Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Thank Gods It’s Based On The Book (And Other Henson News)

Yes, the Muppets are about to film The Wizard of Oz.

Rumoured cast list:

Kermit the Frog will be the Scarecrow

Fozzie Bear will be the Cowardly Lion

The Great Gonzo will be the Tin Man

Miss Piggy will be pulling double duty as both the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch

In a really cool bit of casting, Pepe the Prawn will take on the role of Dorothy’s dog Toto.

And the role of Dorothy will played by a yet to be cast human guest star.

And for those who didn’t know, there’s to be a Fraggle Rock DVD released in late summer; alas, it only has episodes 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, but it’s Fraggle Rock, you know? More! More!

If you ever saw Henson’s The Storyteller, the first series with John Hurt is now available on DVD (watch for Sean Bean!); the second series with Michael Gambon, the Greek Myths, will be released in September 2004. And if you never saw it, then trust me, the episodes are exquisite, and if you’re at all a fan of mythology, folklore, and/or Henson, you’ll want to see these.

(You too can waste hours over at the Muppet Central website!)

You Are A Head by a Sentry

Happiness is hitting random on the Tragically Hip playlist, and getting Nautical Disaster right off the bat.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

(Oh, the post title? The result of listening to the Hip while on the way home from a live TV broadcast in Kingston. It was night. I was tired. t! was in the car. It was Hallowe’en.)

Musical Ephemerae

I finished my new Music page of the site last night. I was rather surprised to discover that I’ve only been with the orchestra for three seasons, not four, and I’m rather impressed at the amount of repertoire I’ve acquired since joining them.

Rumour has it that my goddaughter is currently enthralled with celli. I must get the viola fixed so that she can hold it like a cello and mess about with it.

And the Not-Music-Related part of the post:

Note: a cool bath before bed brings the body temperature down, and the world doesn’t seem as humid and infernal as it actually is. I had a wonderful night’s sleep. Although swinging my legs over the edge of the bed in the morning only to discover that my feet no longer reach the floor is still slightly disconcerting. It will fade in time.

Fool’s Fate

I forgot to mention that I finished Fool’s Fate while I was gone. I can see what Ginger means when she says that she’s not quite fine with the end of Fitz’s story. I was impressed at the skill (no pun) with which story elements from three trilogies were wrapped up in general, however. It’s not a completely happy ending; there was loss, things weren’t too easy, and Robin Hobb deliberately didn’t take everything away from any of the protagonists, nor reward them completely. In the end, it just might have been the only way to end it, really.

In Which the Prodigal Returns, to Mixed Reception

We arrived home through six hours of storms and mind-numbing boredom at around seven last night. While I was gone, HRH stained the kitchen cabinets, moved some smaller pieces of furniture around, and raised the bed by about a foot to create box storage beneath it. No major crises occured in my absence, which is always a relief. Maggie punished my eleven-day absence by ignoring me until bedtime. Nixie wouldn’t leave me alone, and even talked to me with chirps and tiny meows. Cricket lay on the dining room table and sulked at the window, through which she wriggled to the Great Outdoors sometime over the week, so now having tasted freedom she is no longer satisfied with the small world known as Home, let alone the presence of her mother figure.

My day is scheduled already: I’ve caught up on e-mails, sent out a couple of queries, and now I’ll sit down with a pile of books and select new readings for the first level of students at CMS, as so much has gone out of print recently. Apparently reading selections from other teachers have been thin to non-existant, so I have a lot of work ahead of me. It was a lovely vacation, with lots of sleep and books and food, but now I’m back in the sweltering humidity and the dust kittens of home. Back to… whatever it is that I do when I’m not writing a book. Goodness. I just may have forgotten what that is.

Catch-Up

Okay — yesterday it was the killer migraine that hit me minutes after we arrived at my parents’ friends’ place for dinner (Dad drove me home, bless him), the day before was a day trip to Stratford, and today was here and there. Otherwise I’d’ve been posting the long reflective entries I’ve been composing in my head for the past seventy-two hours. Honest.
 
I was at the Royal Botanical Gardens for an hour on Tuesday morning, amusing myself in the greenhouse whilst my parents attended a meeting in Conference Room Two (which really ought to have been called TROT-2, but no one would understand the reference except a handful of people back home, so I withheld it). I took reams of notes to turn into a substantial post on herbs and the joys of being alone in huge glass buildings with over two hundred invisible anoles, which I still might do eventually, but I’m just too tired at the moment. (And don’t believe the website write-up; it was humid, not cool and dry.) Besides, I want to get back to Fool’s Fate, which is stunningly fabulous. I finished I, Elizabeth the night I had my migraine, after I’d taken two extra-strength Advil and slept for two hours (oops – there’s a max of three per day, so no wonder it knocked me out). Damned good. Pre-dates the film Elizabeth (you know, that Cate Blanchett one), and really foreshadows the film well in tone, speech, and scene. It was nice to finally hit a book which took more than two hours to read from start to finish.
 
Mum and I saw Guys and Dolls at Stratford, which came as a bit of a culture shock, since I’d been reading I, Elizabeth, and after having experienced so much Elizabethan theatre in the town over the years I always associate Shakespeare plays with a Stratford trip. (And that’s Stratford, ON for my American readers. I can’t quite envision Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK doing Frank Loesser musicals. And t!, the Noretta Motel finally as a new sign.) The show was enjoyable, in spite of Cynthia Dale doing a monotone performance of Sarah Brown. Sarah Brown should be earnest and perky. Cynthia Dale was lukewarm and lifeless. (Which she has apparently been in the past five years she’s been appearing at Stratford. Why do they keep casting her?)  Sheila McCarthy as Adelaide more than made up for the time Dale was onstage, though, and every other lead was phenomenal, paticularly Geordie Johnson as Nathan Detroit. (BTW, Tal, my mother and I have decided that sometime in your life, you have to play Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Just thought you’d like to know.) The choreography to the Gamblers’ Ballet was as impressive as the dancing itself. It’s rare to find a show where the men’s chorus has the knock-out dance numbers; in fact, it’s rare to find a show with practically no female chorus. This ballet had been choreographed so that while there were a dozen guys onstage, there were five different moves going on simultaneously — by two or three men in completely different places. It made for a dynamic overall presentation of the number, seeing that three men were dancing the same steps, but they were each dancing next to someone whose steps were totally different, and next to that second man there was yet someone else dancing something again different. For those of you who know the Festival Theatre, you know that the thrust stage is almost square, but still not huge; group numbers have to be really carefully sequenced. The choreography throughout the entire show was a triumph over space.
 
But every time I think of Cynthia Dale in the show, I think of a cold fish dressed as a Salvation Army sergeant. She would just stand and sing — no emotion, nothing. And in a larger-than-life show like Guys and Dolls, particularly when your co-star is very expressive, that just doesn’t cut it. I rather meanly evaluated her performance and almost said to my mother than I could have done better (and no lie, her singing is about my level of skill, and the gods know I can act better than she does), but I didn’t. If I believed in Purgatory, I’m sure I’d have shaved a few years off.
 
Time to go curl up and read again.