The Sound Of... Music (?)

Music has always just been a part of my life. I guess it’s part of pretty much everyone’s, but in my case it has been less ambient and more direct. My mother is a professional musician, by which I mean that she teaches music, and plays with various groups, and music has always been part of her life, both personally and professionally. My father sings (and dances) and plays the flute; my very earliest memories of him, and of songs, are being carried on his shoulder around the kitchen, late at night, while he sang Irish folk music (which, by the way, I now realise is so totally not appropriate for children). My sister inherited my mum’s abilities and plays pretty much everything, and has spent a few years as a Jesus Minstrel, making a joyful noise unto various Sunday school and summer church camp kids around the US and the world.

I’m the one Rice who didn’t inherit any of this. Unlike the rest of my family, I have a voice like a castrated frog, and no especial affinity for instruments. I can read music because I played oboe for about ten years, but I have a very hard time with anything that’s not in treble, or not in oboe range (really high or low notes flummox me). I suppose I was competent at oboe, but never brilliant or anything. I’m very good with rhythms and I did somehow manage to be the one person in the family with perfect pitch, but neither of these things is terribly useful since I can’t really apply it.

If I’d had the native family talent, I would be pursuing professional musical theatre, but I didn’t. (Fortunately, I don’t have a complex about being a director because I failed on stage: I never went for the stage, and when someone pointed out to me that my native instincts and talents were more those of a director, I immediately realised the truth of this statement, which my life has always reflected, and I’m much happier in that capacity. I can direct musicals without having to utter or comprehend a note.) But in spite of this, music’s just something I enjoy. On the heels of one of my massive mental upheavals, precipitated as always by personal crisis, I decided to take up the violin. I put it down after a few months, because I went back to Washington and college and my life and family and just didn’t have the time. Last spring, went it all went caddywampus again, I remembered how much that had helped, so I went out and bought myself a violin here in England. It was what I did last spring and last summer, when I just couldn’t figure out what else to do.

And it worked brilliantly. Not because playing made me particularly happy, but because I had to think about so many other things than the cyclic shit in my head, so it took me away from what was eating me alive. Learning- because I am still very much learning- violin reminds me a lot of when I was first learning to drive, and I was certain I’d never be able to keep all the little things juggling simultaneously in my head. A few hundred thousand miles later, I drive quite without thinking about it, even after two years away from my car. Someday I hope violin will seem that intuitive, but just now it’s trying to remember where my fingers go, and what the notes look and sound like, and the timing, and the pace, and where my bow has to go, and..... Right now, it’s not a very pretty thing.

This is very frustrating for me, because although I probably am way more patient than I think I am, I don’t like being bad at things, at least not things that matter to me. Last year, for example, I was absolutely the worst Frisbee player in Constantine House. No matter, since Frisbee isn’t something I particularly care about. But I live a life very surrounded by musical people. My family back home, yes, but here in England, too. James and Adrienne both sing at near-professional quality (Adrienne was an opera major for a few years), our friend Zac is an honest-to-god prodigy, one of those people who can just play anything and also composes, Charlotte and Kate are both violinists (admittedly out of practice) and Charlotte was once a very serious pianist, and James plays violin all over Yorkshire. So it’s a wee bit intimidating, and depressing, not to be one of the cadre of the gifted. Being in the Tribe is like being in the Rice house: I can wish very much, but I just don’t share that gift.

Tonight is one of the rare nights when I’m home on my own, though (James and Adrienne went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, and I couldn’t care less, so the thought of spending cinema money on it was just not gonna happen), which means I actually had the chance to play. An hour later and my arms are seriously killing me, and my left hand fingers are much the worse for wear. That’s the one real drawback to violin: I am exceedingly vain about my hands, and the thought that I’m ruining them for something I’ll never even be terribly good at it is rather vexing. At this point, though, my pride in my hands is taking a bit of a back seat to my pride over all, because it’s inevitable that someday, someone is going to hear me, and I’d rather it not make them run for cover.

In fact, I know it’s going to be sooner rather than later. James has been trying to get me to play when we go out for folk nights for months, and, proof that I am a fool in more ways than one, I finally caved and told him I would play by the end of the summer. (Actually, I originally said June, but May has been hellish for both of us, so we agreed that a postponement was fair.) Which means I actually have to try to get over my phobia of being heard, and it also means that I have to not totally suck ass by the end of the summer. (For the record, I also hated playing my oboe if it wasn’t in the middle of the band. The one time I tried it at Solo & Ensemble, I had a panic attack and hyperventilated, which is just about the last thing you want to do if you’re getting ready to play an oboe solo.) (I should point out that there is in fact another side to this bargain- James is supposed to have the next chapter of his novel on my desk by August. It gives us an excuse to nag one another into doing the things we both know damn well we should be doing anyway.) Should be an interesting attempt. I’m very big on keeping promises, so I’m not sure what I’ll do if it’s getting to the end of summer and I’m still sounding like a cat in a meat grinder. The thing is, I’m a perfectionist, and I don’t like anyone to be witness to me doing anything that isn’t absolutely spot-on, which is also why it’s an extremely rare thing for me to let someone see my writing. James will probably think it all right- he has a far higher opinion of my playing than I do, but he has a higher opinion of everything I do, so I’m not sure I count him as a reliable gauge. I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Right now, I feel very sorry for our neighbours, who are going to have to suffer through an hour or two of scales and scrapings on a periodic basis. And I feel bad for James and Adrienne, because inevitably I’m going to have to do this when they’re home, which means they will share in the suffering. That is, if I can ever lift my arms again.

The End Of The Saga

We all survived the play last weekend, remarkably. Thursday night was easily the worst opening night of my entire experience, and that is counting Pajama Game when we had a grand total of three people in the audience. We still put on a better show then, even though energy was down the bog. Thursday of Eyrbyggja Saga included more thrown lines than all of my previous years in theatre put together- we probably ad-libbed about forty percent of it, and it just felt dead. It was like having one last, astonishingly bad dress rehearsal.

The old adage that a bad dress means a good run has some logic: a bad dress rehearsal usually scares the shit out of the actors, who then really haul ass for opening. I guess you could say we were just a day behind, because Friday night’s performance was hot. We were dead on, the dropped lines could be counted on one hand, and the energy was through the roof. This was our smallest audience, but the largest group of people we knew- lots of last year’s Lords who are still in or around York came. Saturday was an overly full house and another awesome performance, and the audience was fantastic. We finally seemed to have learned all our lines, got in character, and found the balance of performing and drinking that worked. (I don’t normally advocate drinking during a show- in fact, normally I am dead against it. This show, however, all the rules were chucked out the window long ago, because if our directors insisted on not caring and behaving as unprofessionally as possible, I didn’t see any reason to twist myself into pretzels trying to be even the way I naturally am. I was also sorely in need of a drink, at least Thursday, just to keep my homicidal rages at bay. So James and I went through a bottle of mead each night. At least it’s the drink of the period we were portraying. And, no, we did not go for accuracy and drink it out of horns- I will never be able to use a drinking horn as long as a live, because I can still remember the way Jon’s smelled at James and Adrienne’s wedding party last year. Ugh.)

We had the cast party at Murton after the Saturday show- bonfires in the longhouse and out in the common, with marshmallows and sausages; James brought a whistle and Fernando a drum, so we had improvisational music and danced around the fire and probably got a spiritually closer to the people we were portraying than we ever managed in the show. It wasn’t a late-running thing, thankfully, because it had been one hell of a week and I was exhausted, but it was a nice location. I’d love to do a G&SS thing out there, or just do an overnight camping with the Tribe, because it’s a fun spot.

The aftermath, of course, was getting the money and figuring out just how bad the damages were. I do give Jeremy and Fernando credit: they put together an expense report, as should happen after every show, really, detailing where the money had gone and what we’d made. The only trouble was that they were about £50 off on the actual amount in the cash box, which is a problem, and we’re still trying to figure out how to handle that. And some of the expenses just didn’t need to happen. Like, we always serve refreshments at the interval, and they come from Poundland. Except that they went to Morrison’s, which is much pricier. And they spent as much on having the cast use taxis in one night as they did to get a bus for all of us for two. And I swear the audience must’ve been driven out in limos, because their transportation cost more than the venue and properties put together.

Which, all told, means that Lords lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of £450. It’d be closer to five, but Jeremy magnanimously (note the dripping sarcasm) agreed to eat about £70 worth of the expensive food he bought for the interval. This means they lost more in this show than my initial budget for Apollonius. In fact, they lost more than half their agreed upon budget (which, of course, they went over by fifty percent). How this will impact upon the summer show remains to be seen. I feel bad for Strasz and Kats, having to deal with that, although they seem to be taking it pretty well in stride. We went through the closet for costumes yesterday morning and they seem quite amenable to cutting costs left, right, and centre. I told them about where we can get free staging, and that they don’t need to hire seating, and it appears that a lot of what we have in the closet can either be used or cannibalised. They want to keep their show under £600 (take note, Jeremy and Fernando!), which is a distinct necessity at this point.

So, when it’s all said and sifted, was this a success? Financially, obviously, the answer is no. Personally, I would also argue against it being a glorious triumph, because this show was like a highway to bleeding ulcers. We ripped our hair out and were driven to drink and threatened mayhem more times over this one than any other show I’ve done in my life. (And I thought last summer was vexing!) But the audiences loved it. (James’s parents said it was one of the funniest things they’ve ever seen.) And the cast did have fun, at least Friday and Saturday nights, because at that point, you can’t unscramble eggs and might as well just go for the moment. So it depends upon your definition of success. I tend to take a mixed view of it: the audience had better be satisfied, but I want the cash box to be fattened, too. However, from a purely artistic standpoint, I’m tempted to say that we made the audience happy, and that, in the end, the most important thing.

I Should Never Be Allowed Near Stabby Objects

CBC did a really fantastic series a couple years ago, called Slings and Arrows, about a Shakespearean theatre company in Canada and its characters, problems, and vagaries. It’s brilliant, and if you get the chance to see it, do. One of the characters on it is Richard, the business manager of the company. He is the world’s worst judge of character, and there are moments when he’s an endearing, bumbling nincompoop, and others when he’s kind of the villain of the show. In one of the early episodes, he makes a comment to the artistic director about the director’s lack of business sense. He tells the director that for once he should think of the theatre as a business, because that’s what it is. The audience is supposed to sniff at so uncreative an attitude, for isn’t the play really the thing?

The truth, though, is that theatre- any theatre, be it professional, community, academic, or charitable- is in fact a business. Only in The Producers is the idea of staging a play for a loss a good idea (and that doesn’t work out so well either). For professional companies, of course, it’s most important to come in on the black, because that’s your paycheck, and that’s what pays the grocery bills. For community or academic theatre, it’s not about salaries, it’s about the longevity of the organisation. End up going into the red and you no longer have a company. So you have to run things with the same pragmatic, hardheaded business sense as any other organisation. Sometimes, yes, you can afford to take a small loss, secure in the knowledge that the season’s other productions will make up the difference. But you can never be certain of that, which is why, like any business, a percentage of your yearly budget needs to be maintained in case the entire year is a bust, in which case at least you’ve got something with which to retrench the next year. (Ask any business or financial expert about this: you always need a fund balance/slush fund.) And you do your damndest to make sure your losses are as small as possible. Unlike a professional company, you don’t have investors to take the hit. Go into the red and you’ve ruined the entire company forever. So, in some ways, you need to be even more careful than professional groups.

The trouble is that nobody seems to understand this.

You’ve already heard my rant about the current budget of our current disastrous production. Well, as of yesterday, there’s been a demand (and I use that word very intentionally) for another £200+. When informed that they were already more than a hundred overbudget on a show where the budget was astronomically generous, the threats, whines, and tantrums began. Threats to cancel the entire show. To take it to the cast so that they would stage a coup (which, actually, can’t really happen, given the paperwork involved). It was absolutely the most abusrd display of grade school politics and bullying you can imagine, from men who are in their mid thirties. Rachel is out of town, so she can’t do much here. Pragya very conveniently resigned as secretary last night. Which leaves Adrienne, the treasurer, to try to point out to unreasonable (and in one case, permanently intoxicated) individuals why asking money for a show they already acknowledge has to lose at least £300, is irrational, unreasonable, and irresponsible. (I suppose it’s interesting to note that the people who see it this way are the small cluster of us who have professional/semi-professional theatrical backgrounds. But it shouldn’t have to be. Logic is not the secret province of the professional, nor is amateur synonymous with stupidity.)

I’ve had a migraine since ten this morning, and I can only imagine what Adrienne’s going through. She and Rachel finally managed to touch base, and the money was eventually granted, with the rider that there is going to be a major and unpleasant debriefing after this show closes. But in spite of this, because of the personalities and lack of maturity on the part of the directors, I can almost guarantee they’re going to have a snit in front of the cast tonight. In which case I swear to god I am going to go off. Professionalism has been in the absolute pits this entire run, and this is just the last straw. Our final rehearsal Tuesday night was really good from a cast/acting standpoint, and an absolute disaster from our directors. I fully expect some choice words to be exchanged come Saturday night when it’s all over. James keeps offering to ‘accidentally’ point his sword at the wrong person during the run that night, and since he came rather close to a proper row with Fernando the other night at rehearsal, I’m not entirely sure he’s kidding, nor, at this point, am I tempted to say no. As it stands, I get to carry a sword in the play, and I might just beat him to it. (None of the weapons are live, but a few pounds of tempered steel can still do a good bit of damage, especially when you factor in the livid rage factor. And I am. Livid, that is.)

All of my life, I’ve heard myself saying things like, ‘Am I the only one who has any common sense?’ In this case, thank god, I’m not. I’ve got Adrienne and the Jameses in the same boat of seething annoyance, and I suspect that, where the rest of the cast aware of all the facts, they would at least see the practicality of the situation. Because of the queer social politics this year, the MAs haven’t integrated with the veterans, so they don’t know what our running budget is, or what precedents exist (like directors eating the overage- Jon and I did it happily with Apollonius, and we came in solidly in the profit margin- Jeremy keeps whining that no spring show has ever made money, but I know damn well that’s not true). (I should add that Lords offered to give us the money we’d spent overbudget,since it was only about £50. We declined- we fully intended to make the point that since we decided to spend the money, we were willing to take responsibility for doing so.) But even if there are a lot of people in Lords who probably can see reason, the ones who don’t boggle my mind. How do you get to be thirtysomething and not understand basic fiscal responsibility? Or responsibility at all?

I hope the play will be brilliant, in spite of its incredibly rocky birthing process. I hope we have fun. And I hope I don’t somehow trip while carrying my sword at an eye-stabbing angle, just because, you know, sometimes I’m uncoordinated like that. Especially around people who are rude and insulting to my best friend, and who have no respect for the things I hold dear.

Homecoming 2008

As much as I loved the conference, and as much as I loved getting to see my family, there is no joy quite like that of returning home.

It’s good to be back on British soil, and getting off the train and smelling the lovely spring air of York was an absolute delight. It occurred to me that there’s something a bit peculiar about that, given that a lot of people would say I’d just been home, but I am not more convinced than ever that York is where I’m meant to be. Here I feel peaceful and content, cosy and comfortable. In York I’m safe, and I’m settled, and I’m secure, all of which I can say even after the emotional fiasco of 2007. That fact alone convinces me that, yes, I am home, both in the literal and more cosmic senses of the term.

I love the Villa, so walking in the front door was a very happy thing. I’m glad I cleaned so well before I left, and I think James did a bit more with the tidying up, because it wasn’t just the Villa, but the Villa at its very best. I suppose I could, theoretically, be happier, but it’s hard to imagine. It was also good timing getting in on Tuesday morning: even though I was absolutely knackered after about twenty-four hours on the road, I came home to Kate’s birthday dinner and our last Lords rehearsal before performance, which gave me the chance to see everybody again, and go out that night (I had missed English pubs), and then on Wednesday we had our Snobs luncheon, following by an afternoon of perusing the shops and streets of the beautiful city. This is my recipe for life’s perfection; and because I am, at heart, people-oriented, it was wonderful to see the Tribe again, and everyone else.

Travel is something I’m always going to do, and love, and want to do more of, but I’ve come to realise that its purpose is twofold. I adore getting to see the world and different places, people and things that are not quite like those to which I am accustomed (and at this point America does count as foreign- curiously, within the first twenty-four hours home, James told me that I’m getting an accent on certain words, and I had someone else ask about my ‘Irish’ accent). But it also makes me appreciate home even more (which is a challenge, as not a day goes by when I do not stop and ponder my good fortune at landing in York and the Villa, among people I love so well). I’m not sure what I did to deserve the life that I have here.... but I’m awfully glad to be back to it.

At The 'Zoo

Of all the states in all the world, the big annual medieval conference just has to be in Michigan.

For reasons unknown, Kalamazoo, Michigan (and more specifically, Western Michigan University) holds the world’s largest academic conference on things medieval each year. It’s a godforsaken part of the world, and nobody ever goes there apart from this one weekend, but for one week the place is crawling with people discussing various aspects of pre-modern society. I’ve known about K’zoo for years, because my undergrad medieval professor, Dr Rampolla, went every year. I had wanted to go for the years preceding this one, but first it was the same week as finals, and then I had other conflicts (New Market and Wine in the Woods, perhaps?), and last year I was bogged down in... everything. This year, though, there was no way in hell I was going to miss it.

On Wednesday I picked James and Adrienne up at Midway and we headed east. James had managed to come down with stomach flu two days previously (I swear a garden snail could beat up his immune system) so it was a rather rough journey, but at least he was past the puking stage by the time they arrived at my (rental) car. It’s not a bad drive, really: tedious in the way that southern Michigan just is, and northern Indiana is a pit on part with New Jersey, but it’s only about two and a half hours. We got checked into the dorms, which are exactly that, and rather spartan and miserable. I don’t know how undergrad don’t kill one another off, having to spend an entire year in tiny concrete cubicles, especially without hot water (at least in our building) and with beds that squawk if you so much as sneeze. (Last year, James rather famously commented upon the thought of how many brilliant and eminent medievalists throughout the past forty years had probably had drunken sex in those rooms. Kalamazoo is famous for having once-a-year couples, who meet up for the conference and then go home to their relative spouses, so the answer is probably, several. But they sure as hell weren’t doing anything clandestine in the bed I got- the entire county would’ve known.)

We did a lot of meeting and greeting over the course of the week. Adrienne always seems to know a million people via the marvellous medium of LiveJournal, and of course she knew people from last year’s conference. James had friends here from the armoury in Massachusetts where he used to work. The only person I knew here was Dr R, but we did manage to have lunch and catch up, which was really nice. I dearly love everyone in the history department at Trinity, and I owe them a lot: they, more than anyone else, really pushed me to come to grad school, and it was Dr R who took my passing interest in the Middle Ages and fanned it into a career path.

During the days we were in sessions of papers. This probably doesn’t sound tremendously exciting, especially if you’re not an academic, but it was amazing. I don’t have the words to explain how incredibly important this week was in my outlook. I’m going home excited about my life and my work, and I’m really looking forward to doing the next degree. Suddenly the thought of a PhD and career in medieval theatre isn’t like being shackled to a mistake; it seems like fun. Of course, conferences represent the thing about academics that I love best, which is the intellectual exchange and the dynamism of bouncing thoughts and ideas off of one another. I’m not a people person, but I am at my absolute best when I’m working with like-minded individuals, either in concert or in friendly and complimentary opposition. This week was a much-needed tonic for the horrible burnout of a year fraught with the MA and the nervous breakdown. I don’t even have the applications for the next degree finished, and I’m excited about getting to work.

Nobody did anything on the York Cycle in specific, which is of course the aspect of medieval drama with which I’m most intimately acquainted. I heard a couple of papers on the Chester Cycle, one of which was about the use of feasting and food within the play.. It covered everything from the possible interpretations (the author argued that real food was probably used, rather than props or mime) to the secular/sacred implications of both the presence of feasting in the text and the literal use of food on stage. This is the kind of thing I find fascinating: I’m not tremendously interested in the manuscripts as pieces of literature, but in medieval drama as drama. They’re plays, and their production and performance is, as far as I’m concerned, the most important issue. And it’s fun because it forces me to think about theatre in different ways from the relatively representational style in which I usually work. Perhaps the note that interested me the most was the discussion in both papers about the ways in which Chester found ways of continuing to stage the plays, even after the Reformation, when the political authorities tried to quash them (they eventually succeeded). By trying to recast religious plays in a secular light, they gave the plays a longer lifespan than the politics of the era would have liked. And the thing in that which is so intriguing is that it suggests that the plays were important to the populace beyond their meaning as religious works. Since religion isn’t really my baby, even in the Middle Ages, I find that exciting.

Another pair of papers discussed the writings of Hardin and Chambers, and the validity of Hardin’s dismissal of Chambers’ evolutionary interpretation of developments in medieval theatre. Just the idea of putting scientific theory to artistic/creative processes is kind of interesting (and, I would argue, a limited option). I spent most of last year reading these two books, so I’m intimately familiar with the issue. This made me want to go back and re-read them, though. (And for the record, the Darwinian argument of development, which I have always found the more rational, is the one generally out of favour, due in no small part to Hardin’s subsequent writings.) This lecture would have been indescribably tedious for anyone who doesn’t do medieval theatre, and that was another thing I enjoyed about the conference: everything is so tremendously specialised, that you get to feel damned clever when you do understand things. I’m not sure you ever get over that. (Dr R was saying that she’d found herself referenced in a random book she picked up, and in spite of years as a tenured university professor she still gets a bit giddy over that.) It’s both fun and inspiring to realise that there are other people out there who know what you’re talking about, and with whom you can share ideas.

Of course, it’s not all work and no play. The sales booths are a book lover’s dream come true, at least, if your thing is medieval history. I am fiscally poorer, but my shelves are academically richer, for a binge buy I did of books that I used during my MA, or ones that I wanted to find and couldn’t. You don’t even really feel guilty about it, because it’s a career investment. Surely overdue library fines add up, when you need to keep something past its deadline, and you might as well just buy the damn thing. I had planned to let myself have at least one ‘fun’ purchase, but I didn’t end up doing it. One of the books I had wanted, James bought, so it’s in the house; the other I can get at the uni library and photo-copy, and I never spend money on what I can get for free. And after the conference, buying books for work also seemed like fun, anyway.

Other activities include the annual mead-and-ale tasting, where Adrienne got a wee bit tipsy; it wasn’t as good as the meads I can get at home, although she says it was better last year. Pseudo Soc is another bit of academic amusement- people give proper academic papers on made-up, ridiculous topics. You have to get there insanely early- we were there two hours in advance, and everyone orders in pizza and beer and just sits there; it’s probably the best-attended session of the whole conference. (Apart, possibly, from the Terry Jones lecture on Richard II, which was extremely well done, and another fairly packed house.) And there is the infamous Dance on Saturday night, which is really something you go to watch. Academics are strange people, and medievalists, it seems, are not, on the whole, genius dancers.

It’s been an exhausting week, but an exhilarating one. I definitely want to make this my annual pilgrimage to the States, even if it is decidedly awkward as far as seeing my family goes. But it’s worth it for the kick in the rear, for the recharging of the mental and academic batteries, which I think one desperately needs periodically. I never thought I could be excited about medieval theatre again, after last year, and that, if nothing else, is beyond price.

'Wicked'.... Is, Mostly

It was originally anticipated that I would probably not see my family at all while I was in the States, but I managed to fly in a few days early. I stayed with my sister Kay, which is always interesting, given that we spent most of our childhood hating one another, and, as my mum says, we have reached the upper levels of tolerance at this point. She’s in seminary in Chicago, which may unto itself explain a lot about why we’re not close. My parents, who are, by contrast, two of my favourite people in the whole world and arguably the very closest of my friends, came down for two days so we’d all get to spend at least a bit of time together. I hadn’t seen them in almost two years, but I was much relieved to find them unchanged.

When I lived in the States, Mum and I would take semi-annual trips down to Chicago for opera weekends. The Lyric has these really nice out-of-towner packages, where you come down on a Friday morning and stay at a rather nice hotel in town, and binge out on something like three or four operas from the season over the course of the weekend. I love opera, but Daddy’s not terribly keen on it (at least, he thinks he’s not, although he’s a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and I’ve seen him giggle his way through Marriage of Figaro on multiple occasions), so instead of opera we decided to go see a musical, which is something the entire family can agree on. I’m the only one of us who hadn’t seen Wicked yet, so we went to that.

I should mention that even though I haven’t seen it, I’m extremely familiar with the soundtrack and probably as well informed about the show as you can be without actually watching it. I’ve also read the book by the same title, which is the source text. (I did not really love it. While I admire greatly the idea behind it, I didn’t think it lived up to its promise in terms of writing or structure.) Kay and Mum have each seen it a couple of times; it’s Kay’s favourite show and she is bat-shit crazy about it. After the fact, when Mum and I were giving our critiques, she stuck her fingers in her ears and hummed loudly.

Because while Wicked is a very good show, it is not a perfect show. In fairness I ought to state that I’m a minimalist; I don’t like showy shows: if you’re spending all your time gawping at the tech, at the lighting and effects, you’re not actually seeing the show. It’s very easy to swamp a production in, well, production, especially these days when audiences seem to want all that fluff. Wicked is not Cats, for example, where there is no substance behind it all; nor is it the Hal Prince Showboat, where the rather delicate story of the first modern musical was overshadowed by having a giant boat on the stage (thereby making ‘Old Man River’ Mississippi, which is of great symbolic importance to the play, completely invisible). Wicked is a strong enough- if predictable enough- story that it can hold up to a bit of gewgaw and furbelow. But it doesn’t actually need all of that.

The stage is framed with cut-out gears and machinery, and in the centre of the proscenium arch is a very large animatronic dragon. It does some fairly cool things with smoke, and it swivels its neck, at the downbeat, but that’s all it does, the entire performance. Both the mechanics and the dragon are a nod to the source text, but since that particular theme isn’t really dealt with in the play, it serves no purpose except to say, Wow, look what we can do! (And drive up the budget phenomenally, I’m sure.) And if you don’t know the book, it makes no sense at all. There were also a lot of things that rolled on and off stage rather needlessly. Even though musicals require a certain suspension of disbelief and creativity on the part of an audience, we seem to have forgotten their ability to imagine the characters into different locations, without very obvious, and large, and preferably electronic, signposts.

To continue with getting my kvetches out of the way, the song ‘Wonderful’ is woefully misplaced. The second act is quite dark and tense, and then they throw in a carnival piece that absolutely stops the tension and the action dead in its tracks. Put it in the first act and it would be fine, but it absolutely, under no circumstances belongs where it is. I don’t know how nobody caught this in previews, because it’s neon obvious. (I rather thing ‘One Short Day In The Emerald City’ is another throw-away tune, but I acknowledge the need to give a nod to the film-induced expectations of the audience. And Wicked does do a good job of balancing the imagery expected from the movie without becoming a slave to it.) Axing the last five minutes, and the happy ending, would be a much better decision- this is not a story that wants a happy ending.

All that said, Wicked is still pretty awesome. Don’t go into it expecting the book; the plot is much simpler, a rather standard fare of storytelling. But the characters are engaging, and the music is wonderful, and it is technically spectacular. The lighting is fantastic; whoever did the design, while I think it a little bit much, did some really beautiful work with scrims and gels and gobos. It was also nice to hear a real orchestra, where so many productions these days use synth. And in moments when the production really needed to look like the movie, it did, but in a way that blended in with the rest. Arguably more important, there are some excellent melodies and lyrics here. ‘Defying Gravity’ is a showstopper; while ‘For Good’ can make you a bit choky. (Unless you are my mum, in which case these two songs, and my particular favourite, ‘I’m Not That Girl’, make her totally lose her shit.) There are also a lot of little funny bits in what is essentially a pretty dark show. I’ve always thought of Glinda as reminding my of my friend Cori, who always wanted to be Glinda when we were younger (the film version, that is: she got a poufy pink dress), but I sat through the first two scenes trying to figure out who the character reminded me of, because the likeness was uncanny. The penny finally dropped and I realised that it was like watching an only slightly characterised version of Rachel.

But I think the thing I like best is that Wicked is structured more like a good old-fashioned musical from Broadway’s golden age, rather than the sung-through monstrosities or vomitous revues that have cluttered up New York and West End theatres in the past decade. It’s original, and it’s charming without being either overly clever or overly precious. And I think that, if you’re not like me, and prone to looking at theatre through too critical a lens, you can walk out of there really exhilarated. There’s a degree of depth to it- it’s not going to keep you up nights, but it’s not absolute fluff, either- that you don’t see terribly often in contemporary musicals. Ultimately, this is a production about the grey areas of ethics/morality, which is about as close as you can come to putting the very philosophical aspects of the book to the stage. Is good actually good, is evil truly intended, and how much do fate, circumstance, and general human nature play a part? Those twist and turns, darkness covered by light, are what I think make the best musicals (look at, to give the two earliest examples, Show Boat or Oklahoma!- sure, Rodgers and Hammerstein is sugar-coated, but there’s some actual meat under the cotton candy).

I don’t know that I’ll become devoted to the show and feel the need to see it time and time again, like my sister does, or like Adrienne does with Phantom. There aren’t many shows I love that much. But I’m awfully glad I finally got to see it, and at least, to some degree, understand what my family has been going on about all this time.

Confessions of an Expat

For the first time since this blog began, I am in the United States.

I haven’t been in America for almost two years. Unlike most of my friends, who visit at least for the holidays, I’ve just stayed in England. Part of it is that my class and theatre schedules have made it impractical for me to get away for anything more than a couple of days, which is not cost-effective. And part of it is just a general reluctance to return to the nation of my birth. Family politics contributes (do I go to Mudball, Michigan to see my parents, but no one else, or do I spend the time with my own family and friends on the East coast and not see the folks?) but it’s more just that I don’t feel any real pull to return.

Being back here is incredibly strange. You wouldn’t think that two years away would change your perspective that much. I’ve always been culturally isolated in some ways(lack of television, for example, separates you from the rest of society pretty quickly, and I haven’t had one for years), so I didn’t truly expect that it would be that strange. But it’s amazing how much you adapt to your surroundings and forget about what you used to take for granted. No, I don’t have a cute British accent (although I do notice accents over here a lot, and I notice that there are some words that I pronounce differently, and certainly my current slang owes more to England than America, though arguably that’s always been the case). And having got back behind the wheel of a car today for the first time in years, I remembered how to drive (and after a few days of riding in my sister’s car, I had no trouble with which side of the road to use). It’s the little things that get me. My sister’s oven, for example, which is not anywhere near the size of my mum’s, is enormous. So are the cars over here, and the houses. Highways are enormous and chaotic. Everything really is supersized in America; it’s no wonder we were the home of the disgustingly enormous cheeseburger. Light switches, and electrical outlets, however, seem really small. Toilets don’t flush with anything approaching the turbo-suck of British ones. And even if I haven’t picked one up in England, people over here have serious accents. I thought that Midwestern ones were obvious once I moved to Washington, but now they’re all quite glaring.

And the grocery stores! As always, the thing that to me is most indicative of cultural difference is the food. The varieties of the same product here are legion. And say what you will about British cooking, the availability of prepackaged and instant meals over here suggests that fewer Americans scratch-cook. Britain, I think, does fresh food better- markets and specialty shops, like a proper butcher or fishmonger, are more common there- but America, unsurprisingly, does junk food better. ‘International cuisine’ in English grocery stores leans very heavily in an Asian, especially Indian, direction; over here the Hispanic foods section gets equal or greater space. Not that this is surprising- it’s perfectly logical; but this is something I would never have contemplated before moving to York. Most exciting to me is being back among the land of really good cheese. I have yet to be anywhere in the world that can compete with Wisconsin cheddar, or the sheer variety of astonishingly good other cheeses to be found there.

The truth is, even though I’m ‘home’, I’m not. I spent twenty-six years of my life in a country that feels absolutely foreign. In some respects it always did; my ending up in England isn’t much of a surprise. And since being there I have been happier than in all my life. Even in the summer of my discontent, when life seemed so utterly devoid of charm, there was the beautiful city and a feeling at least spacial peace. The feeling that I am in a foreign land in the nation of my birth is disconcerting. I miss New England, and my ancestral graves, but not much else.

My first encounter with America on this trip was going through customs and being hassled for not having all my information to hand. I politely explained that I wasn’t sure how to fill out the forms, since I am an American national but a British resident, after which I was grilled for contact information that I didn’t have. Since Kay was picking me up, I don’t know her address. The fact that I didn’t know her phone number by heart was somehow suspicious, to which I tartly retorted that one should not assume we speak. Her number, which has a mid-Wisconsin area code, was somehow suspect. Ah! But once I explained that my sister studies at a seminary in Chicago, there was no problem. Which so perfectly exemplified why I left, and indeed my first words to Kay were something to the effect of wanting to get back on a plane back home. In fairness, most of the people I’ve run into along this trip have been spectacularly nice and pleasant, but even that is odd to me. People in Britain are also nice and pleasant, but they aren’t your best friend instantly. There’s a distance that I both respect and appreciate. I find the... overt American friendliness unnerving; it feels slightly insincere. (It probably isn’t, but that’s how it feels.)

The best part of coming back here, apart from seeing my parents, is that it makes me all that much more convinced that England is the home I was always meant for. Before flying out last week I was actually quite reluctant to leave, but I have no such qualms about it from this side of the ocean. It’s lovely to visit the family, and I’m looking forward to Kalamazoo.... but it’s especially nice to know that this is just a holiday, and that in the end I get to go home to England.

A Very Small World

At the expense of making myself sound really old, I grew up on the other side of the technological divide. Computers at home weren’t at all common until I was late into my childhood, and the internet didn’t normally exist for individuals until I was well into high school. (I learned to type on a manual typewriter.) We were pretty advanced having a phone in the car during the teen years, and it was a car phone, not a cell (for the, like, thirty seconds they existed, before mobiles made them obsolete.) Hell, I remember rotary dials. And when cordless phones were seriously cool. Getting to talk to friends long-distance on the phone was a Very Big Deal.

That said, I am, of course, currently living in the modern world. I’ve had a cell for about eight years, and I honestly can’t think how my adult life would have functioned without one. I don’t know that I’d have been as comfortable living abroad were it not for the wonders of the internet, which makes it possible for me to be constantly in touch with the people I left behind. I’m not terribly tech savvy or au courant with the latest gadgets and gizmos (SA, for example, has a cell phone with so much on it that I’m pretty sure it can actually make julienne fries, and it would take me longer to read the manual, much less understand it, than the thing’s shelf life). As far as I’m concerned, phones and computers do things these days that no one actually needs them to do. For my part, as long as I can basically talk or write letters with them, computers and phones are doing their job; nothing more is required.

This does not stop me from being amazed at how well they do this job, however. For example: James and Adrienne took off this morning for Boston, to visit James’s parents before I meet them next week in Chicago for the Kalamazoo conference. SA called Adrienne’s cell phone to tell her that she’d been cast in Richard III without auditioning (which could be the topic for a whole other entry, but I’m saving all that for tomorrow). I see this, since the phone is here in the UK, and find Adrienne online via Instant Messenger, and relay the information. She then finds SA online with another programme, gets the whole story, and relays it to me. SA lives about three miles down the road from me, but I get this information via my roommate who’s in Boston. By the same token, my mum often gets gossip and news from me about people in her hometown, that I get from skulking around Facebook and friends’ blogs, even though I live in England and they are practically in her backyard.

Really, you think that these items exist for business, or data processing, or the government, or any such high-flown reason, but the truth is that they exist because they make it damned easy for us to spread gossip. (And I don’t want to get any emails about how gossip is morally wrong or something. First, I don’t care, second, I don’t hold with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and third, as far as I’m concerned, gossip is really just either ‘news’ good and proper, or ‘concerned sharing’.) It must’ve been so much harder when you had to go over to your neighbour’s house to share the latest information, and so much more obvious that you were doing it. When her mum and sister were visiting and irritating her, Adrienne and I sat across the living room messaging one another snarkily: no one was the wiser, and it gave her the chance to vent. You couldn’t do that a hundred years ago. And, let’s face it, this is what ninety-nine percent of the world is actually using mobiles or the ’net to do. Not saving the world or finding a cure for cancer: it’s so that we can talk about one another and what little intrigues our various intertwined lives are playing out.

And the data trails! We know so much about court and political intrigues of earlier eras from surviving documents, but if those people had had access to the internet or cell phones, they would have got away with a hell of a lot more. Admittedly, history might be a lot duller (picture Mary Queen of Scots and the scandal of... the Casket Text Messages?). Ironically, in this so-called information age, and the massive government invasiveness (if any of America’s Big Brother snoops are reading this, you and your country suck the big one), when it comes to the everyday scandals and secrets, it’s a hell of lot easier to get the information across. The fact that information from York, to York, can come via Boston is amazing to me- not so much technologically speaking- I’m not clever enough to understand the tech of it- but because the sheer ridiculousness of trivialities, like cast lists, shooting around the globe between three of us in about thirty seconds is simply absurd.

It makes me wonder what’s next. Because I can’t imagine being much more efficient in “shared information” than this- but I’m sure that eventually someone is going to try.