American in Paris

Last night we (my wife, Eryn, and me) went to An American in Paris at the Ordway.  It's one of my favorite musicals - despite a little of the hokey 60s musical vibe in spots that's so common to that era.  I listened to the soundtrack as I fell asleep when I was a teenager and loved the movie.  My wife was surprised at how many of the songs were familiar.

There are a couple of great reviews out there, so I'll defer to them.  They note how beautiful the sets were and I can't agree more.  The way they integrated real set pieces with video with video on set pieces with digitized art over the digital set pieces....amazing.  It didn't distract from the acting and dancing at all, but provided a very city of lights and city of art feel.

• https://patch.com/california/studiocity/american-paris-pantages-theatre
• http://triangleartsandentertainment.org/2017/01/an-american-in-paris-now-at-dpac-is-a-delightful-dance-heavy-musical-inspired-by-the-1951-film/

I wasn't sure my 14-year old would enjoy it, but she laughed out loud several times which reminded me of how smart the play is in places.  The dancing was amazing and the acting superb.  My only complaint is that Milo (played by Emily Ferranti) doesn't emerge as the character who gets everything she wants in the end.  She's clearly the best character in the play, and I still think so after 35 years.

American in Paris also fulfilled my basic rule that anything with a bicycle early in it is going to be great.

A View From the Bridge

We did the matinee at Theatre in the Round after lunch at Republic this afternoon.  I did not approve of my lunch, by the way.  They snuck a mayo-based chipotle sauce into my jalapeno hash.  Unlike the profile for most Minnesotans, my issue was not the spice, but the mayo.  I hate the stuff.  If there's a whiff of it in what I'm eating, that taste overrides all the other good tastes in my food.  Nasty.  It's not as bad if it melts into the food and is dispersed, but drizzles of it all over my food...ugh.  Might as well order a bowl of mayo in my opinion.

The play was good, although I'd summarize it by saying it's the most stressful episode of All in the Family I've ever seen.  We had a good discussion in the car on the way home about what the lawyer/narrator meant by settling for half as much.  My opinion, and maybe I'm way off, is that he respects something in Eddie because Eddie is the stereotypical tragic character.  You look at Eddie and his actions, and he screams Shakespearean conflicted protagonist.  There's a purity to his actions and his singular focus, even if that singular focus is way, way fucking wrong.  It's a short hop to thinking it's chivalrous love from where he stands.  But even in that respect, it's perverted and messed up and drives him down paths he shouldn't go.  It's flawed.  And he ends up dead in the end for his flaws, just like a tragic hero.  So the narrator is saying you feel like you're looking at someone who should be that hero, full of emotion and singular purpose, and who is so large.  And you should just get that out of your mind, because in a real world, with real people, and real repercussions, half is sufficient and maybe better off for everyone around you.

Aidan Jhane Gallivan was very good as Catherine.  We saw her in Fahrenheit 451 last season.  Michael Eagan made me so uncomfortable as Eddie that I can't help but congratulate him. I squirmed a bit in my seat.  I was not as taken with the Rodolpho character - it was the interpretation of him as having a wavering, quiet voice that bothered me.  I think it was to make you think extra hard about whether he was or was not gay and whether he was really using Catherine for her citizenship, but I think it could have been done another way.  Overall, an excellent production, although I still prefer The Crucible (which I last re-read as part of an ethics in science course in 1987).

Fahrenheit 451

I'm not blogging because of  New Year's resolution - I never do anything because of  New Year's resolution.

We went to Fahrenheit 451 at Theatre in the Round on Friday night.  The acting wasn't superlative, and the story is a little long winded in places because Bradbury turned book lectures into dramatic monologues (he wrote the screenplay himself), but it was still very enjoyable and a nice addition to the Shakespeare and Christie we sometimes see there.  Montag and Mildred (his wife) were believable, and Captain Beatty definitely had a psycho/evangelist/true believer vibe.

The set was well done for a minimalist attack.  They papered over the props/furniture, and it was modular so they could reuse it for walls and blocks and a sofa to switch between the fire station, Mildred's living room, and outside the town.

Their choice of books to burn amused me - I wonder if they bought my company's books by the pound or if someone is a lawyer in their spare time.

The play is VERY different from the book, but I'd read the book so long ago I couldn't quite remember all the details.  Apparently Bradbury modeled the play after the movie.  I had to go check the plot notes at Wikipedia, and they confirmed Beatty was a much worse character in the book, met a much more violent end (burned alive vs. a dog, although the dog noises in the play were scary, sort of Cloverfield-ish; they're releasing Cloverfield 2 btw, trailer here), and the book memorizers made more sense because there was a threat that civilization might end, at least temporarily, so the threat of no books meant not carrying forward culture after a catastrophe.

By the way - the Wikipedia page has a section on F451 being banned if you're into irony [link to a post on some local book burning].  The idea of burning the Bible, not the actual fact of it, was what triggered the ban.

Eryn was excited because the program talked about a video game from 1984.  I told her I'd owned it (and you can get a copy for emulation on DosBox) and that what I remembered more than anything else was the dogs.  It made me appreciate that some people really miss the days of text games when the focus was on the story and not open world.  Eryn's been playing Life Is Strange lately which seems to attempt to get back to some of that story telling while not losing the modern gaming approach.

We went to Town Hall prior to the play.  We were trying to go to Ramen Kazama, but the place was absolutely packed as we drove by, with people standing around waiting for tables. It worked out, because TiTR had given us a 20% off one meal coupon we used on Eryn's steak (she's a steak fiend), and Pooteewheet tried the Three Hour Tour Chestnut (in a tulip glass despite not a high level of alcohol) and agreed with this reviewer who said: "Shit gets Cadburry real quick..."

Catch Up - Part III - Trylon

We've been to the Trylon a lot in the last several months.  Usually I'd just say I've been to the Trylon a lot, but for the purposes of this post, we include me, my wife, Eryn, Kyle, Ming...all in some sort of configuration.  Kyle and I saw The Legend of Boggy Creek (seriously low-rent sci fi channel) and recently he, Ming, and I went to Why Don't You Play in Hell.  Kyle fell asleep.  Ming and I enjoyed it, although I could have done without the weird throwing up on the prayer-wish box parts.  Seemed extraneous.  If you approached it as just a movie about a mob fight that ends up with a amateur film buff getting involved and the whole thing going low-fund Kill Bill after a bunch of David Lynch-style background moments.  Well, it hit its intended mark.

I FAR preferred the Zatoichi series.  There are 26 of them!  But we watched four including the 1962 original, the 1963 sequel, the 1970 Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, and the 1989 remake.  Eryn went to the last three with me on Tuesdays after school and had a great time.  Like me - and unprompted - she preferred the original black and white versions with stylized sword fighting and a focus on the story and buddy-warrior aspect rather than the blood and violence.  The 1970 episode was very Spaghetti Western in the Clint Eastwood style and when they piled all the gold from inside the statues to lure in the bad guys - there's a scene where they have gold dust in their mouths - it really evoked the scene where Eastwood paints the town red and calls it hell in High Plains Drifter.  The 1989 version got rid of the stylized violence in favor of real violence and the main characters, who are at odds but very respectful of each other in the original (Zatoichi visits his grave in the second film), are more traditionally adversaries.  Probably my favorite series since the Halloween Japanese ghost series Kyle and I went to there.



Eryn loved the movies, but I think the two buckets of popcorn, soda, and coffee at Peace Coffee before the show each time also played a part.  It was a good place for me to work and her to get her homework out of the way.


For my wife's birthday in January we all went to Buster's on 28th for the first time since their fire, and then to Strait-Jacket.  Ming, Kyle, me, Eryn, and my wife.  A full contingent.  Buster's was great, although we sat so close to the door that every time it opened you had to debate whether to put your coat on.  Strait-Jacket is a funny thriller (now; perhaps it was scary or more suspenseful in its day) and very enjoyable.


The twist at the end wasn't unexpected, but it didn't make it any less amusing.
.

Weekend

We had a good weekend.  On Friday night we went to the play at Inver Hills high school to see the play for which Eryn had been doing tech/stage the last few months.  It wasn't a single theme.  Instead they did The Acting Games.  Much like The Hunger Games, but the competition was amongst the styles of actors to determine who would win.  Losers were relegated to jobs as barristas and waiters.  The second half was musical numbers from a variety of movies such as Moulin Rouge, A Teen Beach Movie, and Les Miserables.

Then Eryn and my sister took off to Southern Minnesota on Saturday to see The Sudden Lovelys play.  So my wife and I had an evening to ourselves.  We went to Chang Mai Thai for dinner and then to the Lagoon to see animation shorts.  Most of them were great, although The Dam Keeper was amazing.  Absolutely beautiful, and a great story about a pig who's bullied but finds a best friend.

More Musical Theater - Little Shop of Horrors by The 7th House Theater

My father in law posted elsewhere that he was going to see Little Shop of Horrors performed by 7th House Theater (Facebook link) at the Open Eye Figure Theatre (not too far from MIA).  Open Eye does a lot of puppet shows - they have a driveway series - and there's a cool bicycle-pulled puppet theater in their entry way (below).  7th House doesn't have a permanent location - there are only 7 members - so Open Eye was providing the venue.

I didn't know what to expect, but from the very first note it was amazing (I think that was Liz Hawkinson who kicked it off).  Everyone was an exceptional singer, and that was the focus of the play.  Some of the details were left to the imagination with some small visual aids (I don't want to spoil those parts) and it worked amazingly well.  The three background singers played many of the parts and when a part was minor, like Mr. Mushnik, players swapped the role with a small overlap in delivery to indicate ownership was passing to someone else (as well as handing around a mustache).  There was live piano and guitar and the pianist (Robert Frost) and guitarist (David Darrow) joined in the play.  David Darrow played a convincing psychopath DDS.

Maeve Moynihan did an amazing Audrey, and in the small Open Eye venue, her voice was everywhere.  Eryn (not in the play) got a treat in that Catherine W Noble was her teacher at the Children's Theater Company Percy Jackson acting class.  We had no idea she would be there and she remembered Eryn when we caught up with her after the play.  If I had any thought that Eryn might not be a theater geek despite initial interest, this weekend probably seals the deal for her between 7th House and the Centennial Showboat.

Grant Sorenson was Seymour (I really hadn't realized until last night that the character from Little Shop of Horrors might have something to do with the Krelborns from Malcolm in the Middle) and Gracie Kay Anderson was one of the three Ronette's with Catherine and Liz.  Both were just as solid as the rest of the cast.  I'm looking forward to seeing more of them in the future.

The bicycle puppet trailer.


Waiting for Little Shop to start.  The props and scenery didn't get much more elaborate than what you see, a plastic mustache on a stick, a plastic tarp, and a clever Audrey 2.  This should give you some idea of how close we were to the actors when they were down stage (I got that right - from the audience perspective, down stage is closest to me, upstage is back by the screen).

Minnesota Centennial Show Boat - Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde

Last night we went to Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Showboat near Harriet Island in St. Paul.  It was the opening night of the show, put on by University of Minnesota students.  My wife and I had been to the showboat before, to see Dracula but I believe our last visit was in something like 1992, before we were married.  We both remember it being closer to the Minneapolis campus and infested with spiders.

Jekyll and Hyde was performed as a melodrama with olios inbetween.  I'd never heard of an olio, but was pleasantly surprised.  They were hilarious.  The show itself was full of great humor, but the olios really stole the show and "The Calendar Parade" and "The Saga of Two Little Sausages" had me laughing.  All of them were amusing.  I highly recommend the show, but after their opening night they're on hiatus for nine days while the Mississippi River crests.

I was joking with Kyle on Facebook that I sort of felt like I was in Bioshock Infinite.  There was even a barbershop quartet as part of the olio "Marriage a Cinq"  He said if I had to throw a ball at a minority I should get out my skyhook and go to town.


This view, more than most, made me think of Bioshock.  It's like all the empty decks where you're looking for trashcans to pilfer.


Panorama of the river.  The water was speeding along.  At one point, just as it was getting dark, a large tree was going past me as I was standing at the rail, with a noise that sounded like a monster had breeched, the whole thing sudden vanished.  A few minutes later, one limb popped back up above the water.  I would not want to be in the water right now, or in the next week as it crests.


It's a little less Bioshock when Eryn is posing with her umbrella, although if she'd had a dress and could manipulate dimensional barriers, it might have been a different story.


There were two boats on the river pulling in as we went to the play.  I wonder if Tall Brad is up on that bridge somewhere...


Nice picture from the showboat of downtown St. Paul.


The stage before the show.  Almost all the scenery was painted.  There were amusing scenes where someone would pretend like a painting was a 3-dimensional prop.


Intermission.  The cathedral in the dark from the showboat.


There were a number of informational displays about Jekyll and Hyde.  One was about how Hyde was portrayed through the years.  It included Doofenshmirtz's failed attempt to make himself a monster.


The title painting which came down between scenes and after the Monty Python-esque ending.  Wonderful vaudeville and a lot of energy.

Appointment With Death (there will be spoilers!)

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra." [The Appointment in Samarra, retold as The Appointment in Petra in Appointment With Death]

Friday night the family went to Theatre in the Round to see Agatha Christie's Appointment With Death. Despite a bit of a weak cast - I really hate saying that, having once done quite a bit of acting myself, so you know when I say it I'm likely serious about something lacking in a performance - Molly Pach Johnson as Sarah King and Scott Keely as Dr. Theodore Gerard, the two most vocal parts, were both very good.  Molly was very good as Helena in All's Well That End's Well that we saw earlier in the season. And Muriel J. Bonertz as the domineering Mrs. Boynton scared me, so an incredibly good job on her part.  I believed she was capable of such malice that she'd off herself to leave her children domineered and cowed even after her death.  Amusingly, at least to me, I found the relationship between Dr. King and Raymond Boynton more believable because his more wooden delivery could be interpreted as deferring to a stronger female character.  First his mother, and then Dr. King.  Similarly, Ginerva seems destined to move from being under the thumb of one domineering character to another. Only Nadine and Lennox seem to find a new balance of power that's more egalitarian in their lives.

The play has quite a few changes over the book.  A major one is that there's no end-game explanation of what happens to the characters, which apparently is spelled out in the book, each of the children going on to lead happy lives.  And there was an interesting discussion post play as we left.  Eryn (age 10) and I were convinced that Dr. Gerard had gone a bit Hannibal on everyone.  I think in the book and the traditional version of the play, Mrs. Boynton is truly conniving and offs herself of her own volition when she discovers she only has six months or so left.  In the end of the TItR production, Dr. Gerard does a little bit of exposition that left me feeling as through perhaps Mrs. Boynton was just fine, and Dr. Gerard had planted the six month idea with Dr. King, who had planted it with Mrs. Boynton, who had offered herself as Dr. Gerard hoped based on a psychological profile, in order that Ginerva would be freed to go with him.  That makes it a much creepier story.

I put a copy of the play on hold at the Dakota County Library so I can do a bit of mental contrast and compare.

In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms

Friday night we went to Theatre in the Round to see "In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms" by Ludmilla Bollow.  I'd liken it to something like The Golden Girls, but without all the obvious one-liners and a disturbing theme about getting old and not being able to let go of the past.

Myrah, Violet, and Winifred are three elderly women who meet in the department store restroom consistently, and each is facing a personal issue.  Myrah is losing her health.  Violet is losing her house (more accurately, all her money).  And Winifred is losing her mind, a slow process that started when her husband died in the war 40 years earlier.  They band together to combat Winnifred's sister Clare who wants to take Winnifred back to her dog kennel where she's good at training both dogs and humans, and she can make sure Winnfred is safe (and potentially sell Winnifred's house and leverage her war widow pension).  Clare is tenacious and accounts for much of the humor in the show. She reminded me of the paperboy in Better Off Dead with John Cusak, except her $2.00 is Winnifred.  At the end of the play (spoiler!) Clare is tied up in the bathroom with an old fur coat, still trying to get her hands on Winnifred (who has agreed to go with her, but doesn't end the play with Clare).

The actresses did a wonderful job, and Maggie Bearmon Pistner was particularly good as Myrah.

Life and Beth

Last night we went to Life and Beth at Theatre in the Round.  Very enjoyable and much more digestible for Eryn than All's Well That Ends Well, which was a struggle with the language, but which she still enjoyed.  She laughed out a loud a few times during Life and Beth, despite some grown up themes here and there.  It was a good play to find humor in, and it's fun to take her to some plays that are both funny and sad and make her think about what the playright is trying to convey and the complexity of people, opposed to the Children's Theater plays which are more one dimensional, even when they have a more complex theme.

I've been to an Alan Ayckbourn production before.  I saw Absurd Person Singular in London back in the very early 90's when I was there by myself.  I didn't know anything about the play before I went, and at the time the suicide theme for Eva was just too depressing to allow me to enjoy it, despite the humor in the other parts of the play.  But it was exciting to go to a play in London, which was my point at the time.  I notice in the Wikipedia article about Absurd Person Singular, it says it was playing at Whitehall Theatre in May 1990.  That would have been when I was there seeing a play at the West End.

But back to Life and Beth.  Funny, although in a dry way given most of the characters are dysfunctional in some way.  Alcoholic sister in law.  Overbearing, passive-aggressive (but dead) husband who says things like "hand on heart" and argues about how they've never argued.  Son who's driving his girlfriend nuts.  Girlfriend who's nuts (and talks once, which Eryn caught and we didn't).  And widow who is, in many respects, happy she's on her own.  I liked the idea that the dead husband's (Gordon Timms) parents used to tell his sister (Aunt Connie) that he had lapped her three times, until she could feel him breathing down her neck.  My sister should tell her eldest that same thing just so she knows to try harder.  And the vicar tells the widow at one point that she should accentuate the positive (the old Johnny Mercer song) and that she's still young, "for a woman."

As the Star Tribune review states, Jean Wolff was excellent as Beth.  She was the most believable of the characters and her reaction to her life with Gordon gone was illuminating.  An excellent production.

84, Charing Cross Road

Friday night, we took Eryn to her first play at Theatre in the Round.  The last time we were there was almost ten years ago, and my wife was so pregnant we were afraid her water was going to break at the theater.  So it's exciting that Eryn is old enough to go with us now, even if an 8:00 p.m. start time is a little late for her.

We took her to 84, Charing Cross Road which might not have been the best first choice for a non-Children's Theater play for a 9-year old.  Although we used it as an opportunity to prep her for Treasure Island, which is coming later, so she understands how it'll be different than a set-centric production.  The characters in 84, Charing Cross Road don't directly interact, exchanging letters between NY and England bookstores which, in "crossing" the stage, cross the Atlantic. Here's how TRP (Theatre in the Round Players) describes the play:

"A warm and charming dramatization of letters that spans two decades between a young struggling writer in New York and the delightfully dusty staff of an antiquarian book store in London. At first just business, their correspondence becomes much more: in a sense, an exchange of love letters -- about the love of good literature."

It was well done and the audience laughed aloud in several parts.  What struck me was that the relationship between the characters was also a relationship about books, and a relationship with the store and that (spoilers start here, so bail here if necessary) when a character died, so did the store.

Eryn's review was that it was very sad that Helene never met Frank before he died.  Some of the literary references were lost on her.  For example, Peppy's Diary is only funny if you're familiar with the Diary of Samuel Pepys.  My Tudor/Stuart history background courtesy of Stanford Lehmberg helped.  Although I didn't realize until now, that during my undergrad years I'd actually met the uncle of Ben Elton who was my teacher's teacher.  Something new every year, eh?

It was a great play.  I recommend it.  Not fast.  Not lots of action.  But a solid, enjoyable work which worked really well on the TRP circular stage.  The scenery definitely contributed, and I found myself checking out a stack of books that looked like they were published by my company, only to discover they were constructed props.  Very convincing.  I really felt like I was in both a NY book-littered flat and a UK bookstore pre-internet.

Bert and Ernie

I strongly recommend Bert and Ernie at the Children's Theatre Company. Eryn thought it would be too young for her. And Pooteewheet and I thought it would be incredibly annoying. But it was very funny and Eryn laughed through the whole thing. A+