A Broadway-styled musical play has gone down to disastrous failure both critically and from audiences, despite having been funded by tax dollars to push global warming.
“The Great Immensity,” was just as advertised; immense. Not just an immense bomb, but according to one Congressman an immense waste of the $700,000 in tax dollars spent to float the production.
The play opened in New York and was then supposed to go on tour across the United States, but the production fell apart after one appearance in Kansas. Sold to the National Science Foundation for the huge grant as “an experience that would be part investigative journalism and part inventive theater,” the play opened a year late to scant audiences.
Interestingly, for a play about global warming, a topic many people are skeptical about, the plot was based on a conspiracy. The story revolved around a woman named Phyllis who went on a search to find a friend who disappeared while studying global warming on a tropical island. Phyllis also discovers a plot to destroy the international climate summit in Auckland, New Zealand.
It was all to be “a thrilling and timely production” featuring “a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: How can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?”
Reviews were not kind. For the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz said the show was “an uneasy mix of fact and credulity-stretching fiction.” He went on to note that the musical pieces felt “shoehorned in and not, pardon the pun, organic.”
Another review scoffed that the production was “all over the map” and concluded, “It’s not easy preaching green.”
Congress was also not amused by the show. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said that the musical was a waste of tax dollars.
“There is no doubt that the Great Immensity was a great mistake,” Smith said. “The NSF used taxpayer dollars to underwrite political advocacy dressed up as a musical. And the project clearly failed to achieve any of its objectives.”
The Congressman also pledged to find other such wasteful spending and eliminate it.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.