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SHOCKER! Climate Alarmist Musical Finally Runs Out of Taxpayer Money, Quickly Closes
The asinine ambitions of our know-it-all federal bureaucrats know no bounds. Really. No. Bounds.
A collection of bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation (NSF) used $700,000 of taxpayer money this spring to play out their Broadway fantasies by funding what they surely thought was a sure-fire hit play.
It would combine the prose of Al Gore with music that would elevate it above his usual drone that makes audiences want to stab their ears with pencils. And there would be dancing! Combine all that with actors who can make anything come alive, and audiences around the country will not only be entertained, but informed! We will change the world!
That’s the best pitch I can give this stinker — and probably close to the actual pitch the producers gave to the NSF. The actual result was a musical titled “The Great Immensity.” Shocker: It was an enormous flop. Via reporter Jessica Chasmar at one of my former employers, the Washington Times:
A taxpayer-funded musical on climate change is closing its curtains early amid a storm of criticism from reviewers and lawmakers.
“The Great Immensity,” produced by Brooklyn-based theater company The Civilians Inc. with a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), has ended its run after reaching just 5 percent of its anticipated audience, Fox News reported.
The play also opened a year late and failed to produce a buzz once it did.
“Despite fine performances, the musical mystery tour is an uneasy mix of fact and credulity-stretching fiction. It’s neither flora nor fauna,” New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz wrote in a review at the time, Fox News reported. “[The] songs — whether about a doomed passenger pigeon or storm-wrecked towns — feel shoehorned in and not, pardon the pun, organic.”
The play’s description describes the itself as “a thrilling and timely production” with “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?”
“Even the best adventurers can wander off course, and the Civilians do so on a global scale in ‘The Great Immensity,’ ” read a review from Time Out New York. “The inventive troupe’s latest effort is all over the map. … It’s not easy preaching green.”
The play opened late. The play reached only five percent of its expected audience. It was terrible — so terrible even theater critics eager to give a hipster-Brooklyn production sending the “correct message” about the need to act on climate change couldn’t give it positive reviews. Good enough for government work, right? Read on.
The play ran for three weeks in New York in April before going on a national tour. It stalled out after a single production in Kansas City, Fox News reported.
Golly. What a surprise. When your big New York production hits the road, and then grinds to a halt after a single performance in Kansas City… well, even people like me with a very low threshold for “good enough for government work” are disappointed. But if you think the bureaucrats at the NSF are disappointed in their investment of your money in this stinker, think again.
The NSF said it is too soon to tell if the grant funds were wasted.
“This particular project just concluded in August, and the final report has not yet been submitted to NSF,” it said in a statement, Fox News reported. “Final reports are due to NSF within 90 days following expiration of the grant. The final report will contain information about project outcomes, impacts and other data.”
This is the state of the modern administrative state. An obvious failure cannot be called a failure. Give us a few more weeks and we’ll produce the documents to prove an obvious failure needs to be funded at triple the previous level to ensure even greater success!
Fire 75 percent of the federal bureaucracy. Today. Figure out who needs to be re-hired next week.
Published in General
Oh my goodness.
‘Fire 75 percent of the federal bureaucracy. Today. Figure out who needs to be re-hired next week’
That’s the ticket, where did we ever come up with this ridiculous commandment that Federal bureaucrats can’t be fired? Civil Service reform was enacted to prevent re-filling jobs with your own supporters , we’re saying don’t re-fill them at all, eliminate the positions. IIRC Not long ago we still had tea tasters in the government.
I wish I had $700,000.
They should have worked the bugs out at the cowboy poetry festival in Nevada.
And let that “next week” be in “soon enough for government time” which in the real world would translate into slightly after the heat death of the universe.
The guy in the picture seems to be enjoying himself though, smiling at the thought of snookering the taxpayers out of whatever he got paid no doubt.
guess it got hit by a cold front
This is poetic social justice.
They finally made Planet Of The Apes: The Musical?!?!
Let’s give these people their due. That is, when they do the following:
They did successfully drain taxpayer dollars into the hands of reliable democrat voters.
Wasn’t that the goal?
DR. ZAIUS DR. ZAUIS DR ZAUIS!
They finally made a monkey out of me.
Maybe it was written by the people that made the IRS Star Trek video.
“I hate every monkey that I see from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z”…
Hi my name is Troy McClure and you might remember me from such government musicals as “Recovery Summer, the Pivot to Jobs” and ” Louise Burn Your Hard Drive!”
I sense the behind the scenes at the NSF would make a great movie. If only we could cast Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder to play the idiots behind it….Springtime for AlGore anyone?
I thoughts liberals were opposed to money for bombs.
Instead of the curtains closing under a storm of criticism, closing under a storm of overripe produce would have been more appropriate.
No doubt this was intended as an “educational” endeavor.
Pity the obvious lesson seems not to have been learned.
There’s an argument here regarding “starve the beast”. Amazing how cutting off funding will make gov’t-sponsored insanities shrivel up and blow away.
So our bettors in gov’t decide that giving up $700K to fund a musical is a great use of taxpayer dollars. In Barry’s America, this obviously constitutes an infrastructure buildout, and we should all be thankful to the USG for building that for us.
Grants: Get ’em while they’re hot! http://www.nsf.gov/funding/
The play producers still have the last laugh. They got $700,000 of our money . . .
Chris Campion, thanks for the link at #19. I clicked on “A – Z Index of Funding Opportunities.” There is a vast array of ways the NSF doles out grant money. Hundreds and hundreds of entries. From a few minutes of browsing, it looks like over half of them could plausibly be useful to America. There is lots of overlap, but I don’t mind that because every field of study should have several independent places for serious research.
But the total is staggering. This is the outfit that funded the majority of the old “Golden Fleece Award” winners.
That is a great idea. I would only modify this approach and say fire 95% of the EPA, Dept of Education and Dept of Energy.
Its only time until we see the National Endowment for the Arts funding Windmill Farms or Solar Powered Hydroponic Night-time farming.
I’d love for Nancy Pelosi to sponsor some night-soil farming. I imagine she produces bumper crops daily.
This is simply, blatantly, illegal. The federal employees responsible for this grant should be jailed.
The First Amendment guarantees a free press. There’s nuance to that: everybody thinks of censorship–but the Framers were concerned by censorship in the negative (“you cannot print that”) AND censorship in the affirmative (“if you print our story, we’ll pay you”).
The reason we do not have a state-funded broadcasting company (and maintain the litany of fictions that allows NPR to exist as a collective of “charitable foundations”) is precisely because a government-operated press is censorship in the affirmative.
Paying a producer to put on a show advocating a political position (1) ain’t doing science, and (2) ain’t permissible under the Constitution. The first flaw should get the NSF poor reviews; perpetrating the second should send somebody to jail.
Better idea: Abolish Education Department, DOE, and the EPA. In fact, there’s a great plan to devolve the EPA to the states … which already have their own competent environmental protection agencies closer to the real problems.
http://heartland.org/policy-documents/replacing-environmental-protection-agency
I’d laugh but then it was my money they were using all along. Perhaps the laugh is on me.