Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

Next to Normal

I knew I wanted to see Next to Normal as soon as a friend in California recommended it last year. So when I saw that it was part of the Citadel Theatre’s 2012-13 season I bought a pair of tickets right away, thinking that for this show I’d probably want company. Unfortunately a cascade of complications overcame all my would-be companions, and I ended up going by myself to the last show of the run. I thought it was great. I’d been listening to the Broadway recording for a few months, before the show. When it looked like I wasn’t going to have company, I decided to protect my emotions by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia. I don’t know whether I regret that choice.

My general impression of the set was shiny. Shiny, and the opposite of cozy. The play was set in Seattle, so sometimes there were shimmery metallic representations of rainfall seen out the windows. Most of the scenes were in and around a two-story house designed by an architect, and the rest were in medical settings, so it made sense that the framework was all shiny metal trusses (probably they were polished aluminum and lit to look like chromium) and the furniture was all glass, chrome, and black leather. When I noticed the lighting, it was on the blue side. There was a shock-therapy scene emphasised by flashing lights which didn’t seem at all out of place in the rest of the set and lighting. What we saw before the play started was magical – it appeared to be a lighted house far away in a field of stars, and then somehow it looked like that faraway house became the stage set.

I was prepared for the story to be powerful and disturbing. But it was also much funnier than I expected. The protagonist Diana, played by Kathryn Akin, was witty, angry, and very likeable. The actor’s timing and body language showed the character in a wide range of mental, biochemical, and emotional states. Her daughter Natalie was also easy to identify with, while the Henry character was mostly a humorous contrast and distraction. I found the husband more self-serving than sympathetic, which certainly made the story more interesting than if he had fitted that stereotype of patient spouse.

The narrative moved quickly, with very short songs and lots of echoes and reprises, and not much dialogue between them. The voices and orchestra were good and well-balanced.

The performance at the Citadel Theatre was a co-production with Theatre Calgary, directed by Ron Jenkins.

Dinner by twitter

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On Sunday night I was hungry and I had transportation, so I decided to go to the Next Act Pub, where I don’t go very often. By the time I found a parking space in Old Strathcona, it was fashionably late and the pub was almost full, so I sat at the bar.

I asked the bartender to recommend some hoppy ale, and he served me an Alley Kat Orange Dragon Double IPA. I would definitely drink this one again. It was moderately hopped and had a sort of orange-peel citrus taste to it.

Then when I was reading the menu and contemplating dinner, the bartender reported that the Cameo Burger (the Next Act’s name for burger/sandwich special) was the Paul Reubens, their take on a Reuben sandwich. Before he was finished reciting the ingredients, I realised that reading the bar’s twitter-feed description of that sandwich was what had put the Next Act in my head in the first place, so I waited til he finished, told him so, and ordered the sandwich along with fries.

The official description of the Paul Reubens is “the amazing Paul Reubens cameo!! Corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, pickle and homemade sauce on marble rye.” It was a really good version of a Reuben sandwich, with lots of meat but not enough that it fell apart, and savoury fresh marble-rye bread lightly grilled with – I don’t know if it was butter or oil, but the grilling added to the satisfying mouthfeel. The fries were thin and crisp and not too salty.

Also, from my seat at the bar I could read the show posters on the wall, and I saw signs for at least two interesting plays closing that day that I hadn’t known about before. Which is another good reason to go to the Next Act more often.

Spring Awakening: two local productions

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This year I’ve seen two local productions of Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater Broadway musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 stage play. I know there was a Citadel Young Company production last year, but I didn’t see that. I haven’t seen or read the original play, but I’m going to get the script from our library and read it. I saw the Strathcona Alumni Company production at the Fringe festival, and then the Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts production in early November directed by Jim Guedo.

It’s interesting, seeing two productions so close together and comparing them. The sets, staging, and dance moves were very similar. One thing that’s bothered me since encountering the play for the first time at the Fringe was how much the story seemed focused on the two main male characters, Melchior and Moritz, rather than the main female character, Wendla. But after seeing the MacEwan production, I had a more balanced impression. I don’t know if it was because the actor playing Wendla in the MacEwan production, Kayla Nickel, was stronger, or whether there were some directorial choices involved, but I was more comfortable with that aspect of the MacEwan production.

When I first saw the Fringe production, not knowing the story ahead of time, I felt like parts of it dragged a bit. This second viewing was at an advantage for me, then, because this time around it felt like a stark compelling series of events rushing to some awful conclusions. And I was better able to take in some nuances, because I wasn’t quite as busy being shocked. For example, in the scene about disclosure of child abuse I hadn’t noticed before that the abuse-victim and the abuse-survivor finish the song together in a way that feels like support and solidarity, the only possible way to make that bit at least somewhat hopeful.

I didn’t find the Moritz character quite as likeable in the MacEwan production as I did in the Strathcona Alumni one, but I don’t know why.

Bloodless

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On a business trip to Toronto, I read the tourist magazines looking for some kind of theatre event that would fit in my schedule and my budget. I considered The Normal Heart at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, but it was sold out at the only times I was free. I ended up choosing “Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare”, a new Canadian Theatre 20 musical about the serial murderers in 19th century Edinburgh who sold their victims’ bodies to a medical school. It was at one of the big Mirvish theatres, the Panasonic Theatre, which is a modern functional space on Yonge Street with a tiny lobby and the bathrooms in the basement, rather than one of the ornate refurbished theatres like the Elgin or Royal Alex. I picked this show because it seemed less predictable or tourist-oriented than most of them. People who go to a matinee of a musical on a weekday seem to be mostly old people or school groups.

Reviewers didn’t like it much, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was neat that it got its start as a Winnipeg Fringe show three years ago. There were about 14 people in the cast, with the ensemble smoothly filling various minor roles and moving scenery between scenes. I liked the way that it started out with a sort of likeable-scoundrels tone but gradually darkened as it drew us in, showing conflicts between the conspirators as they attempt to define and redefine what’s not okay, and showing the disturbing class-based double standards, depending on who the victim was and also contrasting the doctor who purchased the bodies and the hand-to-mouth labourers who provided them.

The sets were simple and not distracting. The period costumes were fun to look at. The production is new enough that it doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia or a cast recording on iTunes, and there wasn’t any souvenir merchandise for sale in the lobby either.

Worth Doing Badly

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In early 2006 I worked through the exercises in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The exercises are designed to free people up from various things blocking them from being creative. I haven’t re-read the book since, but I recently got thinking about how many concepts from that book I am habitually or occasionally putting into my life, and about what creative explorations have illustrated those concepts in the intervening years.

Morning pages One of the customs advocated in the book is to start each day writing three longhand pages of stream-of-consciousness. This isn’t just a practice for writers, but something that helps anyone. I occasionally do this or something similar. It’s surprisingly hard to start the day just with handwriting before turning on the computer, but when I do it, I feel less stuck and it’s easier to then focus on tasks at hand afterwards.
Artist’s dates Another concept in the book (and in the author’s later works) is to periodically do things alone just for fun and art, whether it’s playing with modelling clay or going to a gallery or movie. I actually do that kind of stuff alone all the time – visiting the Muttart Conservatory is one of my favourites – and it’s funny to think about when I was doing the exercises and making that a special effort.
Permission to do multiple projects I didn’t realise how much better this was for me until I started quilting in 2007. If I wasn’t in the precision-focused mood for squaring up blocks and unpicking seams that weren’t right, which one project needed, I could still be productive on quilting another project or picking out fabric for a new one. Getting rid of that echo of my mother’s voice about finishing one thing before starting another or I would never finish anything turned out to be astonishingly helpful. I realised that the same thing worked in my teaching work, in my camp planning work, and in tidying the house, and when I wrote a story with multiple viewpoints for NaNoWriMo, I often jumped to the next character’s narration when stuck on one, and then went back to fill in later.
Clearing up to clear space for creativity At the same time, Julia Cameron also suggested various exercises about clearing out projects or possessions that we weren’t enjoying. One exercise was to go through dresser drawers and make decisions. Another was to pull out hibernated projects and either finish them or find a way to dispose of or repurpose them. I was surprised to find how empowering this was – I didn’t get rid of very many projects, but the ones I did made it seem easier and more enjoyable to finish others. Using this principle, when I got seriously into knitting after moving here, I dug out all the old partly-done knitting projects and all the yarn, got rid of a few things and found ways to finish almost everything. Ravelry helps motivate me with project tracking, and once or twice a year I make a point of finishing up hibernating projects, and feeling a huge accomplishment. Tidying up physical spaces has a similar effect, in giving me freedom to think about other space-needy projects. I had cleaners in a couple of weeks ago, so my living-space floors have been empty and vacuumed. And I’m pretty sure that’s one of the factors that freed me up to explore the large-scale patchwork artwork project that is currently consuming me.
Taking risks pays off Another factor that set me up to start this project was doing an improv-theatre workshop with Rapid Fire Theatre. It felt very risky to start with, but I could feel myself thriving in it and taking lessons home from it every week. A job application and interview I did partway through the course didn’t feel nearly as scary as they might have, and not getting the job didn’t devastate me. And the initial concept of the current art project popped into my head a few hours before our end-of-course performance, when I was feeling a little anxious and mostly excited about having become that kind of adventurous.
Learning techniques helps too In improv, in quilt design, in learning to work with colours, and so on, learning the tricks and skills of the discipline gives me the background to be both more confident and more successful. Which brings me to one of my key philosophies nowadays,
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly I was a cautious controlled child, afraid to fail and hesitant to stand out. I mostly did the activities that my parents were interested in and thought we were good at – they strongly supported my Conservatory piano lessons as long as I was willing to continue, but were neutral to discouraging about goofing-around composing and about any of the practices that would have led me to be a social piano player, like playing by ear or sight-reading. I remember expressing some wistful envy about my cousins’ experiences at art camp and being told “[OurSurnames] aren’t good at art”, which meant that of course they’d keep paying for the clarinet rental instead of letting me try the oil-painting elective at school when everyone else got to pick a new elective. As a teenager I wrote some fiction privately, and daydreamed about being a Gordon-Korman-style prodigy, but never considered any steps along that way like taking writing classes in university or finding a critique group – by the time I was in Grade 13 I’d so strongly internalised the idea that I couldn’t afford to pursue that kind of impractical dream that the only way I could daydream about it was to put in the story that I was somehow instantly good enough to be published. Instead, of course, I went off to engineering school, put the 10 000 words of story-in-progress in a box, and did not consider myself a writer again for more than twenty years.

I’ve come to realise in recent years that although maybe some kids had more chances to explore things they weren’t naturally good at, adults typically don’t. Adults know what they’re likely to be good at, and they keep doing it or they try out related things. My friend Shaav commented recently that there was no place for adults to learn about science unless they were scientists. I pointed out that it was exactly the same about art. We like the idea of letting kids try everything, but we aren’t quite as eager to try everything ourselves, and if we do, we look for clues to see if we’re good enough to continue. And the more I embrace opportunities to try new things and to pursue things I’m interested in whether or not I am any good at them, the happier I am and the more creative I am. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

A Few Good Men

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Last weekend I saw Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men at the Citadel Theatre. Maybe I should have bought a season subscription, but I was more excited about some of the offerings than others, and I couldn’t buy a subscription on line or see the prices by the time I thought about it. So I got one really fabulous seat for the first performance, instead. (Row C, centre).

I never saw the movie, so I didn’t know more than the basics of the story beforehand. I thought it was really good. The thing that impressed me the most was that although everyone was in uniform with the bearing of military personnel and the expressionless faces of enlisted Marines, the actors managed to convey a lot of information about the characters just in small changes in stance or facial movement. And because we knew that they weren’t going to make those things obvious, the audience (or at least me) was working hard at paying attention.

The set was not elaborate but it set the mood and it made it easy to tell which scenes happened in which location. It made use of a rotating thing in the middle of the stage to bring different bits to the front.

The story had a satisfying resolution, but it also brought up a bunch of more complicated questions about right and wrong. And I liked it that the one female character (Lora Brovold), her story didn’t turn into a romance.

Since then, I’ve also watched the 1992 movie, which is full of famous actors. It was good, and very similar, but I actually preferred watching the play. Because instead of letting me find out from scratch who the characters were, it felt like the Jack Nicholson character was just loudly Jack Nicholson, and so on. Again, I was hugely relieved that although the Demi Moore and Tom Cruise characters come to respect each other, they didn’t end up romantically engaged.

The tragedy of Fanny Gabor, and theatrical asides

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I saw the musical Spring Awakening at the Fringe, and I liked it but found it depressing. Parts were compelling and parts sort of dragged. I also really liked some of the music. Since then I’ve been listening to the Broadway-version soundtrack and the music’s really grown on me, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the show from an actor friend who is very fond of it. So I guess I’ve changed my mind about not wanting to see it again.

Grant McEwan is going to be performing Spring Awakening at the end of October and first weekend of November. I’m going to go see it on the first Saturday in November.

Also, I’m going to see Next To Normal the weekend after that – that’s the musical about the effects of mental illness on a family, which a friend in California recommended last year.

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In Spring Awakening, in the song “And Then There Were None”, the despairing teenage character Moritz has written to his best friend’s mother, asking her for help, specifically money to flee to America which he thinks is the only solution to his problems. The friend’s mother, Fanny Gabor, responds to him in a spoken-word monologue, and he sings his anger and frustration about her answer, now seeing no way out except suicide.

The play is about the teenagers and their troubles. It’s not about Fanny Gabor. But I keep thinking about her. She’s only in a few scenes of the play, but you can see that she’s a kind person who pays attention to her son and his friend, who respects them and wants the best for them. She won’t give Moritz the money to escape, partly because she doesn’t have it and partly because she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She reassures him that she likes and respects him, she offers to intervene with his angry parents, she points out that lots of successful men had trouble in school, and she directly addresses his veiled hints of suicidal plans. She does exactly what I’d hope to do in that situation.

As far as I’m concerned, Fanny Gabor does everything right.

It’s not enough.

And because the play isn’t about her, we don’t see any more about that, except that she’s one of the people putting a flower on Moritz’ grave in the next song. She goes on to worry about her own son, who’s got himself in a different kind of mess, and nobody in the play has an unequivocally happy ending because it’s not that kind of play.

The more I listen to the recording, the more Fanny Gabor reminds me of me, though. I like supporting and appreciating young people and like Fanny Gabor I’m flattered when they consider me a friend. And when they’re in trouble, I worry about them and I do what I can to help them, and I try to make choices for that help that are balanced and appropriate.

Some of my friendships are more balanced and reciprocal than others. Some of the help I’ve provided has been rewarding for me. And sometimes I’ve been sad and angry to discover that the person is unwilling or unable to take my advice, or that the help provided isn’t sufficient to enable the person to rescue himself or herself in the way I’d envisioned.

Fanny Gabor’s story reminds me that those are the costs of being a compassionate person and an amateur helper. And her story also reminds me that maybe I’ve been lucky so far. I haven’t yet encountered a situation where my help wasn’t enough to deter someone from suicide. But I might. No matter how good I am at saying and doing the right things, that’s not going to be within my control. And that would really suck.

All I can do is to be thoughtful about who I reach out to and what I do and say, to have realistic expectations of how I might make a difference for my friends, to let them know how I want them to treat me, and to take care of myself.

Five musicals at the Fringe

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In 2012 I saw five musicals at the Fringe theatre festival.

Middleton a folk musical. This was of uneven quality. The accompanying recorded music was sometimes amplified too loud to be able to hear the lyrics. It didn’t quite work for me and I’m not sure why not. There were some comic/heartwarming characters typical of a musical, there were some big issues and some funny bits, there was one very good song about being a victim of domestic violence, but I ended up restless and disappointed. Middleton is the town in the Annapolis Valley where I bought my brown apple-applique quilt on my bike trip.

Spring Awakening: a musical, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: Both of these had large casts of local young people. Both of them had professional microphones and amplification used properly, and the music was by live small orchestras, all of which was an improvement over Middleton, which I saw the first weekend of the festival.

Both of them had musical scores that I would call alt-rock or punk, which at first seemed bizarrely anachronistic in the period pieces, but then I realised that any other kind of “show tunes” would be equally anachronistic. And I liked the music a lot in both shows. Spring Awakening had more songs that I could see buying and listening to again though.

Both of them had extremely partisan crowds of young friends who were very responsive. In Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, there was a bunch of appropriate heckling from the back that I couldn’t tell if it was scripted or spontaneous.

If you look up Spring Awakening on Wikipedia, you can see that it was originally a scandalous stage play of the late 19th century, made into a Broadway musical about six years ago. I can see why it was scandalous, if it was anything near as explicit about sexual issues of adolescents and their consequences as the musical is. It was mostly not a happy story, and it couldn’t have been with integrity. I thought it was a good show well done, and I might buy some of the music, but I don’t really want to see it again.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had a very different mood, that I don’t know how to describe. Way beyond tongue in cheek to making fun of everything. There were a few serious points, like the problems of direct democracy and the disconnect between a Washington elite and the needs of the frontier people, and it was clear that the main objection to Jackson that the scriptwriter and performers had was his role in the Trail of Tears and earlier ruin of Indian nations.

I’m curious about the economics of Fringe shows. I’m assuming that they only reason these two companies can afford to put on these large-cast shows is that the actors don’t need to make enough money to put food on the table etc, and that their producers might also be getting donations for costumes and stuff – and also, they must have a waiver or subsidy of royalties. Spring Awakening was done by a company of recent alumni from Strathcona High School, with a director and music-director who teach and run student theatre there. The production felt more polished and disciplined than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Fiorello! – I missed this in the regular Fringe time, but it was an unofficial holdover at the Varscona Theatre. It’s a musical about Fiorello LaGuardia, the anti-corruption New York politician in the 1920s and 1930s. I enjoyed it. It had some cutesy-stereotype-y stuff but the pace was good. The number where he was campaigning on street corners in different neighbourhoods, in English in one verse, then in Italian in the next and in Yiddish after that, was great. Donovan Workun, a local improv guy, played the title role.

Reefer Madness – In the holdovers weekend I went back to the Westbury for Reefer Madness, the 1998 musical. I didn’t see any programs, but I was more caught up in it than for many other shows. It was really funny. Some of the music was catchy and some wasn’t my thing. There were 6 actors each playing 1-2 main characters and some other attributes and chorus. There was a hilarious blasphemous bit with Jesus in gold lamé shorts. I kept thinking about the similarities with Rocky Horror Picture Show – the innocent young couple subverted and seduced in a den of depravity, the didactic lecturer telling the story, the other characters in the reefer house and their interactions with the boss, etc. At one point the actor playing the didactic lecturer was then playing Franklin D Roosevelt, in a push wheelchair with a lap blanket, so that made me think even more of the guy in Rocky Horror. I guess Rocky Horror Picture Show (1977) was playing on the tropes of the original 1936 scare-tactics movie and others of that genre – but since I’d never seen it, I didn’t realise it until now.

One of the reviews, I think in the Vue, alluded to how the dramatic warnings about marijuana are now known to be so ridiculous that it’s easy to laugh at, but that it’s disturbing to be realising that if you substituted heroin or crack, they are or might be true. Which was creepy, for me too.

Fringe holdovers

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Reluctant to let go of having fun at the Fringe festival and get on with the next things, I remembered that every year they pick a few shows to hold over in the bigger venues the weekend after the festival ends. Always before I’d been ready to move on to other pursuits, but this year I went through the lists of holdovers and bought four tickets.

Fiorello! – reviewed in the next post.

LOON – this non-speaking mask show had been well spoken of by reviewers and by my actor friend, and it played to a near-full house Thursday night at Westbury, the big auditorium in the Arts Barn. It’s still not my preferred genre but it was fun to watch. The program notes said that the company had benefited from a Kickstarter, so that was neat.

The Minor Keys – I hadn’t really been inclined to see it during the Fringe, and I just added it to my list of holdover shows in a sort of what-the-heck thought of filling up my Friday night. It was playing in the downstairs arts space of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the neighbourhood just east of the railway tracks. I didn’t like it much. It was … it was the kind of show that’s like a staple of summer-theatre, just a set of not-too-nuanced funny characters revolving around each other. The setting was a run-down jazz club in the late 1960s. There wasn’t very much music in it. The actor playing the professor, Tom Edwards, sounded and looked really familiar but I don’t think I’ve seen any of the shows mentioned on his resume in the program. The actor playing the young accountant was Kendra Connor, whom I’d seen a few nights earlier as Marie in Fiorello! David Belke wrote it. With an intermission it was almost 2 hours long, which was draggy after the faster-paced shows of the Fringe.

Reefer Madness – also reviewed in the next post.

Holdover shows cost more – $18 with the Fringe capital fee. And in some ways it’s not as much fun, just showing up for one or two shows in an evening without a surrounding carnival; it’s more like an ordinary theatregoing experience. There are three shows playing tonight, for the last night of holdovers, but they’re all shows I’ve already seen. So I guess that’s it for me for Fringe 2012 – 31 performances during the festival and 4 afterwards, for a total of 35.

On corn on the cob

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It seems strange to me to have corn on the cob any time that it isn’t fresh and fairly local, although to be fair I can’t say for sure that modern freezing or supermarket transportation makes it taste awful, because I’ve almost never tried under those conditions. I indulge for a few weeks every summer, just like strawberries and asparagus.

When I was young, about half our vegetable garden space was corn. We used to peel it outside while the water was heating up. We used to leave on the stems as handles, and if a handle was too long to go in the pot some of us would cry, and the grownups would eat that one. We’d roll the cooked corn in butter or margarine on our plates and add salt and pepper. Whoever was missing his or her front teeth that summer would need to have the kernels scraped off, but that was a far inferior way to eat it. We also used to buy it from farms and roadside produce stands, and we learned never to open it until we were ready to eat it. One year when my mother was planning a big August party in Muskoka, she even found a farm source of corn outside Bracebridge.

My family of choice also loved fresh corn, but their customs included breaking off all the handles, and using little prongs stuck in the ends to hold it by. I eventually convinced them to leave the handles on one or two for me. Also, they believed that the polite way to put the butter on was to take a pat of butter on your fork and rub it back and forth over the corn.

Around here, if you say “corn”, people say “Ah, Taber corn” and smile. I’ve never been clear on whether corn from Taber is the best, or the first, or the most readily-available, or what. It seems to be sold from pickup trucks on the sides of highways, mostly. This weekend I was wondering about going to a 5km race at the Taber Cornfest, but I looked up how far away Taber is (6+ hours driving) and decided not. So instead I bought some Taber corn. I’d seen the vendor peeling back the edges of other cobs before sorting them into bags, but I asked her not to open mine and she didn’t question that.

The trailer I bought mine from had a certificate posted, saying that it was official Taber/Medicine Hat corn, so I guess it’s like terroir or appellation controlée. A CBC article says that some of the corn sold in Edmonton is counterfeit, so it’s important to look for the certificate, and that one distributor said that any being sold before last Tuesday was fake. Well, I’m pretty sure the stand I went to was there when I was driving back from last Sunday’s race, so maybe their certificate is a forgery. And it’s really good corn.

I still don’t know, though. Is sweetcorn for human consumption also produced closer to home? Is Taber corn the first, the best, the biggest crops, or what? On Facebook yesterday, you might have seen me wondering whether Taber corn was like Leamington tomatoes. Leamington ON is known for tomatoes. It’s the southernmost agricultural region in all of Canada (Point Pelee sticks out from Leamington into Lake Erie). As a teenager I worked on a fruit and vegetable farm in the Niagara region. We used to buy Leamington tomatoes at the wholesaler for about two or three weeks before our own came in. I didn’t have the impression that Leamington tomatoes were better than ours, just that Leamington tomatoes started earlier and were a major cash crop for that region, moreso than in Niagara. But of course I was incredibly biased towards local agriculture in those days, to the point of wildly resenting my parents for having bought a house in a surburban development that used to be fruit-growing land before the mid-1950s.

So tell me about Taber corn. Or about your memories of corn on the cob. I have a car for tomorrow; is there some special pick-up truck where you get your Taber corn?