Over the Misty Mountains and beyond the barricade

In which our Diva has recently spent a number of highly satisfying hours in the dark

'Tis the season for actually getting out to the cinema more often than usual, and with two highly-anticipated adaptations of things near and dear to my heart for many years, this year has been no exception.

First up was The Hobbit, which I'm not too proud to admit I've seen three times. Two of those were in the much-discussed HFR (high frame rate) format, which, while I see where those who dislike it are coming from, I'm going to have to declare myself in favor of. (Though it's interesting that it's the frame rate that's getting all the attention, when I think a lot of the look also comes from the RED-EPIC camera's extremely high resolution.) It took a little getting used to -- as I've been explaining it, my brain spent a good chunk of the prologue switching between interpreting what I was seeing as "video" or "right in front of me" before cementing a new perceptual category -- but by the time Bilbo was unexpectedly accumulating Dwarves in his dining room, I didn't find it obtrusive at all.

Much has been made of it as a vehicle for showing the sweeping vistas of New-Zealand-as-Middle-earth, but I was equally struck by how much it allows the audience to see the finest nuances of an actor's performance. And there are plenty of those to be seen in The Hobbit, from the entire ensemble. The fun part about seeing it more than once was being able to watch all the character stuff going on in the background, and there's plenty to see. Thorin looking out for his nephews, and his nephews (particularly Kili) looking to him for cues on how to behave and whether they're impressing him. Balin keeping a weather eye on his long-grown-up protege. All sorts of other things that make the huge troop of characters distinctive and memorable.

Speaking of capturing performances, of course, Andy Serkis' time covered in little dots was tremendously well spent as always. Without detracting from the tremendous technical and, yes, artistic skill of the team who put Gollum's image on the screen, it's been great over the past several years to see that people understand that their work isn't replacing the actor -- as some doomsayers were predicting for a while there -- but providing a new way to change his appearance, as the artistry of costume designers and makeup artists has done for centuries before them. The technical advances made since the Lord of the Rings trilogy a decade ago have been entirely in the service of all the more faithfully showing us his work, with greater capacity to capture nuances of expression like the movement of tiny muscles around his eyes. Anyone who tries to tell you what he does -- and what we see -- isn't acting? Has no idea what they're talking about.

And yeah, New Zealand is pretty too, and the production design is as gorgeous as ever. Impressive production values don't make a movie good, but they also don't prevent it from having heart, and there's plenty here. The seven-year-old kid who loved the book, and who went on to plunge into the rest when her reading level would allow it, has grown up very happy with what this team has created on screen.

If the adventures of the Company of Thorin had me grinning at the screen for the better part of (three times) three hours, I was just as happy to spend a similar stretch of time mostly crying my eyes out. Though, after some 25 years of familiarity with Les Miserables, I really should have known better than to go with only two measly kleenex in my purse! I ended up clutching a useless sodden ball by the time the barricade was going up. Oops.

A good chunk of that is down to Anne Hathaway's absolutely heartrending Fantine, though again, I was happy with all the performances. I have a quibble here and there with voices, despite having accepted years ago that movie-musical singing is different from musical theatre singing in much the way movie acting is different from theatre acting. And, in much the same way, it's evolving to keep pace with technical developments and audience tastes. But all the characters were right there, newly vivid in many ways as they were illuminated by the perspective of film and the tweaks to the text. Closeups and angles provide opportunties for minor characters -- notably little Eponine and several of the students -- to shine in non-verbal moments that might go unnoticed on stage.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is, it's amazing, they did an amazing job. Not that there was anything wrong with my faith in the future of the movie musical, but I still feel really really good about it now.

I know these are both HUGE movies that don't need any help from me. But sometimes the blockbusters really do have the heart and the art. And this is my blog, and it's the holidays, and I felt like gushing about movies that make me happy.

I hope you're finding things this holiday season that make you happy too.

Women's Work

In which our Diva heads back on stage and back in time

One of the best groups of theatre people anywhere, Babes With Blades, has a fabulous in-depth New Plays Development Program, and much to my delight they've invited me to be part of it again. I'm one of the cast for the public reading of Deeds Not Words: The Rise of The Jujitsu Suffragettes by Anne Bertram, which tells the complex story of members of the Women's Social and Political Union fighting for the vote. I had the opportunity to take part in a closed reading earlier in the development process, so it's extra cool to see how the play has evolved and be there for its first bow in front of an audience.


There's far more history here than can be told in a single play, of course, but it's a fascinating story that I think will engage audiences while they're in the theatre and hopefully afterward too.  It's not just about how a group of suffrage activists came together with Edith Garrud to learn to defend themselves with martial arts in a manner one might not immediately associate with middle-class British ladies in 1913. The fracturing of the movement, the personal cost as leaders began to move in different political directions, is at the heart of the drama. It's a story well worth the telling.


The public reading of Deeds Not Words will be held at The Second Stage (3408 N. Sheffield, Chicago) at 1 p.m. on October 22. Admission is free.

After that (well, in the midst of it, actually, since the rehearsal schedules are concurrent) I'll be doing my first musical (yay!!) in several years, as Marmee in Little Women with GreenRoom Productions. I picked up the book from the library on the way home from work, since I last read it when I was about 9. It's... large. I don't remember it being that large. Mind you, I was a pretty hardcore reader as a kid, so it doesn't really surprise me that I don't remember it being daunting or anything. I do remember it being an emotional rollercoaster, and the snippets I've heard so far of the show's score (it's a different adaptation from the one produced on Broadway a few years back) promise to serve that purpose very well indeed. I'm excited to revisit it as an adult, with an eye toward identifying with Marmee instead of Jo! (I always feel like I should pick one of the other girls, like identifying with Jo is a bit cliche, but, well.)


Little Women runs two weekends, December 10-18, at the Cosman Theater in Huntley, IL.  Tickets are $20 in advance ($15 for students and seniors), and will be available online at the GreenRoom website sometime shortly after their current production of Doubt closes.


If you can make it to either or both shows, I'd love to see you!

The history books will clean it up

In which our Diva celebrates independence in a musical way

Love this movie so, so much. Of course, TCM is starting it fifteen minutes after I have to leave for the theatre! Only a matinee today, so that we can grill and gawk at fireworks with our families. (Remember, six more performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream!)



Yes, it's about a bunch of landholding white men squabbling amongst themselves. Make no mistake, what they made in that hot room in Philadelphia was a beginning. It's still a work in progress.

And so long as that work continues, it's worth celebrating. Have a safe and happy Fourth!

A few of my favorite things

In which our Diva has been neglecting her blog again. Bad Diva. No cookie.

Watch: Being Human, the BBC series that sounds like the setup for a joke -- a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost share a pink house in Bristol -- but is in fact one of the more brilliant things to hit my TV in years. Anyone who knows me knows that my favorites list has always included various supernatural dramas, but the main thing that sets this one apart is its intimate scope. No Chosen Ones, no cosmic prophecies, no apocalypse-of-the-week. Just three people who happen to have some extraordinary problems, building their own weird little family. Even when they do inevitably get caught up in larger circumstances, the focus remains on protecting that family. Saving the world is a bit out of their league, just as it is for the rest of us.

Like all good fantasy, it isn't really about monsters. It's about how life is frequently and drastically unfair, but we find ways to make it worthwhile anyway. And how what really matters is looking out for the people we love. The three mid-twenties stars -- Russell Tovey, Lenora Crichlow, and Aidan Turner -- are individually superb, and collectively a perfect storm of ensemble chemistry. And creator/writer Toby Whithouse (who has written, among other things, the milestone "School Reunion" episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the revived Doctor Who) has a knack for defying cliche, and for acknowledging the absurdity in dramatic situations without lessening their impact. For those on this side of the pond, BBC America has already aired the first season, and has announced plans to run the second (which has just finished in the UK) and third (which will be starting production soon).

Eat: It's the time of year again for my two greatest vices: Cadbury's Creme Eggs and Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. I've already stocked up on the former, stashing boxes in odd corners of the freezer to be rediscovered throughout the year. The latter have thus far eluded me. At this rate I'm going to have to start going from grocery store to grocery store until I spot a table of earnest little girls. I need my fix!

Read: Currently I'm in the middle of Derek Parker's lively biography of Nell Gwyn, the most famous mistress of the famously randy Charles II. It's unpretentious, full of all kinds of cool incidentals about Restoration theatre, and generally a very enjoyable read.

Listen: The other day, my mental soundtrack randomly started running Clara and Fabrizio's soaring duet that closes the first act of The Light in the Piazza, so I've been playing the cast album a lot. Still bowled over every time by the heartfelt performances and the utter beauty of the score. Still cry at two or three points every single time. If there's a "the" Broadway composer of this generation, Adam Guettel is probably it.

Opening night!

In which Broadway comes to Elgin tonight and tomorrow

Broadway Night! will be presented on Friday, July 10 and Saturday, July 11 at 8:00 PM. A variety of singers, including Solange Sior (Elgin), Susan Dennis (Bartlett), Robert Jastrebski (Arlington Heights), Charles Martin (Elk Grove Village), Valerie Meachum (Elgin), Kimberly & Brittany Albrecht (Barrington), Jori Jennings (Chicago), Kendra Wieneke (Barrington), Lindon Warren (Round Lake Beach), Marianna Adaire (Evanston), Nicole Teram (Chicago), Tatiana Ranallo (Gilberts) , Annamarie Schutt (South Elgin), and Gabriella Stocksdale (Elgin) will perform excerpts from Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Porgy & Bess, The Sound of Music, Annie, Show Boat, South Pacific, Songs for a New World, and The Light in the Piazza, and music by Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill.

All Events and Performances will be held at the Kimball Street Theatre, located on the first level of the new Rider Center, on the Campus of Elgin Academy, 261 Dundee Avenue, Elgin, IL 60120. (Visit our website at www.elginopera.org for map and directions.) Tickets are $18 for Adults and $15 for Seniors and Students. Discounted prices for members of the Elgin OPERA Guild.

Hope to see you there!

And the beauty is, I still meet people I know

In which our Diva is holding breath and keeping fingers crossed

Posting on the fly. If I stop and think about how much I have going on through the rest of this summer, it's enough to make my head spin! So I'm just being in one place at a time and loving it. (And not thinking too much about how my house looks kinda like we were raised by wolves.)

The first concert of Elgin Opera's first Summer Music Festival is this weekend's "Broadway Night." Download a PDF of the festival brochure, and come join us!

There are a million things I want to post about right now, and no time to put them into words! Remember, if you ever want to know where and when you can see me performing live, check the events calendar on my website.

Song for today: "The Beauty Is" from The Light in the Piazza, which I get to sing in this weekend's program. I love Clara's sense of wonder and adventure, finding commonality with a foreign place and people. I hope I always remember how to approach the world that way.

Shiny things for your Thursday

I have decided that "Love & Fairy Tales" is an okay name, but we should have called it Die Flederflöte. Or Die Zaubermaus.

Watch: Harper's Island, premiering tonight at 10 Eastern on CBS in the US and Global in Canada. I started out looking forward to it because it means Gina Holden on my TV, and she blogged a bit about it during filming. Now I'm looking forward to it because it looks really nifty in general, and in particular because I love that a major US network is experimenting with the British model of telling a full-season story with a definite end.

Read: The "Hollows" series by Kim Harrison, starting with Dead Witch Walking. We're up to our eyebrows in kickass urban fantasy heroines these days -- not that you'll catch me complaining! -- but Rachel Morgan is easily my favorite (at least of those whose authors haven't moved on to other worlds). I have a thing for protagonists who really really really want to do the right thing, but who need to be grabbed and firmly shaken on a fairly regular basis. Rachel is definitely that, and Harrison's universe is a seriously nifty place to tell stories in.

Listen: The Secret Garden. Still the most shimmeringly gorgeous score ever composed for Broadway, with an amazing cast including Mandy Patinkin, Rebecca Luker, and (pre-Hedwig) John Cameron Mitchell.

Eat: Southwestern BBQ Chicken Salad from Portillo's. Yum!

Thus endeth my plugging for today. :-D

And if you call me 'Emma baby' one more time, I will scream

So. Bailiwick is looking for an understudy for Tell Me On A Sunday. Which I adore and which nobody ever does.

"Must be able to rehearse the last two weeks of July and participate in tech the first week of August."

Y'know, exactly when I'm in the final blitz to have everyone dressed when Shrew opens July 26. And of course the show runs through the weekend I'm covering the Widow/Servant.

I hate linear time.

For one brief shining moment

TiVo is a marvelous contraption, for it caught Sunday's Live From Lincoln Center broadcast of the NY Phil's semi-staged Camelot, which I had no idea was happening on account of life-on-spin-cycle. Last night I decided to take an evening to sit down and watch it and decompress rather than try to Get Stuff Done, with the result that I think more Stuff might well Get Done tonight than might otherwise have last night and tonight together. (That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. *nodnodnodnodnod*)

While it was far from an ideal Camelot, it had its moments. Most of them provided by Nathan Gunn, who is, if not the BEST LANCELOT EVER, a ludicriously close second to Richard White. Yes, the opera star with (I'm given to understand) no musical theatre credits? Put everyone but maybe Marin Mazzie to shame. Serious whoa.

Christopher Lloyd as Pellinore = well, of course. Also, I'm reasonably certain there was some ad-libbed color in the description of the Questing Beast, among other things. Stacy Keach was a perfectly serviceable Merlin.

The book was shuffled oddly in a few places ("Before I Gaze" in Act II? Srsly?), and I remain convinced that if you're cutting anything, the entire Morgan LeFay scene should be the first to go (thus rendering the casting of Fran Drescher a moot point). It just doesn't fit. Hateithateithateit. (Probably doesn't help that I imprinted hard on the 1982 revival. But they were right to cut it! And wrong to cut "Fie on Goodness," which this one did too. I don't know if people don't want it to look like Mordred corrupts the knights too easily or what, but dude, that's the point: the Table was ALWAYS fragile. It represents change that's incredibly hard to implement, and incredibly easy to backslide from.) Haven't decided yet what I think of Goth!Mordred -- the whole production is an odd mix of contemporary and pseudo-period design, and there's a way in which it makes sense, but he's perhaps a bit too jarring.

Gabriel Byrne seems like a no-brainer for Arthur in theory (even if he hadn't started his movie career as Uther!), but in practice, errrrmm. Speak-singing still needs to have a bit more relationship to what the orchestra is doing. He plugged along pretty gamely, but he was the one you could really tell was underrehearsed and out of his element.

Which was a pity, because for the bits where the singing was taken out of the equation, there were some solid "oh, yeah, that" moments. Not that my heart doesn't break for any Arthur during Guenevere's aborted execution -- the scene is constructed to be pretty well cast-proof -- but you could see Mordred's lines ("Let her die, your life is over; let her live, your life's a fraud!") hitting him and cutting deep.

And of course I will never not get chills during the "Resolution" speech that closes Act I, and never not cry at the knighting of Tom of Warwick. Do justice to those, and you're allowed to be Arthur. (Even if Byrne did drop "not a man" after "I am a king," which gives me a cramp in my sense of rhetoric.)

I love that speech so very, very much...

Proposition: If I could choose from every woman who breathes on this earth, the face I would most love -- the smile, the touch, the heart, the voice, the laugh, the very soul itself, every detail and feature to the last strand of the hair -- it would all be Jenny.

Proposition: If I could choose from every man who breathes on this earth -- a man for my brother, a man for my son, and a man for my friend, it would all be Lance.

I love them. I love them and they answer me with pain. And torment. Be it sin, or not sin, they have betrayed me in their hearts, and that's far sin enough! I can see it in their eyes. I can feel it when they speak. And they must pay for it and be punished. I shall not be wounded and not return it in kind. I demand a man's vengeance!

Proposition: I am a king, not a man. And a very civilized king. Could it possibly be civilized to destroy the thing I love? Could it possibly be civilized to love myself above all? What about their pain? And their torment? Did they ask for this calamity? Can passion be selected? Is there any doubt of their devotion to me, and to our Table?

By God, I shall be a king! This is the time of King Arthur, when we shall reach for the stars. This is the time of King Arthur, when violence is not strength, and compassion is not weakness. We are civilized!

Resolved: We shall live through this together, Excalibur, they, you, and I. And may God have mercy on us all.

Chills, man. I know a lot of people who really hate the show, and I will never ever understand.

Where have all the singers gone?

(repost from my LJ, 12/9/05)

Interesting article: Where Have All The Singers Gone?

My reaction to Jekyll & Hyde on Broadway was not dissimilar to this writer's to a late-run performance of PotO -- I felt like the stage was full of people who had real voices in there somewhere that they weren't letting out. I couldn't even tell whether or not they knew how, although it seemed like they didn't. What's worse is that I was mentally contrasting them with the pre-Broadway tour I'd seen just two years before, with Robert Cuccioli, Linda Eder, and Christiane Noll. All of whom I therefore knew for a fact knew how to let the voice out -- but you might never know it from listening to Noll on the Broadway cast album! It was enough to make me start wondering if my memory of her voice in person in '96 was accurate, until cuts from The New Moon, a revival of a Victor Herbert operetta she starred in subsequent to J&H, started turning up on my Launch station, demonstrating the assured full soprano I was sure I'd heard in her Lisa (they hadn't changed her name to Emma yet). All I can think is that she was directed (like the King & I incident mentioned by Rebecca Caine in the linked article) to sing in a manner considered by Them What Was In Charge to be more "accessible." The result is that she sounds completely spineless -- which is exactly how the character of Emma is viewed by practically everyone I know who first encountered J&H in that form. She's not written that way at all, but I can't blame people for getting that impression when her voice has been gutted of its power.

Even at this level, I've been flat-out told at one audition to make it "less operatic and more Broadway." And in listening to what they encouraged, it didn't take long to figure out that they really meant "less Shirley Jones and more Kristin Chenoweth in the TV version." Considering that Kristin's rendition of "Till There Was You" on A Prairie Home Companion was one of the few things I've ever heard her do that I didn't much like, that sort of thing doesn't inspire me with confidence. Especially when what I was told to do it on was "My White Knight," the most full-out soprano number in the show! I don't want to hear a wispy Marian the Librarian, any more than I want to hear a wispy Emma Carew. Soprano jokes are identical enough to blonde jokes when we don't go around deliberately sounding like a bunch of six-year-olds!

That said, I'm curious to know when this article was written, because I do think sound vocal technique is at least on the way back to being recognized as an actual asset, partly as the general public is exposed to people like Idina Menzel or Norbert Leo Butz, who demonstrate (like the strong singers in the megamusicals of the 80s) that you can use sound technique in a pop idiom. There are options other than sounding like you should be wearing a horned helmet on the one hand, and sounding like your larynx has no access to your air supply on the other. I'm hearing singers again on recordings of newer shows, and I was despairing of that for a while. I still have hope that Rebecca Caine's comment that "my kind of voice is dead in musicals" is wrong.

Of course, one threat to the improvement trend is coming, ironically enough, from the renaissance of movie musicals, where the very "non-professional-singer" sound coming from the likes of Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger is repeatedly remarked upon as a good thing, and is rapidly becoming the standard of what people want to hear. Even in a quasi-classical score like PotO, where knowledgable critics and existing fans overwhelmingly trashed the bejeebers out of Emmy Rossum and Gerry Butler, but the new fans latched onto them as the gold standard. I wrote my own movie review intentionally judging them as pop performances rather than traditional, and I do still enjoy the movie. But it doesn't bode well for the future.

The conventional wisdom is that audiences won't accept classical technique because they don't "understand" it. Yet filmmakers use it for dramatic effect all the time. The exact same principles people are getting in a "subliminal" way in underscoring, and having no problem with, are what we're told they won't accept in the foreground. You don't have to understand what kind of soprano Renee Fleming is to feel the effect of her contribution to LotR. For that matter, people still watch The Sound of Music year after year. You think it matters if they "understand" Julie Andrews' voice?

Yes, some people hear a type of music they're not familiar with and just think it's weird, or fake, or whatever. But frankly, shoving unsuitable voices into it isn't going to change that very much. Meanwhile, in my experience a great many more people react positively -- even if it's "I don't know much about that stuff, but boy is it pretty," that's all it NEEDS to be. It's the myth of "elite" art that's getting in the way, not any actual incomprehensibility of the material.So, frustrating. But still hopeful spots too.