★★★☆☆
Solo isn’t high art, and it’s got some rough edges, but it’s a fun ride. Star Wars movies from The Phantom Menace onward have been trying to be serious with a side of adventure and comic relief, not trying to be adventures that also have something to say.
That said, I liked The Last Jedi more than The Force Awakens, so YMMV.
★★★★☆
Xmarks (originally Foxmarks) was a cross-browser bookmark sync service that I used for a long time to keep Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari on multiple computers using the same set of bookmarks. It almost shut down in 2010, but LastPass bought it and moved to a freemium model, which they kept running until May 1, 2018. By then it had been flaky for a while:
These days I use Floccus to sync bookmarks across browsers, which has the added bonus that I get to choose my own storage.
★★★★☆
The cold-war musical Chess works surprisingly well set in the present day.
UCI Drama’s production is a concert staging of the show, with the orchestra and choir onstage, and the actors carrying handheld microphones with minimal props. It works well, especially for the more 80s-pop numbers like “Nobody’s Side” and the big ensemble songs like “Merano” and the chess games, though it gets a little awkward when the characters are singing to each other with microphones. (The show features two competing styles of music, achingly 80s and classical musical theater.)
The show’s structure is fluid, with vast differences between the original London and Broadway versions and later productions, and just about every version tweaking the story and moving songs around. This version largely follows the London stage version, with a few key changes:
The performances were all solid, with Molokova in particular as a standout.
I’m still not sure how well “Someone Else’s Story” works for Svetlana, but that ship has sailed. And “One Night In Bangkok,” despite being instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the 80s, is cringe-worthy now. For this production they downplay the stereotyping by playing up the fact that it’s seen through the perspective of a total lout (Freddie). It’s still cringe-worthy, but at least it’s a character statement rather than a narrative one.
★★★★☆
2024 Update: The hotel has been remodeled and is now the Palihotel San Diego. It’s still in the same location, though, so at least some of my experience is still relevant!
As late as 2018, the historic Hotel St. James still had its original elevators (super-fast by 1913 standards) – complete with hand-pulled sliding gates instead of automatic doors. The kiddo was quite taken with them. The rooms are small, but our double turned out to be a tiny suite, which was nice. Breakfast at the hotel restaurant was quite good, and there’s a casual rooftop lounge area open to hotel guests that offers a great view of the city.
One downside to being an old building: No room for central air conditioning, so they’d put in window units instead… and being in the Gaslamp, weekend nights get loud. Not just traffic and sirens, but there are a lot of bars and nightclubs, and we heard people talking, shouting, and cheering late into the night.
We took the train down to avoid traffic and parking. (Parking’s bad enough downtown that I usually end up leaving the car in the hotel lot the whole weekend anyway.) Amtrak’s Surfliner runs all the way to Downtown San Diego, and we took the trolley from the train station to within two blocks of our hotel. From there, we walked everywhere downtown, and took a bus out to the zoo and Balboa Park.
I’ve never stayed here during Comic-Con, but I have stayed here twice with the family. The first time, when I wrote this review, was the weekend the weekend after the con, when the crowds (and hotel prices) go back down to normal summer levels. A few of the trolleys were still wrapped, and one gift shop had 50%-off superhero shirts, but otherwise there was no sign left of the Gaslamp’s annual week-long transformation into a pop-culture extravaganza. The second time we got a slightly bigger pair of rooms. Even the first set of rooms were bigger than anything at the Mark Twain or the Mosser (both in San Francisco), though, and I have no idea whether Pali remodeled the existing rooms or knocked out the walls to build new ones.
★★★★★
I saw 3D Theatricals’ production of Beauty and the Beast this weekend and really enjoyed it. It was much better than the stripped-down touring version we saw in 2010. Bigger cast, bigger orchestra, more elaborate costumes and sets, and they didn’t cut any of the songs (including the one I kind of wish they had).
Great performances from the leads. Belle was a little more brassy than I’m used to, but it worked. The scenes with her and Maurice at the beginning had a nice geeky-family-hanging-out feel to them. Gaston’s performance actually reminded me a lot of Captain Hammer.
It was interesting to see how they worked around the lack of an understudy for Lumiere. They said he (and the actor playing Chip) had been delayed by a car accident, which may have been one he was involved in, or may have been the multi-car fatal collision and fire that shut down the 5 freeway for the whole day. They pulled an actor from the ensemble who had never rehearsed the part, and while he knew a lot of it, they still had to work around things like the dance steps in “Be Our Guest.” (Belle stepped in and offered to lead.) The regular actor made it there before act two and stepped back into the role.
Incidentally: Chip is a thankless part. You have to sit inside a cart wearing a giant teacup on your head the entire time you’re on stage. Though I’m impressed at what it takes to play Mrs. Potts: You need to hold one arm up the entire time (or else wear a very unbalanced costume on your shoulder, which I can imagine messing up your back), and push that cart around one-handed, with choreography. I hope directors/costumers are willing to adapt the costume for the actress’ dominant hand.
Anyway, it was a good production, and an interesting live-theater snafu. Sadly, I was the only one flu-less enough to go, and it was the last weekend of a short run. One of these days!