Coast of Utopia and etc.

So I have a bazillion things to catch up on, and this will be a vague attempt at a few of them.

I should be more present online again starting tomorrow night as wordsofastory will be back home for a couple of weeks before a brief stop here in the city before spending the summer in Cyprus digging stuff up.

Romeo + Juliet I already reviewed.

The next night we saw Coast of Utopia, pt. 2, and I remain frantically trying to get tickets for the final part. The second part is, I felt, a much more traditional play than the first, and while it's exactly what it needs to be compelled me less than the rather cinematic vision of the first. That said, everything about it remained inpeccable, and, more than the first, I feel a desperate need to read the thing to really look at what Stoppard is doing with Time and Truth in it as centered around the deaf boy, which sure, is a great device in general, but has particular interest to me.

The staging of the revolutionary stuff in France was particularly compelling, especially with the singing, and it really gave me chills and moved me to tears just for the sheer scale of it -- it put me in mind of the awe, but in a much darker way, that I felt at the end of Act II of Luhrmann's staging of Bohemme with that damn streamer cannon.

I talk a great deal about the theatre I was blessed to see as a child (Camelot with Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole in Pygmalion, Jerry Orbach in 42nd Street, things like Cats and Les Mis when they first opened and weren't only not a joke but were creations of a sort we had not been able to imagine at that time). It occured to me that this Coast of Utopia phenomena (and probably Luhrmann's Bohemme, as well) are on that scale of things that I'm astoundingly lucky to have seen and will be the subject of envy one day.

To my great glee, it turns out a CD is being released of the music for Coast of Utopia. There's an article about the music here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/arts/music/21coas.html that also includes some MP3s. Particularly listen to the opening theme and the curtain call; they're so evocative and have such great energy.

One of the stranger things that's stuck with me from both parts 1 and 2 were the curtain calls. Part of it is how exceptionally well choreographed they are (curtain calls always feel like last minute disasters to me when I'm in them), but it's also a sense of how between fact and fiction I find them -- with the thematic music and the victorious, almost martial, staging of them -- is this the heroes of the play celebrating? or the actors? There's a real gleaming pride in these curtain calls and a ferociousness to the body language from all the actors and it interests me, both as a glance into the nature of performing something as insane as this piece, but also as a glance into the characters in a way that's out of Time (even more than the plays themselves) and into the authorial and directorial mindsets of the presentation. Anyway, go listen to the sound clips.

Yesterday I had a fabulous Baroque dance class that was rewarding and made me feel accomplished and then we went to Risotteria where I had a gluten-free Sicilian pizza with sausage. Half of it still awaits me in my refrigerator. I think it will be lunch tomorrow as tonight I think we're going to try to go to Tartine.

I'm off to Regency dance class now. And really the Coast of Utopia music is just buoyant. I wish that tsarina who is so into Russian literature and such could have seen it, as she'd be a valuable contributor to the discussion.

Meanwhile, I remain crazed that I still can't buy a copy of either the script or music for Stephen Sewell's Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon.

*whew*

Really good dance class today, and lots of exciting possibilities coming up too.

In other news -- if you want to piss me off, you need to have more imagination and skill than just subscribing me to a bunch of bestiality mailing lists. That said, you're still an asshole.