Technically, the film sucks lemons through multiple garden hoses, sometimes simultaneously. Truly crappy cinematography, audio levels which jumped all over the place, I finally gave up and turned on subtitles. The black and white clips they showed at the start are disgustingly gratuitously artsy fartsy - all the TV news was in color 10 years before, this was not the 50's. The clips were poorly edited and should never have left the junior high art film project they came from.
The ending was also a study in how not to build suspense, how not to tell a story. The slo-mo at the finale was just stupid. And I never liked Tosca anyway.
The basic story is compelling, Penn carries the show well enough to make it worth seeing. The crowd scenes were impressive. I wonder if
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rackstraw ever found himself among those thousands of other extras. There is a lot of history in there which I either had not known or had completely forgotten. At the height of his fame I was overseas, I didn't hear the story till I moved to CA a few years later, Dianne was Mayor.
- Mood:
sleepy - Music:Danny Elfman Overture
I liked everything about this film except the music. It did not help that the theater had the audio cranked way too high (starting with the trailers), but that only made a horrible score worse. Especially toward the end when the composer goes all celestial choir on your ass. Oppressive, tuneless crap. Thank goodness much of the movie is set on the bridge of the Enterprise, where they don't play music.
They did something which totally broke from the original that I actually liked - everyone on the bridge is a child genius. And one thing I did not like - officers kissing in public. Totally wrong. But also totally hot.
Leonard Nimoy is wonderful, and I noticed the cinematography on his scenes, especially the close-ups, was better than the rest of the movie. It would have been fun to also have Shatner, and would have worked just fine within the plot line of the film.
The movie is about 2 hours long, I did not look at my watch once - riveting in places, held my interest throughout.
I found this musical through a series of random events, ( Read more... ) My TV is my alarm clock, and this one morning it's tuned to The Today Show and there is a bed in the middle of the street in NYC, and on the bed are Kristen and someone green. The smarmy male announcer introduces the green woman as Idina Menzel, and the number is Popular from Wicked. It's all Kristen, this number, green woman is just a prop. The number is quirky and cute and hilarious and not nearly as easy to sing as Kristen makes it look.
( embedded popular under here )
So I broke out the CD and gave it a real listen. Maybe 20 times. Steven Schwartz's music and lyrics are mostly good, often brilliant. Kristen and Idina are both amazing. Joel Grey (the original MC from Cabaret) is less bumbling than I'd expect the Wizard to be, but blame the script.
Which is where I'm torn.( Read more... )
Some of the lyrics I like:
( Read more... )
Another way I'm torn is Wicked is in SF right now, playing at the Orpheum, and I would love to see it. I know I won't be seeing Kristen and Idina, but there's a lot of talent out there, I may not be disappointed. However... orchestra seats are $225. The cheapest non-obstructed-view seat comes to more than $100 with the obscene $11 ticketmaster service charge. Those numbers are beyond "support the arts" and well into "become a patron", IMHO. I'll be getting a bonus at work next Friday, basically an extra half-month's pay. I've already blown some of it on a Nikon lens, maybe a trip to the theater will be in the cards after all.
- Mood:
contemplative
The Lohman is the high-class replacement for the old black box theater, which was a not-converted-much meeting space up at the top of the very steep stairs. When I was in Jay's production of Bells Are Ringing mublety-mumble years ago, I dreaded that climb. But wiser and more hypertensive minds put the new theater at the bottom of the hill, spitting distance from the parking lot. Yay!
So I was in a good mood and really jazzed to see this show. It was...uh..er...different.
Some background: Half a dozen years ago, The Weekly World News ran a big series of articles about a boy who had been found in a cave in West Virginia, living with the bats. They applied more than their usual journalistic skilz to this endeavor, causing a sensation among their millions of supermarket line readers and all six subscribers. So of course the first thing which raced through the minds of Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming was "let's write a musical!" Aided and abetted by the musical prowess of Laurence O'Keefe, they did just that. The result was Bat Boy.
The inside of the Lohman Theater is cave-like. By hanging some fabric stelagtites/mites and building a very simple set of columns dressed up to be cave-like, with some bats hanging from the light poles, we have a passable cave. All expenses were spared in this production, but these are desperate times for theaters, so I'm not complaining. Set construction was done by a class at Foothill. Costumes also were home grown, and also mostly credited to a theater class. The show doesn't need much in the way of costumes, but the forest menagerie scene had me sitting there with my mouth hanging open, marveling at the grade school Halloween quality of the costumes.
Moving on...
The cast was miked. This is a theater small enough that the cast can spit on the back row, microphones were not called for, and most of them were over-modulated and way too treble-equalized. The only good thing about the audio is there was no feedback.
The programs are a hoot - done on tabloid format newsprint, with the cast bios crammed into one unreadable paragraph.
So much for the technical.
The basic plot of Bat Boy is pretty straightforward. Starving boy found in cave by trailer trash, brought to the backwoods sheriff, who takes it to the veterinarian. Vet's wife and daughter tutor the boy and bring him to the tent revival to be healed. Or something like that. Backwards townspeople blame the freak for the cattle plague and Frankenstein logic ensues.
The music is not memorable, but Spencer Williams did a great job of maximizing the harmonizing skills of the ensemble. Anything with more than two parts is rock solid and on key. The script is not particularly clever or memorable either, but everyone seemed to have their lines down, and the over-choreographed numbers were executed well.
The play attempts to mock Christian Charity, trailer trash, coal miners, mob rule, and all the things which the Weekly World News thrives on. It was a great idea, but the results are uneven.
Casting had several WTFs. The vet's wife, who sings a lot, made a habit of wandering around the scale in search of the right key. In fact, the only soloists who could sing are Tim Reynolds, who is amazing as the evil vet, and RaMond Thomas who belts out pseudo-gospel as Rev. Hightower. Thomas also flips flawlessly between that role, the part of a rancher, and the irate mother of Bat Boy's first victim. Michael Rhone got about 95% of the way through his Pan song before running out of steam.
Several people play multiple roles, wig and simple costume changes cover most of that, but a lot of the caricatures were like high school rip-offs of bad SNL. The laughs were mostly of the laugh-at and not the laugh-with variety.
Another vocal feast was provided by the "shadow chorus", Kevin Hull, Walter M. Mayes, Brian Palac, Karyn Rondeau and Molly Thornton. Why they were in the chorus and not in the leading roles is a mystery to me.
I almost forgot Robert Brewer, in the title role. He was okay. He can sing well enough, and he hangs upside-down by his knees like a champ. But I have to say that his emaciated days are behind him, and when they put him into that cage in the orange jump suit, he did not even come close to looking like the description in the script of a starving under-aged boy. Orange is not one of the "thinning" colors. And make-up clue: if you want to look like you've been living in a filthy bat cave all your life, you might want to look dirty.
Bat Boy is a total romp for the cast. Go see it - as long as you are not expecting a classy, Broadway-quality show, you'll be entertained.
Performance Dates and Times:
February 27-March 22, 2009
Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm
Sunday matinees at 2pm
Saturday matinees, March 14, 21 at 2pm
Tickets:
$26 General Admission.
$24 Seniors (65 and over).
$18 Students.
Not appropriate for children under 12 years of age.
- Mood:
cynical
Since I only watched the last half hour or so, this won't be long. All I saw was the last 5 minutes of the obits (I missed Heath but was very moved by the response to Paul Newman, which I think was richly deserved) best actress, best director, best actor, best picture.
I'll have to see The Reader - Kate has never impressed me as an actress, but sometimes experience works wonders. Slumdog Millionaire could not have been as good as the obviously emotionally skewed in favor of the underdog votes went, but I'll put that on my list just in case it really is a hidden gem. Haven't seen Milk yet, either, but Sean Penn has been robbed several times in the past, and I have no doubt his performance was deserving, and the spontaneous standing O and applause tells me most of Hollywood agrees.
So much for the personalities. The presentation made me want to puke. The time they spent serenading the nominees would have been better spent showing us clips from the movies which got them nominated in the first place. The best picture montage was a travesty, and I think it robbed the nominees and the previous winners both with such a poorly edited and inconsistent presentation. All I have to say is the person who produced that piece of crap needs to go back to the clinic and have the rest of the lobotomy performed.
Hugh Jackman is a stunning actor, he sings, he dances, he's very very pretty and has a lot of class. On the one hand, we saw almost none of him in the last half hour, thanks to the cavalcade of old thespians and bad montages. On the other hand, what we did see was not very entertaining. Blame the writers, I guess.
I forgot to Tivo it, but I'm sure there will be enough on NBC.com and Youtube to catch me up.
- Mood:critical
- Music:The Theme from Slumdog
Written by Caroline Smith, the play gets off to a slow start, with far too much time spent establishing the relatively shallow characters of Ukrakian chef "Babchka" (Dee Baily), her son Steve (Steven Lewis) who produces and announces the show, and the ever-silent Peg the camera gal (Peggy Lynch). The boredom lifts with the entrance of rival chef Isobel "Izzy" Lomax (Carolyn Compton). This was supposed to have been Babchka's final episode, Izzy's show had already been canceled as well, but when the station manager's wife sees the Jerry Springer-like spat between the two, she has her husband offer the dueling chefs a show together, with Steve as producer.
Kitchen Witches includes lots of clever zingers, and some world class bickering between the two chefs. Casting of the women's parts is excellent with very contrasting personalities between the chefs, and Camera Gal is just plain weird in all the right ways. Lewis, however, strikes me as too old for his role, and gives the impression of far more competence than I think the playwright had in mind for the momma's boy caught in the middle of a war between two domineering matrons.
Matt Matthews has done his usual excellent directing job, the players have their lines down pat, the action moves along as quickly as the sometimes uneven script allows, and the staging is so well blocked that the 2-minute-drill cooking competition chaos scene didn't looked planned at all, though it has to have been minutely choreographed. And Matt made good use of his secret weapon - his wife Audrey created dozens of food props which looked good enough to eat. There was also a lot of real food on the set, a stage manager's nightmare which Michael Antonucci handled beautifully.
Jim Narveson's set is cleverly designed to split in half, and includes a working stand-alone sink, which is pretty impressive for such a tiny theater. There were a few bits which counted on costumes to make the difference, and Marian Narveson came through every time with everything from capes to hats to a mammy outfit.
Kitchen Witches finishes its run tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm, Santa Clara Players, tickets can be reserved online here.
- Mood:Bewitched
John Patrick Shanley wrote the screenplay, which was based on his stage play, and also directed this film. His only other directing credit is Joe Versus The Volcano, and it shows. There are some excellent, innovative scene setups, and the set dressing is meticulously accurate. There are also some attempts at artsy-fartsy shot setups which are major FAIL. Some of the dialog is gripping, while some is BS stuck into the film in an awkward attempt to adjust how we feel about a character. One strong point in the directing is the sermons. The writing and the way they were shot is riveting.
Hoffman plays a parish priest. Streep plays the principal of the parish school. Adams is a too-young, too-innocent nun teaching US History. The principal is convinced that the priest has taken an unhealthy interest in one of the altar boys, the school's one black student. She has no proof, not even any real circumstantial evidence. Hence the title of the film.
80-year-old Alice Drummond deserves some kind of award for magnificent acting in the role of nearly blind Sister Veronica, but the part is probably too small for a supporting actress nod.
None of the child actors are anything to write home about, and the other sisters are non-entities as far as the writer is concerned.
This is definitely one of Streep's best performances, very much against type, and they hid her trademark nose very well behind glasses and a bonnet. All the sisters wore a bonnet instead of a wimple, and I wonder if that was for historical accuracy, or the costumer was on drugs. Any costumers out there care to educate me?
I did not like the ending. I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say it ends with about 3 minutes too many of Streep which, in my eyes, destroyed her character (and the word "sabotage" comes to mind again).
It's a powerful film, despite its flaws, and well worth seeing if only for the mixed messages it gives.
- Location:home
- Mood:doubtful
- Music:Tragic Kingdom - No Doubt
It is well-written, though towards the end things bog down a bit as the author prepares us to buy the sequel, which I will not be doing. Many of the characters are well-drawn, many are woefully superficial. As with many fantasy novelists, Rothfuss takes liberties with the powers of the various supporting charaters, adding to them when the whim strikes. Some of the magic described can only be understood if one is the author.
There are several females who have a place in the young male protagonist's heart, and it's unclear whom he prefers. Save it for the sequel, I guess.
The book starts out asd a page-turner, but by the end I was counting pages to the end. And coming to the end and finding the story still had a long way to go, I was not amused.
Worth used bookstore price if you're not a fantasy fan, worth full price and sequels if you are.
Dr. Robin Cook's Mindbend is out of print for a reason. Not a well-crafted book, the characters and situations seem contrived, and we find out from the epilogue that he wrote it to push a political cause promoting regulation of medical practices which the book doesn't really focus on. The plot pits a medical student against a big nasty drug company which is inviting OB/GYN doctors on cruises where they are drugged and subjected to behavior modification and on their return home, quit private practice and join a clinic which specializes in performing unneeded abortions to harvest fetuses for research.
Gag me with a speculum.
The writing style is stilted and not Cook's usual free-flowing form, but I read it to the end the way one keeps staring at a wrapped wound in hopes to see what's under the bandages.
Not worth plucking off the free coffee shop book exchange rack. My copy has been composted.
Not quite, but almost a page-turner, whenever I put it down I looked forward to the next chapter. While it's not a Great Work, it's well written, and except for the fate of the husband, it wraps up loose ends in a way I was happy with. Worth used bookstore price.
- Mood:catching up
Saw Wall-E, which was okay, sort of. Maybe. I caught myself nodding off several times. I caught myself saying WTF even more times. The movie opens with the biggest WTF in Disney animated movie history. Okay, I'm a musical theater geek, so maybe to me this is a bigger WTF for me than it would be for you, but I suspect not. It opens with the audio from one of the opening numbers from Hello Dolly. And we're not talking about the title song or any of the songs which have become standards. We're talking about Put On Your Sunday Clothes,starting with its utterly forgettable 3-minute tuneless intro. In the movie it's a 5-minute Gene Kelly over-choreographed dance number, which is shown several times in the movie as Wall-E is obsessed with this number, which is on a videotape he found in the scrap heap and has saved. Also repeated ad nauseum is a 30-second clip from the much more recognizable It Only Takes a Moment, which serves as the romantic hook for the movie.
I happen to love Hello Dolly, except for the parts Barbara Streisand is in, but Wall-E is such a mismatch it went a long way to ruining it for me.
Another WTF is the characters. Much of the action takes place on an ark spaceship which the inhabitants of Earth boarded 700 years ago to escape the pollution and garbage for what was supposed to be a 5-year cleanup (of which Wall-E is the sole remaining operational bot). They have all chosen to live their entire lives in hover-lounge chairs plugged into the internet and they are all now so obese they can't even stand. As much as I love to park my fat butt in my comfy recliner, I can't see an ark ship where everyone chooses to be fat and lazy. In any population there will be some insane Morning People who jog everywhere, spend too many hours in the gym and the pool, and have no use for the Internet except to download aerobics videos and nutrition plans. I think the movie would have been a lot less boring if there was some diversity in the population on board.
They tried real hard to build a love story between 700-year-old Wall-E, who looks like a trash compactor on tank treads with a pair of binoculars slapped on top, and brand spanking new Eva* who looks like a hermetically sealed white ceramic martini shaker. It didn't work for me. Part of it was the lame lame lame Hello Dolly obsession, part of it was just poor writing.
*In the movie, the character played by Fred Willard spells out the acronym as EVA, which is what Wall-E calls her, but she calls herself Eve, and so do all the other characters. Another WTF.
There were two highlights for me. The first is the performance by he voice of the captain. Jeff Garlin was superb. He also played the only character to whom the writers had given any...er...character. The second highlight was the closing credits. No easter egg, but like Kung-Fu Panda they were artistic and entertaining, and the music was highly danceable (there were about a dozen kids dancing to it beneath the screen, sometimes jumping up to try to touch the screen. Made me smile.).
I went on a Sunday afternoon hoping the kids in the audience would liven things up, but they were put to sleep almost as much as I was. Not worth matinée price, and probably a huge snoozer on DVD.
- Mood:
blah
It's a good read, entertaining, and except for the ending it stands on its own nicely. The focus is handed off back and forth between Jane, the love interest from the first book and a new character, Jared, the clone of a mad scientist who has been grown to be a Special Forces soldier. Jane is Jared's squad leader, but because he's been cloned for a nefarious purpose by the top brass, he also does time as a guinea pig.
I have an observation which others may look at as criticism, but I'm fairly neutral about because I tend to do the same things when I write fiction. Scalzi is very light on physical descriptions of his characters. He has painted himself into something of a corner by making his Good Guys look a lot alike (green skin, cat-like eyes) but hey, these folks are all gen-gineered clones from real people, they ought to have some identifiable differences other than personality. The several non-human races also get shortchanged this way - I have no clear image of what any of them look like.
He is also very light on physical descriptions of the settings. He only mentions items in a room if they are being used by the characters, and he only mentions features of a place in the most general terms. If you're a fan of those books which have maps in them, you will find the tales of the Colonial Defense Forces to be lacking in this regard. Artists would have a difficult time illustrating these books. In fact, the covers for both books are pretty generic.
Both books are all about the minds of the characters, which brings me to a non-neutral criticism. The Jane of Ghost is not the Jane of Old Man's. They have different personalities, and more important to me, she never thinks about or communicates with the protagonist of the first book until the final pages, when the last chapter of the first book suddenly becomes the focus for the ending of the second.
Scalzi has created an interesting universe, and sets up the framework for an infinite number of spin-off books. I'll be reading the next one, The Last Colony.
- Location:home
- Mood: apathetic
Thai BBQ chicken is cuisine of the Northeast, and it is done like this:
Take a whole chicken
Baste it with honey pepper sauce
Cook it over coals on a spit
Keep basting it
When it's done and a little more brown than golden, take it off the spit, and use a cleaver to chop it up, skin, bones and all, into bits about 1" wide.
Serve with honey pepper sauce.
Traditionally it is served with sticky rice, but long grain Thai white rice is okay too.
Pacific Thai also ruined dessert. I have never before had mango with sticky rice where the mango had been previously frozen. Yuck. And the sticky rice was purple with sesame seeds and some other crunchy seeds or beans mixed in. That's a different dessert, it doesn't belong with mango. Mango requires white sticky rice soaked with sweetened condensed milk and maybe coconut milk.
I am reminded of something I wrote 20 years ago when I led ba.singles jaunts to the Thai restaurants in the south bay. There is a lot of excellent food in the local Thai restaurants, but there is not a lot of authentic Thai food.
Both places committed cutlery crime. Thaiphoon sets their tables with chopsticks. Thais do not use chopsticks except to eat Chinese food. Chopsticks are for barbarians who don't know how to use a fork and spoon. Pacific Thai sets their tables with a fork and knife. Knives are weapons, and putting one at someone's place at the table is tantamount to a death threat. There should have been a spoon, but there wasn't. Pacific Thai added to the non-authentic atmosphere by playing a CD of pan pipe music from the Andes.
My waiter at Thaiphoon did not speak Thai. He was Chinese. My waitress at Pacific Thai was Thai, from Surin, and spoke not only Thai but also the command language they use with the elephants (Surin for the past 100 years or so has hosted the annual elephant round-up), however it took her a minute to realize I was speaking Thai because, she said, they did everything in English there, including placing orders with the kitchen. Out of the wait staff of five, only two were Thai. It is possible that the Caucasian woman and the African-American man spoke Thai, I just didn't ask. Should have, just to be fair. After all, looking at me, who would guess I speak it?
- Mood:
discontent
The first five minutes reminded me of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by making us guess who the characters are, but eventually Dvornichek clears that all up with a monologue which sounds like it is pages and pages long, and clearly and concisely explains everything which has happened, who everyone onstage (and off) is, and a few things which are likely to happen.
The show is fast-paced, lots of laughs, some very funny running gags, and even some alleged singing. From the director's notes, this was originally a musical, but was trimmed down to be a comedy with a little bit of music. Lisa Battista didn't have much to work with as musical director, but her piano playing from backstage was excellent.
Technical stuff: The set by Ron Gasparinetti is very clever, converting from two stateroom balconies to the inside of a stateroom via three minutes of cast-being-crew magic. Parts of the set are excellent, parts not so much. There are a lot of food props, and I thought the challah in Act II was out of character for the show, though pretty funny for a Friday night performance. Dragon head honcho Meredith Hagedorn did the props. Lighting was good, except for the little bit at the end which wasn't as much of a spotlight effect as I suspect the director was going for.
Acting stuff: Cortopassi played a very even tempered character with your standard American accent, and could not have been better at it. However, I would bet real cash dollars that the script calls for an Eastern European accent and corresponding bouts of shouting. Arias chose to play his part with a French accent. This made no sense for a character called Adam Adam, and the accent was very difficult to understand, which went a long way toward killing the role for me. He showed great talent with physical comedy, and due to his condition, we don't have to suffer through as much of the accent as we might have. Wood's Ivor was way over the top, and he changed accents a few times during the performance. He didn't seem to have a good handle on who is character is. But he put everything he had into it, which helped. I don't know what the script says about Natasha, but I'm guessing she ought to be 10 years younger than Cappuccini played her, and she ought to have a musicals-quality singing voice (as should Ivor and Adam - none of them do). Brooks, on the other hand, was her character, through and through, the smart 30's professional woman, right down to the wavy short hair, white silk blouse and maroon slacks. Cross Katherine Hepburn's no-nonsense confidence with Audrey Hepburn's elegance, and you're in the ballpark. I cannot say enough about how completely she fit the part. And stealing the show was Ferro, who successfully kept the steward in the neighborhood of a Dick Van Dyke comic character, where it could easily have fallen into the cesspool of Adam Sandler - Ben Stiller stupidity. My only criticism of his role is I thought a character named Dvornichek ought to have an Eastern European accent.
Bottom line: worth full price. It's a tiny theater, this show is going to sell out, so make reservations. It runs Thurs-Sat at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm through August 3. July 27 features talk-back with the cast after the show. I may go to that one, to see how things have progressed since opening night. Click here for the link.
- Mood:
crazy
Hayley Westenra's PR flacks say don't compare her to Charlotte Church, but the voices are so similar it's impossible not to. Hayley has that youthful, crystal clear soprano which cuts through a room like a laser. I first heard her on Pandora.com, a tune from her Odyssey album called Never Saw Blue. It was very pretty, but it was a showcase for a spectacular voice rather than an expression of emotional lyrics. I was hoping she had more depth than that, seeing as her bio shows a long list of child star roles in Christchurch musicals and work as a street singer.
So I bought Odyssey and her double album Pure and gave them a listen. Sad to say, Never Saw Blue is one of maybe three tunes in which she shows any capacity at all for telling the story of the song. And that's where comparing her to Ms. Church would be wrong - it would be an insult to Ms. Church.
And it's probably a reason she is mostly unknown in the US. She has an amazing voice, and her technical skills are superb, but she sells her pipes, and not the song. The albums go one step further in the wrong direction by featuring a few songs in the Maori language, but she isn't Maori, and the arrangements are done up so whitebread that I'm expecting an advertising tag line at the end for Twinkies. Though there is a wide variety of songs on the CDs, they mostly sound the same.
It's very sad. Her voice is one in a hundred million. In New Zealand she'll be able to continue to be the "home town girl makes good" forever, but if she hopes to make it in the rest of the world, she'll need to find some good teachers to show her that words are not mere sounds to push out of her lungs. With a couple of small exceptions, the two albums remind me of Italian vowel exercises we do for warm-ups before going onstage for a musical. She's young. There's time.
Edit add: someone left an anonymous comment about the Maori connection which I will be happy to have here if it is submitted from a logged-in LJ account.
- Mood: disappointed
When I saw that in the program I was sure we had a flop on our hands. I mean, Schwartz is no Irving Berlin - his tunes aren't so stunning that you can build a musical from his rejects. Except you can, sort of. Especially if many of them are mashups. Lion Tamer from The Magic Show mashed into I'm Not That Girl from Wicked. Fathers and Sons from Working mashed together with The Hardest Part of Love from Children of Eden. Some of the tunes are wedged in there, not quite fitting, but most of them work.
The show is all about middle-aged Sue [Beth DeVries] and her husband Dan [Ray Wills] and the Sue and Dan in the photos. Those are the young adult Susan [Molly Bell] and Daniel [Michael Marcotte], and the high schoolers Susie [Courtney Stokes] and Danny [Brian Crum]. As Sue and Dan sing about the photos, the other two versions of them are right there, in a tightly scripted tag team match. As the show progresses there is more and more interaction between the three Sues and Dans, and we see the rift between them wiggling a bit.
The show was directed by TheatreWorks founder Robert Kelley, and features a lot of his trademark quick change artistry and snap.
No spoilers, but Danny was a busy young man, and Molly plays a non-Sue girlfriend while Courtney does about five minutes of serial one night stands which is hilarious. Courtney's Susie steals the show - she is far and away the most talented person on that stage, which is amusing to me because she is also the only non-Equity cast member, and a local product who is well known over in the Milpitas area for her leading roles in youth productions with Star Struck Theatre, where her mother, I believe, directs musicals as well. This is her fifth major TW show, and she's living in SoCal going for a degree in (you guessed it) Musical Theater.
Snapshots works, for the most part, and there are a couple of two-hankie moments toward the end. While hindsight says the story line is utterly predictable right to the finale, while you're watching it the little details and jogs, skips and sneezes along the way make it interesting.
Costumes were okay, but nothing to brag about. Lighting was simple and non-invasive. The strobe effect with camera snap audio was used too randomly to make it useful - I wonder if there were more in the script and they were cut, or if the playwright just waffled. Set design by Joe Ragey was his usual superb job. The four-piece band way down in the pit was adequate, not up to what I expect from TW. I found myself missing Lita.
Worth seeing. It runs Tues-Sun through July 13 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Ticket info is here.
- Mood: contemplative
Went to Lyric Theater's sing-along night for their production of The Pirates of Penzance. There was lots of win, but also lots of fail. Michael Sommese is super as Frederic. Solid voice, good looking, solid stage presence. Cara Arellano fits the part of Ruth to a T. Greg Anderson's Pirate King is enjoyable, his big phony beard is not (not his fault). The rest of the leads are adequate. Unfortunately, Alicia von Kugelgen does not quite have the range to sing Mabel, but when she is singing in her range she sounds excellent.
It was great to see seamoose as a pirate.
Some of the win was in the directing of the first few scenes. There are lots of clever physical bits which added a lot to the tone of the show. All through the show it was clear the direction was "listen to the words" and there was a lot of acting going on, as opposed to just walking around the stage singing. Some of the fail came when choreography became too complex, dizzying, and Just Plain Stupid, as in the Major General's lulabye, where the Major General performs a parody of a ballet which was embarrassing to watch. Maybe more so because my seat was in the front row, center. Another fail is rare in local musical theater - the male ensemble is far more attractive than the female ensemble.
In the win category is a fine orchestra. In the fail column is a conductor whose choice of tempo seemed unpredictable. The Major General's patter song was taken far too quickly, and the policeman's comic lament was like a dirge.
I've been in two productions of Pirates, and never realized how poor a choice it is for a sing-along. There is very little to sing along with in the first act if you're male, and only brief responses in the second act, till the rousing finale.
The biggest fail was Cheryl Blalock's concept design of setting the show in 1717, in the Caribbean for Act I and North Carolina in Act II. Much of the humor of the show depends on it being set in Penzance, England during Queen Victoria's reign. By shifting the action to a time and place where there were real pirates, she missed the point of at least half the plot, and by changing the monarch to King George III she completely destroyed the punch line.
Back on the win side, there's an amusing Easter Egg at the end.
If you have never seen a live production of Pirates, don't start with this one. If you are a G&S fan, it's worth catching for flashes of brilliant blocking and acting, and seeing how much fun the pirates are having. It's playing at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose through this weekend.
- Mood:critical
Going Postal is a Diskworld novel, whatever that means. There is no mention of this round planet anywhere in the body of the book, and no clues in there whatsoever to hint at what makes this one of that particular series. Please do not enlighten me, I don't care. If I wanted to know I would look it up.
The spoilers start with the first two pages, so I won't even try to describe any details. In a nutshell it is a romp which takes a con man and a very unusual set of circumstances to their logical, or maybe that should be illogical, conclusions. As with most fantasy novels, this one plays fast and loose with the well-known rules of how and why fantastical creatures operate, makes up much of the rules as it goes, and tailors the magic to suit the author's needs and whims. Unlike most fantasy novels, it is compellingly well-written, and pieces of it are firmly rooted in science fiction (what if the post office's biggest competitor in a world with no electric power was a series of semaphore towers? What if those towers were not well maintained?). Like too many fantasy novels, the characters are caricatures but that's part of the charm of this book.
This book is self-contained, but I can see where it almost demands a sequel, and could have a prequel. Many prequels.
I liked it, because just often enough to keep me hooked, Pratchett throws in an oblique jab at or homage to another author, or a movie, or some other piece of fannish trivia. They are piquant enough to make me LOL. A couple even made me squeal out loud, scaring other restaurant patrons. In its own twisted way the story is inspiring without moralizing. It features a Unlikely Hero and a benevolent tyrant. There is something approaching a love story. But mostly, it's just plain fun. Glad I read it.
- Location:Neto Cafe
- Mood:
amused
Silly me tried to flush them down the garbage disposal, but they clogged it and popped the circuit breaker, so I slopped them all into a garbage bag (there was some serious excavation work required in the bowels of the disposal unit) and will haul that out to the dumpster in the morning.
Tonight's DVD was Junebug, a film which starred Amy Adams (of Enchanted fame). I wanted to see her in a non-Disney setting, and this performance won her a supporting actress Oscar nomination and a ton of wins from other award givers.
So, take the Princess, make her 9 months pregnant, slap her into a seriously dysfunctional Bible Belt family living with her in-laws, and make her a redhead and even more ADD, and you have Ashley, the character she plays in this gem. She deserved the awards.
It's a strange film from a production standpoint. Pretty good photography, considering it was shot in 16mm, and some fine acting, though that's uneven. The editing, storyboarding and shot selection was miserable. Amateur. Killed the flow of the story over and over again. The director seems to think we need to see the entire room before anyone occupies it. And the way to show that the house is empty is to show a shot of each room in the house, empty. Even rooms we have not seen before, nor will we see later. For the first half hour it's hard to tell where we are, or why. It gets easier to tell where we are about halfway through, but "why" is still a mystery a lot of the time.
It's a "you can't go home again" movie which makes you want the protagonist to dump his new cosmopolitan wife, kill his younger brother and elope with his widow-in-law.
I liked the opening/closing credits song -- Stevie Wonder's Harmour Love </b>Performed by Syreeta.
All the characters had their moments, except for Ashley's husband Johnny, whose part is a cross between stupid trailer trash redneck and borderline autistic manic-depressive. Benjamin McKenzie was not up to the challenge. Alessandro Nivola does well as George, the older, smarter brother who went to the Big City (DC) and Made Good. Embeth Davidtz is the gallery owner who practically rapes him and magically is his wife in the following scene. Scott Wilson plays the enigmatic father, and thanks to lousy directing, writing and editing we have no ideas if he's Simple™ or just quiet. By the end of the film he has almost developed into a character. Celia Weston as the mom has the same problem with a character who is poorly defined, and the lines about her don't match the person we see. And I feel sorry for Frank Hoyt Taylor, who plays off-the-wall artist David Wark, a character who has no artistic talent whatsoever, but his childish works are Inspired By God. He pendulums between being just another bewildered crackpot and a wildly flailing top-of-his-voice maniac in the style of a Southern Baptist style preacher.
Sound editing sucked - usually the dialog was too soft to hear, but every now and then they cranked it way up to let us know that people were shouting.
Lots of loose ends, but let us pray nobody makes a sequel.
- Mood: cynical
Claudia McNeil put in a powerful performance as the family matriarch. The screenplay is not as well written as it could be, massive too-long monologues and a lot of over-acting was required to make it work. But the underlying story and big finish justified the roller coaster ride it took to get there.
- Mood:
curious
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