It seems to be a “thing” to reminisce about the past year. I have found that certain outfits are all ga-ga over listing things we (as a people, I guess) did not know last year. Sure, they’re great and all — science and nature and the world around us and such — but really, what do they have to do with me?

Here are some things *I* did not know last year. They are numbered, but they are in no particular order.

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Femme fatale up to no good

Sadly, I will not be going to church with Alex for… let’s see… about six or seven more weeks. Sigh. To assuage my sadness, please indulge my recounting of three fun things from church today.

1. A South American man we know told us about how confusing it was, as a child, to spend half his day in a Catholic school and the other half in a school run by communists. I can only imagine.
2. While the Primary children were on the stand (yes, today was that day), Alex leaned over and whispered, “I am a child of God… and so can you!” Okay, I thought it was funny.
3. One of the children said, very loudly into the microphone, something about the Holy Goats. Boy does that have implications for my religious worldview ;)

Go see the play, already! It’s amazingly good. No, really. Note the dramatic awesomeness of both actors (my wife is the one on the right. Sa-Weeeet!)

I have Netflix, and this is both good and bad. A few days ago, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It, and I’m pretty glad I didn’t pay full rental price. Despite what you’re about to read, it wasn’t horrible. But by the second hour, I really wished I had rented something else. Of course, I kept watching it, but that’s more a testament to my indolence than to any qualities the movie might have had. And “might have” is an important phrase, here.

Maybe I’m getting old and finicky (OK, I am getting that way), but it was just… you know… it was like Shakespeare done by the Muzak corporation. No, I take that back. That’s too vicious, and it wasn’t quite so bad; but that’s the kind of bad it was. The acting was fine. No gaffes, no serious problems. A little histrionic (especially Rosalind), but no noticeable difficulties. Half an hour into the movie, I put my finger on what was bothering me: almost all the lines were being delivered with the precise, predictable nuance and interpretation that mediocre actors wish they could master, but amazing actors have moved far beyond. Kind of like some textbook, How to Act Shakespeare.

Now I’m going to sound seriously unpleasable and really really crotchety, but here it is: the lack of problems in the film was symptomatic of The Problem with it. It didn’t take any chances. It didn’t explore anything new, except in the most superficial way. Yes, everyone was falling over their own tongues, trying to squeeze out every last bit of meaning and emotion from that Shakespearean dialogue we all love (see previous paragraph), but that got old after a while, you know? It… something… was at 100% from start to finish, but it didn’t make it a great film. It was stuffed to the gills with rich, lush visuals; every Portentous or Deep or Moving Moment was backed by a perfectly smooth, perfectly rendered, perfectly mixed symphonic parallel (note: never a counterpoint, or even a harmony, really; mustn’t confuse the audience)… everything in this entire movie was rich, lush, sculpted, and polished, to its artistic detriment. I had the same reaction to Chocolat, by the way. The films share a feeling of putting huge amounts of effort into pleasing one’s central demographic — and the results are certainly a kind of pleasing — but little or no effort is made to say anything other than, “don’t you love this?” Of course you do. You’re the demographic. The creative consultants might have been a focus group of university-educated Northern California suburban soccer moms and Silicon Valley dads. The end result of this kind of process is that it’s appealing in the same way the professionally-manufactured plastic desserts are appealing when presented by your attentive Chili’s server.

One might argue that Branagh did take a chance by setting the play in feudal Japan, when the White People were hanging around acting like Japanese People. If one argued this, then one would be smoking something potent. First of all, attaching Western art to All Things Beautiful and Nipponese is about as daring as telling Republican jokes on Comedy Central. And it was supposedly set in Japan, but that meant that all Japanese people depicted were either (a) White people (lots of them), or (b) a couple of horrid stereotypes that make Gedde Watanabe’s character in Sixteen Candles look like JFK’s interracial dream. Okay, so maybe racism is daring, in a way.

And there was a lion. What. Yes. I said a lion. In postfeudal Japan. Not in a zoo; in a forest, attacking leading men for dramatic import. Moving on.

Rosalind was on some kind of amphetamines. Orlando and his brother were the ethnic minorities wallowing in their conflicted-then-superbondy Family-ness. the Exiled Duke Senior (Brian Blessed?) was an unstoppable tsunami of love and fatherly kindness… actually, he looked a little too blissed out sometimes; maybe he was on drugs, too; but definitely not the same ones as Rosalind. Everyone else (with noted exceptions) was some version of kind-of-annoying-to-watch. Even Kevin Kline — who can usually do no wrong with  me — did wrong by saturating every moment of screen time with a Jungian archetype of  Unhappy Yet Wise Person. As with the rest of the movie, it seems every actor was receiving strong admonitions between takes to be their characters, only more so.
It felt like a constant process of digging, mining every visual image and sentence, not for meaning or true beauty, but for prettiness and what we all think we know Shakespeare meant. Must confirm the audience’s view, at all costs.

The bright spots: Despite the super-brotheriness, Orlando and Oliver weren’t too bad. They seemed a little more fresh, perhaps, than the others, and I found the brother-reunion stuff moving. Duke Frederick (I think played by Brian Blessed also?) wasn’t too bad. He was interesting, to some extent (in strange contrast to the other Duke). The portrayal at least dodged the character’s implied stereotypes a few times. But Alfred Molina’s Touchstone (the fool)  was the only role I truly enjoyed throughout the movie. It was a breath of fresh air. Molina can still do no wrong.

When, oh when will I learn my lesson, Kenneth Branagchkhlwght? Your Hamlet still haunts me like memories of food poisoning. This one, though not as bad as Hammy, will be like the memory of an annoying party, where nobody says anything offensive, and everyone’s dressed really nicely, and I go home with a sense of having wasted my night.

Fair Verona is Shakespeare as he never intended. Graham Jenner and Kerri Bojman have remixed and resampled Romeo and Juliet (with lines from other Shakespearean plays) to create the one-act tale of a community killing its most beautiful young people through an obsession with conformity and ritual. The text is pure Shakespeare, mashed up and rearranged. The themes of the play are not exactly foreign to the Bard’s work, but while they’re merely implicit in the original R&J, here they are explicit and a bit chilling.

The play is being put on at the McMaster University Summer Drama Festival (website here), a perennial celebration of theater completely by students. The budget is miniscule, the stage was built by volunteers, but the offerings at this festival are often amazing. McMaster has more than its share of talented actors, but it also produces skilled stage crew, directors, and (obviously) playwrights.

This festival is one of the best bangs for your theater buck anywhere. Talented young women and men come together every year to put it together from scratch, and their dedication always shows. The music was even composed by one of the actors, who is also an advanced music student.

Fair Verona starts this weekend, with three more performances next week. See the SDF website for more details. And here are some more shots from the rehearsals. Enjoy!

Fair Verona is coming along nicely. It’s a thoughtful, lovely piece about a nice, cohesive community crushing young love like a ladybug. Last night was the first rehearsal at the outdoor stage in The Hollow. Mosquitoes, volume issues, etc… but it’s still a great play. I’m loving it. There was far too little light to take decent crisp snapshot-type photos last night, but there was enough for some long-exposure crazy shots, so here is one. I like to think that Shakespeare would have approved of the ghostly apparitions strutting on the stage.

Billy of Dark Mean Lays down a groove

 Last night was a lot of fun. Constant K went well, and beforehand I realized that — now that I am no longer an actohr, I can hang out and watch the musicians play their sets before the shows. Dark Mean was completely great. I like their sound. It reminds me of The Ocean Blue, Radiohead, etc. Then, we wandered to the Spotted Pig pub in Hamilton, and hung out while a really excellent man named Ted regaled us with his tunes. Then he let us Play and sing, and then there was dancing and general good times… very  nice.

Pic: A.J. Haygarth pondering the absurdity of The Constant K

The Constant K is an absurdist play. I gots no issues with that. It understands its own absurdity. Current U.S. politics, however, are a different matter. At times, it seems we’re supposed to pretend we don’t notice the absurdity of certain things happening around us¹. Here are some insane bits:

•  An interesting graph of false statements made by the Bush administration, month by month, 2001 – 20003. Increasingly, as journalists wake from the daze they’ve been in for the last 7 years, they’re discovering that many of these false statements were probably made with a full understanding of their falsehood. And, of course, they were integral in shoring up public support for a war against a nation that had not seriously threatened the U.S.
• Kucinich introduces articles of impeachment, the mainstream media doesn’t seem to think this newsworthy.
• The major media outlets also don’t seem to think it’s very interesting that the Pentagon clearly colluded with the Bush Administration  to manipulate analysis and coverage of the war effort, creating a machine that presented the administration’s talking points as if they were independent opinions by nonbiased individuals.
• My lovely government, pushed by huge wads of cash from failing media dinosaurs, apparently shoved a DMCA-style copyright law down Canada’s throat a few days ago, by threatening to make the border harder to cross if my adoptive nation didn’t appease the big labels.
• Finally–insanely–This document from 2001 suggests that the people who work to keep us safe have been taking Neurolinguistic Programming seriously! GAH! We might as well base our criminal justice policy on phrenology, with judges and juries using tarot cards in tie-breaker situations.

Sheesh. I’m done for today.

1. kind of like in 1984 [↩]

Alex’s latest play, The Constant K… etc. was housed in an awesome old 3-story building with an art gallery on the ground floor, a theater on the second floor, and a gorgeous massive loft on the top. The building is called “The Pearl Company.” I recently found out why. It used to be a jewelry factory. These pictures show leftover pearls still embedded between the floorboards in the art gallery. (one more photo after the cut). Continue reading →

Picture: Jeff Santa Barbara, Constant K Director, looks pleased, despite his dark and gloomy surroundings.

The Constant K Determines the Ultimate Fate of the Universe opened last night. It was rough in some places, but overall a success. It will just get better across performances, too :) I discovered that I am no longer the boy who could not get enough stage time, back in my early 20s: I was nothing but relieved when my 5 minutes of fame was over.

In other news, it occurred to me that we need a glossary for the show (no, I’m serious), so here it is.

Altruism

Performing a helpful act without any selfish motivations; helping purely to help the individual in need, or for helping’s sake alone.

Comet

(See Meteor/Meteorite, Tumbleweed)

Dawkins, Richard

Popular ethologist and evolutionary biologist, originally prominent for his book The Selfish Gene, a seminal text for sociobiology, and for developing and popularizing the theory memes. Although he was originally known for his scientific contributions, he is lately more famous for using his considerable intelligence and education to browbeat and humiliate less-educated religious people in public forums.

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Michael with Blindfold

Rakhee Totally rocks… not that you can tell from this picture.

Alex’s first play this summer is Lee Blessing’s Two rooms. It’s painfully, heart-wrenchingly horribly sad. It’s the story of a husband and wife. He is blindfolded, handcuffed and regularly beaten by his Lebanese terrorist captors. She, back home, lives in self-imposed isolation and austerity, to share the experience with him, since she can’t get him released.

Rakhee Sapra (above) plays the wife. Alex plays the State Department worker assigned to manage her. There are only four actors, but it’s very powerful. That means people (possibly including me… I admit nothing) cry. Last night, the show got a standing ovation. Yay! I didn’t even start it! Yay!

I must say that all four actors are outstanding, my wife most wholeheartedly included.

Sadly, the show right before it (it’s been double-billed) is, in my opinion, not so good. It’s an interesting effort by a student writer, but it seems to boil down to all the sexual, scatological and drug content of shows like Up in Smoke and Clerks, without any of the original or socially redeeming bits.

On the plus side, the people who aren’t frightened away by that tend to really appreciate something substantial and satisfying right afterward.

Go Alex!

Addendum:  after a sort of creepy anonymous comment on this post (hinting at the possibility of negative social consequences of my negative statements), I have decided to expand my review of the play preceding Two Rooms. I wouldn’t want people to think I just hated it, flat out. In fact, the first play had some strong points. There were several chuckles and a few belly laughs yanked from my abdomen, and some of the physical acting and comedic timing was especially humorous. The actors, most of the time, put forth solid efforts. Unfortunately, the writing seemed to me, as I have mentioned, a collection of clichéd comedic elements from a style of movies that have become ubiquitous and played-out in recent years. I had the distinct impression that the shock-value-humor element was overdone in the context of the other elements, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth and insufficient justification for having acquired it. Part of this bad taste involved a little gratuitous sexual prejudice and some probably-unintentional-but-still-problematic victim blaming and/or misogyny. However, I am still impressed by the fact that an undergrad wrote this. It flows nicely from moment to moment, it has coherent plotting, it has reasonably well-defined characters, and (as I said before), there are some genuinely funny moments. By the standards of professional scripts, it would not fare well, but by the standards of undergraduate work, I suspect it shines quite respectably.

wait… eye boogers.

King Lear on Michigan Avenue, Chicago

I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. Fiend

I love this photo, though it’s perhaps a little silly¹. I think Alex doesn’t like it much. She’s not a prima donna², I promise. There was context to this shot: she was getting makeup put on for her role as Lady MacBeth. That’s just how she has to have her face so the makeup person can do her thang.

In other news, our friends Craig and Melinda are likely going North before I get back from Canada. This saddens me greatly. I will miss them.

In other other news, a dream job opened up just last week at University of Waterloo. I’ve applied, and will be very, very fortunate if I get an interview (which I really don’t think is likely; I have a couple of strikes against me). However, if I get the job, then the travel/relocation crisis in our marriage shifts from the necessity of Alex leaving her home to the necessity of me leaving mine. Sigh.

Perversely, compromise doesn’t work in this situation. If we met each other halfway, we’d have to live here. And we’d both have to leave our homes and comfort zones. Nobody wins. Relashunships iz hard.

1. but also, you must admit, a little awesome! [↩]
2. in the colloquial sense [↩]

I squint my raccoony lady-macbethy eyes, beardface.

Rowan the Witch will Eat Your Children

So, MacBeth is over, and Alex is crashing a bit. It’s been exhausting, I think. 7 performances, 2 per day, no breaks. Naturally, Alex misses the cast, crew, etc. from what was a great production. Me, I’m tired, but not as much.  I’m extremely sad to be going home, but anxious to get back in touch with my job, which seems to have had a development or two (of the not-good kind) in the few days I’ve been gone.

Mostly, though, I’m sad.  7 more hours in this apartment.

So there’s MacBeth. Duncan took this same shot, basically, so this is similar (but a little, um, processed).

You all know I think Alex does a phenomenal job as Lady MacBeth. I have heard from enough other people to feel confident that it’s not just husbandly pride speaking, here. So I probably don’ t need to go on and on about that. The whole production, however, is simply great. There are stronger and weaker individual moments and individual performances, but the gestalt is very good. It’s a shame the Hamilton Spectator is blind to this kind of art happening in a city whose arts scene they purport to cover. Would they think this production is as good as the Dundas Little Theater and other community shows they regularly review? I don’t know, but it’s clear to me that it’s in the same league (and probably takes far more chances, creatively, than most other community theater presentations).

I know I shouldn’t have any favorite witches, but Lindsay (on the left; MacB’s right) is my favorite. She’s just so freaking creepy! That twitchy finger… ::shudder:: They’re all three amazing, however, so I don’t want to overlook Rowan or the highly-adorable Rakhee. The trio are my favorite MacBeth witches (in my somewhat-limited MacBeth connoisseurism), largely due to the director’s choices. They provide the connections between the scenes, and serve as something like the underlying substance from which everyone’s motivations derive. I like it, needless to say. If you haven’t seen this production, Run! Don’t walk! To the theater! Today! !!! (!!)

2 more highly-processed versions of this tableau scene after the jump Continue reading →

so. awesome. Stuff like this makes me miss my days of improv, theater, music, and messing with people in public places…