That great big pop heart in the title sends you the message: We're gonna send Walmart a great big exploding funny valentine, 'cause it's the place we love to hate!
That fits very nicely with the demographic served by Capital T Theatre. Their Austin theatre public is generally young, generally irreverent, generally idealistic in a fuzzy Austin kind of way, and ready for a laugh. Those of us who haunt the Hyde Park Theatre probably spend more time in the bars and the music venues than at the stage, and we might prefer improv comedy or even, on an unplanned evening, late night television or the Alamo Drafthouse. Capital T's pre-show projections of mostly anti-Walmart skits from the Internet directly echoes the Alamo Drafthouse's pre-film warmups. The Capital T crowd is eager to laugh at the incongruities of this American life.
And laugh we did! Mark Sheibmeir gave us a bouncy, funny satire as an imaginary trainer for Walmart greeters, those losers at the front door, and Mason Stewart did a wonderful, grinning, assured turn in bombast as the marketing man with a new vision for the company: the holy of holies, literally, for us American consumers. Those two bits by Mark Pickell and Larry Hill respectively framed the first half and left us ready for more.
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