Long day yesterday.  Fun though.  Wrote for about an hour and a half in the morning, then off to work.  From work, went to dinner at the Italian Bistro.  It's a restaurant in a small chain and it's right across Broad from the Academy of Music where we were going afterward for the opera.   The food is decent and since they are on the Avenue of the Arts, they are used to getting people out in time for their curtain.  All in all, a good choice.  I had the veal parm and so did Tom.  I wished I had room for dessert but, alas, had to forgo such delights or risk falling asleep at the opera, which would be humiliating!

The problem with commenting on an opera you've only heard once is that it takes a while for music to sink in and become familiar enough to recognize the nuances that will make it a favorite.  At least with Cyrano, though, I knew the story and had seen the play recently, which meant I could concentrate on the music and the production itself.

The production was amazing.  Tom said that it arrived in six trailer trucks, and I can well believe it.  The opera world is know for extravagant productions--live elephants onstage have been known.  So it takes a lot to impress an opera-goer.  But--wow!  The curtain opens to a crowd scene--with a huge crowd--staged as if Rembrandt had painted it, all dark sepias and umbers with bright splashes of color on one or two figures.  The architectural staging around the crowd felt solid and real.  Gasp-worthy.  All of the sets were lovely and elaborate, and required fairly extended curtains for scene changes, but the first was the most amazing and stands up to anything I've seen in the theater.

The singing was fine, excellent for the most part.  I actually thought that the soprano had a couple of not-so-great moments, but nothing to actually wince about.  But the duet when Cyrano and Christian hatch their plot to woo Roxanne was brilliant--I embarrassed myself by going "wow" (very quietly, thank heaven!) as the curtain fell.  But it was a wow moment.  There was a march that was fun as well, and the scene in the bakery, where the baker is preparing to receive his poet-friends and Cyrano is preparing to meet Roxanne, opens with the requisite ballet sequence, which was bakery maids in peasant work-clothes dancing folkdance-style (no point shoes!) in a ring to a waltz while extolling the brioche lyre made by their employer.  Delightful!  There were all the requisite bravura pieces for two or three or four.  What I missed, though, was the sing-able solo tune.  The final act had a duet that was very song-like, but I think the opera, which otherwise sounded like it could have been written by a rival influenced by Puccini, gave its one major concession to modern opera by not giving us that great "Nessun Dorma" go home humming off-key tune.  

Then off to bed.  Yay, opera!

They are doing tractor square dancing on the PA channel.  Promenade your partner, on matching antique tractors.  The "girls" are chunky dudes in Mother Hubbard hats.  Did you know the "grand square" is impossible to do on a tractor?  But, you can do a fair semblance of one.  They practice every week.

Awesome!

Though, not quite as cool as the steam shovel ballet.

Thought I'd catch up on some of the stuff I've been doing around town.

It took a while to write that post.  The tractor square dancing has really lost its luster!

Went to New York with waytoocoolrev on Tuesday to see Cyrano.  Dinner at Tony DiNapoli 's was fun and quite tasty--we had Caprese salad, mozzarella and tomatoes, with basil, and raviolis, which were both very good, and the best cheesecake ever--light and fluffy, not dense and heavy at all.  Rolled out and down to the theater for Cyrano.  There was a scene in the beginning, before Cyrano shows up, that seemed a little sluggish and lacking direction, but once Cyrano shows up--perched among the stage lights in front of the side box--the play takes off and we are on the run.  Cyrano is an interesting character because he is both wildly romantic and completely fatalistic about his chances for romance.  He has that preposterous huge nose, of course, and that huge intelligence and wit that he uses as a distancing mechanism. 

Cyrano's world is full of dashing soldier-poets.  Ladies demand to be wooed with intelligence as well as good looks.  Cryano has the intelligence, Christian has the looks, and between them they woo the fair Roxanne (Jennifer Garner).    There is no happy ending.  Cyrano is a prisoner of his own sense of honor.  And the play reels between broad farce (the balcony scene pastiches Romeo and Juliet with an older, smarter, Cyrano supplying Romeo's dialog, and eventually delivering the dialog himself  when the handsome swain can't keep up.  It was, I think, the most lively and well-paced scenes in the play, and Jennifer Garner was marvelous as the demanding Roxanne.  Very yummy,

Unfortunately, we had to move our seats because of a rackety radiator, and I think we wound up in the cat's favorite spot.  I have been popping Benedryl like it was peanuts for the past two days.  Feeling a bit better today, though, and I no longer look like someone punched me in the eye, so I have high hopes for tomorrow!

 

The Stagehand union is on strike!  The theaters are dark, as of TONIGHT!  NO CYRANO! 

Fortunately, the hotel let me cancel, so at least I won't be paying for an empty hotel room in Princeton while I sit at home websurfing and whimpering instead of having dinner and Kevin Kline in New York!  Woe!

There is always Sunday, but Saturday is a total bust.

So the training seminar is kind of grueling, but nights have been fun.  Tonight we went to see the RSC do Coriolanus at the Kennedy Center.  The theater was quite small, so we felt close to all the action, and action there was aplenty.  War!  Domineering mother!  ungrateful nation (Rome)!  Man!pain!  Generals hugging and kissing!  Dramatic death scene!  Coriolanus is played by a very hot William Houston.  There are some oddly flat spots considering it is Shakespeare, but he always manages to wake you up with a battle, or a fight with mum, or, that man!kissing.

A good time was had by me!

Should be home tomorrow, then can kick back and catch up

Busy week, with Caroline or Change the winner event, at the bottom of the post. 

I went to Mom Charlotte's memorial today.  I didn't stay long--I'd had a migraine earlier, and I had that dizzy slightly off feeling, like you are half in your body and half drifting along slightly to the left.  Met some of the family members I hadn't met before, and some of the other friends.  And Aunt Bertha, who was Mom Charlotte's sister.

I've meet Aunt Bertha several times before, and in the way of friends and relatives, we each had heard enough about the other to feel that we knew each other much better than our passing meetings would dictate.  But it is impossible not to love people who love the same people as you do, especially if they have a prior claim of such longstanding.  Aunt Bertha has tickets to the Philly Pops, and so does Barb.  I am not so much a pops fan that I seek them out, being more to the extremes--rock n roll, or classical.  But I may have to get season tickets just to sit with Barb and Aunt Bertha and learn the hand-dance that the peanut gallery does in unison with Peter Nero at the end of each concert.

Barb and I have tickets to the Arden theater, which is just three blocks from home, tomorrow, and tickets for the Pennsylvania Ballet on the 16th.  We don't have season tickets to the ballet, but they are doing a new Carmina Burana with choreography by Matthew Neenan, whose work I really love.  I've seen his pieces at the Pennsylvania Ballet before, and he had a wonderful piece I mentioned back in September that I loved at the Fringe Festival.  And I love Orff's Carmina Burana (and wrote one of my favorite books to it, though it was, as happens, the book that almost nobody else in the whole world read).  So we are very excited about the new choreography.

Then the NSO.  I'm trying to figure  out if I can fit Spamalot into my budget or my calendar the following week.  And I have to pencil in some sleep, somewhere!

Sometimes, you just gotta love the dayjob.