Tag: Mirrored

These posts can also be found (entirely or in part) on another part of my website.

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Seeing Ragtime on stage is a vastly different experience from listening to it, and not just because it’s live theater. There’s so much context, so many connections, so much subtext that you don’t get from the songs alone. It’s very much a go-home-and-hug-your-kids kind of show.

I’ve been a fan of the music ever since we did a few songs from it in a revue back in college, but I’d never actually seen it until this month, when I caught 3D Theatricals’ production in Redondo Beach.

It’s a big show — forty-six people on stage, according to the director — and they turned in a great performance. The vocal standout, I thought, was the actress playing Mother. The actor playing Coalhouse had a very different voice than the one on the album, but he had physical presence and was able to really convey both his optimism in act one and his rage in act two. The character needs both to work.

Speaking of differences between the production and the cast album, I should note: when you just have the highlights, Father comes off as just kind of clueless. When you have the full songs and the book, he’s a bit of an obstinate jerk.

I found myself struck by the layers of historical interpretation: It’s a modern production of a 15-year-old adaptation of a 40-year-old novel about life in America 100 years ago. And we’re still dealing with the same problems: Institutionalized racism and sexism, exploitation of the working poor, conflict over how to handle immigration. It really hit at the moment when authorities kill a young African-American because they think (wrongly) that she has a gun. You can argue that any historical fiction is as much about the present day as it is about the period it’s set in, and maybe it’s a matter of each era distilling the common themes from the older work, but it was telling (and disheartening) how topical the story still is.

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We went out to see Kooza last Thursday (January 21) in the middle of the biggest storm to hit Southern California in ages. Floods, mudslides, tornadoes, lightning, high winds, power outages…and these tickets had been sitting in my desk since sometime last fall.

Fortunately, we managed to miss the worst of the storm. There was a lull in the early evening, and the cloud layer broke up enough that I could see the moon as I left work. We only hit rain during the post-dinner drive to the show. One moment: clear. The next: lots of brake lights ahead of us. The next: intense rain!

As near as I can tell, the storm passed through just north of the grandiosely-named Great Park in Irvine, where the circus had set up their tent. We could see lightning flashes in the distance, and it was cold and wet and windy, but the sky above was clear. So we reached the show against the backdrop of the moon, Orion and Sirus, lightning, and a giant orange balloon.

Night at the Circus

Tower of Chairs at the Orange County FairThe show was impressive. I think this is the sixth Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen* and they’ve all been good. A few acts did look kind of familiar, like the guy balancing on a 20-foot-tall tower of chairs (we’d seen a similar act at the OC Fair last summer), but even those acts maintained the “how the heck do they do that?!” factor. A contortionist act reminded me of someone’s idea back in the early 1990s, never realized as far as I know, to get contortionists to play non-humanoid aliens on science-fiction shows. (These days, you can just use CGI to portray any body structure you want.)

Cirque du Soleil Wheel of DeathThe centerpiece of the show was sort of a giant double human hamster wheel. Two mesh wheels, each with a diameter of perhaps 1½ times the height of the performers, are attached to either end of a scaffolding, which is then suspended from the ceiling so that the entire structure can rotate. Then two performers proceed to run and jump inside the wheels as the whole thing spins around in the air…and then they start running around the outside of the wheels! According to the Cirque website, it’s called the Wheel of Death.

The clowns seemed more prominent in this show than in the others I’ve seen, to the point where they basically had two MC characters: one serious, one comedic.

Oddly enough, the show features a rainstorm. There was enough fake thunder and lightning that we probably didn’t recognize the real thing a few times!

*I’ve been trying to remember exactly which shows I’ve seen, and what I can come up with are:

  • Saltimbanco, early 1990s
  • Dralion, 1999 or 2000
  • Zumanity, 2006
  • O, 2007
  • Corteo, 2008?
  • And now Kooza, 2010

I keep thinking there’s one more, but I just can’t bring it to mind.

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EifelheimI recently finished reading Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. It’s a science fiction novel written as historical fiction, following two parallel stories:

  • In the present day, a historian is trying to figure out why a village wiped out in the Black Death was never resettled, while a physicist tries to work out a new cosmological theory.
  • In 1348, the pastor of Oberhochwald unexpectedly makes first contact with shipwrecked aliens, who spend the next year stranded on Earth near the village.

The present-day story is interesting, but hard to follow just because the viewpoint characters are very…self-absorbed.

Fortunately, most of the book focuses on the middle ages and the story of how a tiny German village encounters and eventually learns to live with the stranded aliens. It paints a detailed picture of life in the 1300s and how their strange visitors disrupt it, and it’s fascinating to look at how someone highly-educated in science and philosophy, but with a medieval European mindset, might see concepts like space travel, electricity, or even evolution. How do you explain coming from another planet in another star system to someone who believes that the Sun moves around the Earth, the stars are all the same distance away, and the “world” encompasses all of the above?

Archived at my reviews collection.

The Black Death

As the book caught up to the arrival of the plague in the village, I found myself curious about the timeline of the pandemic. In looking it up, I found an article proposing that, based on descriptions of the symptoms and spread of the disease, it might have been a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola or Marburg (with a longer incubation period), and not the bubonic plague. It probably falls under the category of “extraordinary claims,” but it’s certainly an interesting idea!

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Finally went to see the new Star Trek movie on Friday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. As a long-term fan (if a lapsed one — I only watched the first 3-4 seasons of DS9, and gave up on Voyager and Enterprise after only a few episodes each, and still haven’t seen Nemesis) I liked it a lot.

We went again Sunday afternoon to see it in IMAX, but the 4:00 showing sold out while we were in line. So we bought tickets for 7:10 and bummed around the mall for the next three hours. Not my first choice, but with Terminator: Salvation taking over the IMAX screens in a few days, it was a limited window.

So we were in the movie during the earthquake.

Quake

Not that I noticed. I’d just leaned over to Katie to whisper something about a music cue reminding me of another soundtrack, so I was moving, and didn’t notice that the chair and floor were moving. (Similarly, I managed to miss the Whittier Narrows quake despite the fact that everyone I knew felt it. As near as I could tell, I must have been standing at or walking to/from my locker at the time.) But a murmur went through the entire audience as they realized what had just happened.

The timing was perfect, too — right at the point that characters in the film open a huge, loud, grinding door to a remote outpost. People thought at first that it was the speakers rumbling. Everyone settled down immediately and went back to watching the movie, but it was the second most popular topic of conversation among people leaving afterward.

Crash

It reminded me of another real-world/movie confluence, way back when I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. That film opened with a massive explosion in space that sent a shock wave so far that it hit Captain Sulu’s ship, the Excelsior. Either at the moment of the explosion or at the moment it hit the ship, we heard an incredibly loud BOOM!, and thought at first that it was just a very impressive sound effect…until we noticed that the curtain was draped across a quarter of the screen. The curtain rod had broken during the movie. After a few minutes they stopped the movie, canceled a showing of something else, and moved us all over into another theater (it was opening night, and they had a theater full of Star Trek fans who’d waited for several hours to get in — they were not going to risk our wrath by sending us home, even with refunds).

Back to the Film

Judging by audience reaction, there were definitely lots of people seeing it for the first time today, so I’ll keep this non-spoilery as much as possible. Update: I’ve also posted this to my reviews site.

  • The film manages to recapture the Kirk, Spock and McCoy dynamic that gave the original show its heart.
  • Each character gets at least something to do, even if it does focus heavily on Kirk and Spock.
  • The actors really manage to convey the same characters, rather than new characters with the same names. Especially McCoy and Spock. Karl Urban in particular seems to be channeling DeForest Kelley the way Ewan MacGregor channeled Alec Guinness in the Star Wars prequels. (And yes, Kirk is different, but there’s a reason for it, and that reason is critical to the story and his character’s journey.)
  • The plot moves and holds together (mostly).
  • The effects of course are incredible.
  • They remembered that Trek can have humor — something that ST: TNG and later shows seemed to avoid as if it would somehow taint their artistic value (except when Q was around).
  • The nods to established elements of the series, from character quirks to design elements to music cues, that are there if you know what to look for, but don’t bog down the story if you don’t.

I had no problems with the obvious canon changes, and thought that the huge event 1/3 of the way in was probably the best way they could recapture dramatic suspense and establish the idea that anything can happen.

In fact, the things that bothered me have very little to do with other versions of Star Trek. Again, trying to be as non-spoilery as I can for the people who haven’t seen it.

  • Supernovas are not that dangerous unless you’re in the same solar system. For planet X to be destroyed, it would have to have been that planet’s sun that went supernova.
  • Another planet, to provide the view that it offered of a significant event, would have to have been a moon of the planet on which that event took place.
  • Engineering doesn’t look like a spaceship. It looks like a brewery.
  • It relies heavily on the same dead-relative-as-motivation trope that’s bothering me so much in Flash: Rebirth. But I can see what they were going for and why they did it.
  • A piece of miracle technology is invented which would revolutionize space travel to the point that it would make any further voyages irrelevant, and will most likely be ignored because of this. (Of course, the TV series did the same thing all the time.)

Music

Also, while I liked Michael Giacchino’s music in context, it’s very repetitive. The theater was playing the score while we waited for the film to start, and an awful lot of it is the same theme, over and over, in different arrangements.

My favorite Star Trek music is a toss-up between James Horner’s scores for The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, and Cliff Eidelman’s score for The Undiscovered Country. We were talking about the music before the movie, and neither of us could think of anything else Eidelman had done, so I looked him up on IMDB. It turns out that he’s written music for about 20 films since Star Trek VI, and I recognized almost all of them…I just hadn’t actually seen any of them.

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I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Continue reading →