for those with time on their hands over the horridays... YouTube

You can find a lot of fascinating things to while away time and avert the end of year tedium there.  I have a couple of recommendations.

I finished watching a delightful BBC mini-series this week called 'Last Tango in Halifax'.  Six parts at an hour each.  The grandchildren of two mid-seventy year olds put them onto facebook, they'd lost touch sixty years before.  And with tredipidation, they decide to meet, fall in love all over again and decide they want to marry.  As with all such things, the bbc had wonderful actors and actresses I'd never seen before, but brilliant.  And oh yeah, their children and grandchildren are emotional messes.  It was very enjoyable.

If you type in 'Shakespeare re-told' in the search box at youtube, you will find three BBC films that put classics into a modern setting.  I liked 'Much Ado About Nothing' most.  'The Taming of the Shrew' was funny, albeit rather heavy-handed, and Crash, my notebook, hasn't let me see all of 'Macbeth' yet, living up to his name.   The latter involves a chain restaurant war.  Oddly, it works.

For those of us who are oldies, and want to dip into nostalgia, the original version of  'The Fly' can be found.  In 1956 I was only seven, and not able to go to matinees alone yet, but very bitten by the movie bug.  I do remember one of the neighbors girls having seen it at a drive-in movie with her parents, and telling the tale with relish, and I was green with envy.  Sounded reeeeally creepy.  

So...  it being Advent and all, I thought it would be fun to see what I had missed.  My word.  It's all talk talk talk, and the main message is not to trust science, with Vincent Price covetinMg his brother's wife.  And boy, was he camp.  There were three special effects scenes (that I counted), and they were so lame...  children today would find them hilarious, am sure.  I bust out laughing every time. Oh my...    I was glad I never wasted thirty-five cents on seeing that, but suppose that at the time, it would have been creepy enough...  we were all naive back then.  I enjoyed that little trip back in time.  If they had the special effects capacity they do today back then, I probably would have messed myself.

Last but not least, I found something for Sondheim fans...  a rarity that I've looked for for over fifteen years.  It's called 'Passion', and has been hotly discussed any time there is a revival of it.  I hadn't even been able to find a cd of the score.  But there is a high quality version with the original cast on YouTube...  the entire production.

It's 'stayed' with me for weeks now.  Musically, it's so far from a musical in the usual sense, it sort of defies description.  I think of it as a symphony that is sung, and the movements have themes, but nothing one would call a song.  and I found the content disturbing.

In fact...   I wouldn't recommend anyone seeing it unless they were accompanied by an adult 55 years or older. Because I don't think people younger than that will understand it, and they will want to discuss.  It's about love, but a very dark aspect of love.  And left me mulling it over for days.

It takes place in Italy before the unification.  A very handsome young soldier is in-love with a very beautiful woman who is married and they are having an affair.  They feel that they can transcend anything and everything.  The soldier is assigned to an outpost, not defined.  His regiment is staying in the castle of a nobleman, whose cousin is very ill.  A mental nervous condition, and she is very plain of feature.  Her doctor advises him to speak with her and he does, becoming interested, .as they are similar in mind and temprament, and she falls passionately in love with him to the point of obsession.  

You would think that could only lead to tragedy, and it does...  but not in the way the viewer expects.  And in the end, he falls in love with her in a way that is desperate and complete.  There is a duel, he goes mad, she dies, but he'd found complete and perfect love.

Some of it is cruel.  Some of it goes right to the edge of what is bearable.  Donna Mills in the main role was incredibly good, with an alto voice as dangerous and seductive as a siren.  (the mythical one, not the alarm)  

I see it as a meditation of an ageing man whose previous work had been often tongue in cheek, cynical, and suddenly considering what some forms of love might be.  And I think most of his work regards considering different forms of love...  from Company to A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George...  certainly Follies, and even Sweeney Todd in several senses.  Passion is sort of a culmination of his work, and is dark.

And it is disturbing.  It stays with you, makes you think.  And pose a lot of questions to oneself.  The production was beautiful, very sexy, and the lighting was wonderful...   especially when they consumate their relationship in a blinding white-hot light.  I think that it will one day be regarded more positively than it has been to date.  But it certainly isn't for everyone.  Who wants to see something that will make you think?   I found it entertaining all the same, if on another level.

And there is a lovely Lincoln Center production of  'A Little Night Music' to bee seen on YouTube from the 90's in good quality.  I didn't care for the staging, but it was a joy to see and listen to.  I'd never realised that the duchess dies...  happy ends all round, and she drops dead in her wheelchair at the very end.  Chilling.  But the music is wonderful, the humour is sarcastic, and it was very funny. And about love.

So...  those are my picks for the horriday season.  You might want to take a look at the one or the other.

I have a horrid fascination with KLG and Hoda on the Today Show...

They sort of remind me of the iconic duo on the series 'Absolutely Fabulous'.  They are up in the morning drinking wine, dishing, being 'naughty', have fixed 'dazzling' personalities that are so fake you think they have pin walls at home to paste on their smiles once they get out of work and get maybe grim, are social climbing sorts of beasts who like to brag about who they are going out with in the evenings, who are mostly high B list, and can generally either bemuse or irritate me. 

The UK had sort of a duo like that in the above mentioned series.

They were cult.  The one an over the hill pill popping, drug taking former hippie and 'alternative culture' person, the other a dessicated alcoholic ex model, best friends, and utterly destructive.  But funny.

Kathie Lee Griffin and Hoda Kotb are sort of mirror personalities to those two, and whether it's a gag or not, they often become parody despite themselves.

 

 

Whatever.  I couldn't find a clip from two days ago, but you get the idea. 

 

 

Now the eternally baked in youthful looking KLG spent twelve years writing a musical.  About Aimee Semple McPherson.  She was an evangelical faith healer who was so famous, she is in the lyrics of the song 'Hooray for Hollywood'.   Just after 'Shirley Temple'. 

 

 

She was a huckster and base founder of the evangelical movement, but had her ups and downs, so, yes interesting subject. 

 

So after many years of sweating blood over it...  It opened on Broadway on Thursday.  Which news I saw Friday, which meant the dread NY Times had already reviewed. 

 

 

Now I and the viewers had been (mal)treated to some of the songs from the show and clips here and there and it was interesting to see what you have to do to get a show there accepted and then try to get it off the ground...   I found the idea interesting, but the music was...   forgettable.  Not good, not bad, sometimes nice...  and I thought I was being unfair.

 

So I called up the Times on my internets, and yup, there was the review.  It was unkind to Ms. Griffin, but basically said what I'd been thinking of her all along...  and described it as too long, not 'deep' enough into the subject matter, and the music was 'generic'. 

 

Autsch!  Au weh!...   The reviewer did say it wasn't the Thanksgiving turkey that had been hoped for....   And that Broadway had seen too many 'religious and evangelical productions of late of the gospel variety'.  Such as 'Leap of Faith' and revivals of 'Godspell' and 'Jesus Christ Superstar'. 

 

The reader reviews so far weren't so good either.  I think this was something where you have a good idea, but it comes in just a hair's breadth too late, something I learned when sending out manuscripts and getting told 'oh, it was so good, but we just published something just like it.'

 

So on the one hand?  Yeah, I have a bit of schadenfreude.  On the other?  If they're smart, they'll bus in scads of evangelicals from Kansas or 'gawwd' knows where and get their investment back, maybe make a bit of profit.

 

Such things are always big gambles.