Idina Menzel), is doing an acappella poem/rant thing in an "art loft."  It's terrible, yes, and she's dressed like Britney Spears with a wireless headset mic AND a mic stand, but okay.

THE THING IS, Mark her filmmaker friend is jostling the crowd filming her READING with a SILENT 16mm film camera.

"'Scuze me, I'm just trying to film my friend's vocal performance with this silent film camera. Is there a darkroom around here where I can change the 400ft mag?"
Yeah, that makes sense.

"I got 11 minutes of silent footage of your reading you poem! It's really expensive to develop and you wont actually HEAR the poem, but I think you'll really love the grainy documentary quality of the footage of you speaking into a microphone on stage while also wearing a headet mic."

Then the cops raid the loft and break up the performance. Probably based on that huge NYPD crackdown on bad poetry. A small scale "riot" breaks out.

But that's not what made me scream out my window.

After the "riot" the principals head over the the local watering hole (a pretty cool set based on 7B), but since they're all artists, they're all flat broke. How are they going to pay the bar tab?

Not to worry, because the filmmaker announces he can actually pay the bar tab because - he sold the silent 16mm footage to the TV news.

"They bought my footage of the riot, and they're gonna show the whole thing."

Sure. The police breaking up an art loft party will not only lead the nightly news tonight but also in 4-6 weeks when the footage comes back from the lab in Pennsilvania.