One for Sorrow

I was talking today about a thing on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week where there was this theory put forth that in order to have cool kids, you ought to not be cool parents. The idea being that cool parents produce dull kids and vice versa, since kids rebel. This is echoed in a Wired piece this week about geeks needing a wider, blander culture to react against or else you don't get creativity.

And I thought a lot of the appeal of these ideas is that it gives you a formula for creativity, a way of ensuring you can be cool, when in fact creativity and talent is often innate, unearned and unfair. Which is not to say that you either get sprinkled with the creativity dust at birth and you’re a prodigy and if you aren't you should just shut up and there's no hope for you and hard work means nothing--could not disagree with that more. I just don't think it's wholly created by your environment, doesn’t always fit in with your personality, at least not in a way that makes it easy. ( So I started thinking about my own tastes in things and whether I got them from my parents. )

Anyone else have relevant experiences in this area?

I saw Equus last night--feels like I have to mention that! What a wonderfully silly play, so crazy bizarre in a way only something written for the theater in 1973 could be. I was giggling madly (but totally silently and respectfully) through much of it—which should not be taken as a sign of contempt. It's just kind of delightful.

Okay, I did slam down a glass of wine at intermission after having Oreos for dinner and that might have encouraged more (still silent!) giggles, but it just made the play all the more awesome. I can not think of this play without thinking of one of my favorite episodes of The Golden Girls in which Dorothy (Bea Arthur) comes into breakfast and announces that the night before she went to see Lyle Waggoner and Sonny Bono in a dinner theater production of Equus. So there would be times in the show where I'd start imagining the scene played by Lyle and Sonny against my will. That’s, like, the ideal production of this play in my mind to which all others can never compare.

( More on the play within. )

This meant I couldn't watch Obama last night so I had to wait until this morning to feel warm and fuzzy at him.:-D

ETA: I forgot to mention that on the way I out I was donating to Broadway Cares and the guy holding the bucket was one of the horses. I was all, "Good job!" Because I think playing a horse in this play has to just be one of the funniest acting jobs. It just so sums up a certain kind of acting experience. And they're good with their coordinated stamping and walking--all the while wearing metal mesh horse heads and these kind of awesome wire sculptured hooves. But yeah, rock on, man! You are totally a horse!

It's that time of year again--Shakespeare's in the park! Last night I went to see Hamlet and totally enjoyed it. I've no idea what the reviews wll be like but if there's one thing I love it's funny!Hamlet and Michael Stuhlbarg is all about the funny. That makes it particularly hilarious that his uncle is Andre Baugher because the idea of him dealing with this kid as a stepson is just...funny.

But he definitely had some competition in scene-stealing from Sam Waterston. Okay, I adore SW in general but he was so adorable as Polonius I wanted to take him home and call him grandpa. It makes me wish Jack McCoy would walk into the courtroom one day on L&O and start crowing about tragical-comical-historical-pastoral!

The whole cast fit together really well, actually, which was nice. They particularly managed to constantly get laughs just from the way they said different characters names (I would try to explain that but you have to hear it in context.) My friend thought the beginning was a little shaky since it was very sort of stylized OTT--she thought it was very old school Hamlet, starting on a high note. But then, it does start on a high note. When Hamlet first arrived and started bawling all over the place I was worried but in the end that actually really fit since he was always swooping from one big emotion to another. He almost seemed more like his natural self when he was being mad, jumping around and randomly doing jigs all over the place.

I was trying to think of how to describe his performance and I found myself thinking this was what you might get if Sokka played Hamlet. He definitely kept my interest the whole time.

Oh, and with the duel it was wonderfully bloody. It reminded me of that scene in The Addams Family where Wednesday and Pugsley do the end scene and soak the whole audience in fake blood.

This post is about a week late--last weekend there was an article in the NYTimes--a sort of silly article, actually--about the show Friday Night Lights. The article was suggesting that the show wasn't doing well because it had no fandom. Other people already pointed out that this hardly holds up. The Sopranos and 24 don't have fandoms and are popular, Supernatural and Smallville have active fandoms but low ratings.

Anyway, I had the same aversion to this show as a lot of people--could not care less about football. But I am interested in the idea of a town where being a football star at 16 is the high point of your life, so I gave it a try. I haven't gotten through the first season yet, but I like it!

The one odd thing I notice about watching it, and this sort of links back to my post before last, but ( I find myself scanning the background in crowd scenes looking for interesting looking people. )

The other day I saw Rock and Roll, the Tom Stoppard play. I really liked it and had a lot of things to say about it, but I don't know if any of them are really interesting if you haven't actually seen it.

I like Stoppard a lot, but I think his weaker plays (at least weaker to me) are ones where the characters seem to just be there to voice ideas. It makes me want to argue with them or agree with them. In the better ones you can see why a specific character needs the ideas they have. The character is expressing something about themselves through their philosophy.

This play dealt a lot with the person/body vs. the mind. My favorite character wound up being Esme, the flower child--the least articulate and educated of any character--which is lonely in a Tom Stoppard play.

The thing is, I usually don't have much time for the whole flower child thing, and I didn't even know this character was getting to me until I got all emotional over her when the play got to 1990. She was played by Sinead Cusack, who's always great--and Rufus Sewell was, unsurprisingly, great too. As was Brian Cox. I know, another surprise.

More theater! Last night I went to see Cyrano with Kevin Kline. My friend and I had really cheap seats but they turned out to be *great*--almost right on the stage. ( Spoilers for Cyrano within. )

If there's anybody who can explain Harold Pinter's "Homecoming" to me I'd be obliged. I just saw the revival on Broadway and...wtf? It wasn't just that it was kind of offensive with the whole "We like your wife so we thought she should stay here and have sex with us and we'll rent her out as a prostitute and she's up for that" idea it was that everybody was so obviously a character in a play.

What I mean is, most of the conversations were so bizarre, with people just trading random stories and ideas instead of actually having a conversation. You know that scene in Annie Hall where Christopher Walken has that creepy monologue about wanting to crash his car? It works because he's telling it to Alvy who, like the audience, recognizes that this is a strange thing to be saying. In "The Homecoming" that speech would have been responded to with another weird monologue, or perhaps some strange demand that got the other person upset for reasons I could not fathom.

And the thing is, I don't think it's that I just need everything to be ultra realistic. People don't actually talk to each other the way they do in Shakespeare either. But at least I get what they're feeling and what they want. With this one I throw up my hands and admit I'm not cool or smart enough to get it.

Acting-wise it was pretty good. Ian McShane was unsurprisingly good, though this doesn't make up for his taking part in the awful Dark is Rising movie. I liked him and James Frane (from The Tudors) the most. Especially James Frane because he played his part in the last act of the play as if he actually realized all these people were nuts. Also the two of them were English so I wasn't worried about their accents. Michael McKean's was pretty good though--I liked him. The weakest for me accent-wise was Raul Esparza. It wasn't that it was so bad, I just couldn't relax and listen to it.

Anyway, that was my latest theater going experience. I do not understand Harold Pinter.

Got to see Romeo and Juliet last night in the park. I honestly didn't think we'd get in--or I wouldn't, because I was far back on the line from petiteseour. We got worried when it wasn't raining--for ten years it seems like every time we go to SitP it pours, so it seemed like a bad sign when it wasn't. This year we bought ponchos and weren't afraid to use them.

So it turned out there was just another problem. Curtain was at 8 but at 9:45 we were still waiting. There was a problem with the turntable thingie that took a while to fix. I was next to an interesting guy on line, though, who said he had just finshed a script on comic book history. I asked him what part and he said EC comics. I was all, "I LOVE EC comics! And a friend of mine in high school's father worked for them." I told him who it was and he was all, "OMG, he's awesome! Look, he's in my script!" Anyway, it was an interesting conversation--and his son was there too and we talked about the books he read in school that year that were all coming-of-age stories. Catcher in the Rye was his favorite, his least favorite was The Chocolate War.

( And then the show... )

I feel like I just started some important project last night but really I just saw a play. Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" is a trilogy, and I just saw the first part "Voyage." It's about a circle of Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth centur: Michael Bakunin, Nicholas Stankevich, Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev. In last night's show they were all young and stupid--especially Michael Bakunin. Ethan Hawke did a great job playing somebody who was charismastic and idealistic and thinks the universe revolves around him. Billy Crudup was also great as Belinsky.

On the way out I pushed through what I swear I thought was a group of college students standing around near the entrance and then realized it was the cast I just saw. Billy Crudup is a tiny, tiny man.

There were times when the play actually reminded me of lj, I guess because it's one modern place where people sometimes get very intense about ideas. There's one scene where someone is considering printing a new essay in a newspaper and he's discussing getting it past the censors. He says, "I think we can do it if we change a couple of words. Two, in fact. "Russia" and "we." He suggests changing it to "certain people," like "Certain people are neither east nor west..." "The Rennaissance passed certain people by..." It reminded me of those lj posts where people try to respond to a post without referencing the actual post because that might be wanky.

So two more plays to go...

petitesoeur and I had great luck last night taking a chance on Shakespeare in the Park We got on the stand-by line after 7 and got tickets--woo-hoo!

( Shakespeare in the Park )

That just made me think of ( another random HP thought I had when reading a comment somewhere yesterday. )

Yesterday I made the incredibly time-consuming decision to create tags, which took me hours. Made me realize I have a lot of theater tags, and I don't do posts for every play I see even. Which leads up to the fact that I went to the theater last night to see History Boys, which is awesome and from London. Naturally any time you get Great British Thespians in a room at least one of them has to have been in a Harry Potter movie. This play had two, Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon) and Frances de la Tour (Madam Maxine). ( The History Boys-mild spoilers within )