Stuff and Moonshine

I’ve a job interview for Thursday, might lead to something, you never know.

Andrew’s been feeling a little better lately—we got a referral to a pain clinic a while back and some adjustment of his meds. It seems to be helping, and he’s been getting out for walks pretty frequently, at least till yesterday when the air-quality outside dropped. Apologies to everyone Stateside who’s also had to deal with the wildfire smoke.

I’ve begun volunteering with the local community theatre. We had the first production meeting for Bus Stop, and now I have to put together costumes for two diner waitresses and a seedy college professor. The head of costuming is doing the other five characters. She costumed the last production of the show thirty years ago, and says the gingham skirts she made for the waitresses might still be around somewhere, but I sort of hope we don’t find them, as I think those blue or green uniforms with the white collars would be more period-appropriate.

We watched A Matter of Life and Death (1946) last night—Andrew had never seen it before, and I’d never seen the whole thing all the way through. Andrew commented that it was the most solidly real surrealism he’d ever seen. Thinking of maybe watching Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) later. It’s also got an afterlife setting, as well as a score by Gogol Bordello; Shea Whigham (playing a character based on the lead singer of Gogol Bordello); and Tom Waits. Fanvid here (contains spoilers)

Watched Under the Volcano (1984), still processing it.

Sunday I watched One For the Pot -- this is the Shaw Festival production from, I think, the late ‘eighties-- there was a revival at the Shaw in the mid-‘90s, but I seem to remember seeing this tv broadcast as a middle-schooler. Or rather, I caught the third act, was able to tape it on the family VCR, and watched it over and over.

Seeing the entire play for the first time, I’m struck by how provisional the set-up actually is. Oh, Mr. Hardcastle wishing to find Billy Hickory Wood, the long-lost son of his late friend and business partner, and settle part of his fortune upon him, makes sense enough. And Billy having a separated-at-birth twin, Rupert Hickory Wood, raised with a posh accent and little else—well, that’s just the rules of comedy. But half the cast have no real reason to be doing what they’re doing. Jugg the butler cheerfully demands bribes for each assist; but Rupert seems to just get caught up in the inertia of mostly-innocent Billy and his scheming boss Charlie. And there’s no reason for Hardcastle’s arty daughter Amy to fall in love with Rupert at first sight, except that she does.

It helps if you regard it all as not so much a farce plot as a parody of one, with all the tropes amped up. Identical twins raised separately? Let’s throw in a third as the curtain comes down on Act II. There are walk-on characters, offstage characters, and a running gag where one or another of the party guests is always wandering by in search of the ballroom. There are so many plot threads some of them have to be thrown away as soon as they’re introduced: Clifton’s blackmail scheme is foiled almost without effort, because  he's made the mistake of being a genuinely unpleasant villain in a story full of loveable comic rapscallions and they have the power of slapstick on their side. This is, after all, a play written in 1959 but set in a vaguely-Wodehousian, vaguely early-1930s country manor. Will somebody get doped up? tied up? forced to don drag in order to seduce a myopic family solicitor? Damn right they will.

By the third act (the part I saw as a kid) the whole thing has achieved escape velocity and everybody’s slamming doors too quickly for the audience to worry about whether any of it makes sense. We’re not watching it for sense, we’re watching for the pleasure of seeing the late Heath Lambert be a human shell game, swapping out accents and ducking into doorways so he can pull a Texas switch with one of his body doubles. Logic is for murder mysteries.

It’s an anthology of local ghost stories (also one loosely based on a personal experience, which imo is the best one).

Shivers, 2023

Spike Lee-directed concert film for a 2019 Broadway performance by David Byrne, backed by a marching/dancing band, mostly percussionists. Everyone’s in grey two-piece suits and barefoot on a mostly bare stage, but it’s the reverse of dreary. The most memorable song was “Bullet,” sung by Byrne next to a single light source:

The bullet went into him
His skin did part in two
Skin that women had touched
The bullet passed on through
The bullet went into him
It went its merry way
Like an old grey dog
On a fox's trail

If someone told me the lyrics to this were a translation of a Lorca poem, or a partisan song from the Spanish Civil War, I wouldn’t be surprised, but the end credits say it’s Byrne (and Brian Eno), and the two songs in the show that are settings (‘I Zimbra”) or covers (“Hell You Talmbout”) he mentions beforehand who wrote originated them (Hugo Ball, Janelle Monae). On the other hand, someone familiar with Dadaist poetry may well have been drawing influence from Lorca as well.

Anyway, good show, good film, made me want to dance awkwardly.

Me: So, are Lilac Time and Blossom Time the same show under different titles? (checks Wikipedia) Huh. Weird.

Apparently, they’re different English-language adaptations of the same Viennese operetta in which Franz Schubert shows up as a character and in some versions, so does his music. Or pastiches of his music.

Poor Schubert – he could seldom get any of his works performed publicly, and then he had such a lurid afterlife as a character in other people’s stage shows and movies. Often played by performers who were significantly older than he was when he died. Sort of the same thing happened to Toulouse-Lautrec, I suppose. For my part I can never bring myself to see either man’s life as a tragedy.

Ah, the joys of fangirling over long-ago, not that well-known actors. I'm not even linking to the images where my reaction is something like "I have no idea what context could possibly explain this."




*I mean, I looked up the play, but I still don't know if they were the leads or what. I hope they were, because as I said, DAMN.

Dreamt that I had volunteered as a gofer for some small theatre production.

It was basically the most realistic dream about a theatre production ever, because I just sat on a riser, waiting for them to need me for something, while the set designer tinkered with a mechanical device that was going to play a part in the opening act.

I think I may have fallen asleep from boredom a couple of times *in* the dream.

My parents got us tickets to see Camelot today, and drove us from Hamilton to Stratford and back (the Toronto-Hamilton leg was by GO bus, not as yet on strike.) Geraint-Wynn (Forever Knight) Davies played Arthur. Don't recall who played Guinevere and Launcelot but they were both very good (and it's very hard to make Guinevere not come across as childish and annoying, at least in the first half.) Brent Carver played Merlin/King Pelinore (liked him better as Pelinore, but then he gets more to do). There was a live falcon in the opening scene. Also unsure who played Mordred in the second half but he came across as Blackadder+Loki, only also Scottish. Mwahahahaha.

Afterwards mom was determined for some reason that we should eat at Swiss Chalet; the first one we went to had moved - the second one was the new location, but was overwhelmed with diners; another forty-odd minutes later we finally came to a third and could stop for supper.

Camelot=easy to get to. Swiss chalet, not so much.