She doesn't live here. But she molts here.

just shows update for now.

Phedre

-Jean Racine, a tragic French dramatist, wrote Phedre as a traditional French tragedy in 1667, possessing of the favored form of writing, 6 foot rhyming couplets, which gave it sort of an artificial rhythm, and also making it extrememly difficult to translate. it doesn't really flow like iambic pentameter does for the voice, so they pretty much had to change a lot. 

-Phedre covers a whole lot of territory of all dimensions of human experience, theological (the idea of divine order/power, the gods have everything set up and you can't control anything), political (these are kings and queens we're dealing with, all of their actions have great affects, like splitting up nations and kingdoms, think about oedipus's plague, leontes's dividing of two nations, etc), Domestic (family horror;; Hamlet's uncle, Oedipus's mom, Phedre's step son), and Psychology (individuals' minds, ethos, etc)

-in 1667, you'd get an orchestra, act 1, a ballet, act 2, another ballet, act 3, a farce, act 4, something else, act 5, and then another farce or spectacle. it was a very social eventa nd people woudl wander in and out. theater as we know it today didnt really happen until electricity because there was no way to turn off the house lights

-they had really nice costumes. they generally were playing contemporary royalty roles. and the king and queen were probably sitting there watching, so you had to be dressed as glamorous as them. 

-french people didn't mind female actresses, unlike england

-soooo to understand the play, phedre, you sorta need to understand phedre's family. her father was king minos who receives this white bull he is supposed to sacrifice, but doesn't to keep it. SO poseidon (most people know him) put a curse on his why Pasiphae to make her fall in love with the white bull. she literally makes a cow cotstume thing and has sex with the white bull and has a son, a minotaur (face of bull, body of man), it was dangerous so they kept it in this maze. 

-soooo phedre, married to theseus, thinks she has inherited her family's curse because she (spoiler alert) is in love with her step-son, Hippolytus. 

-Arecia, who is the woman that Hippolytus is in love with, was made up by Racine, to give Hippolytus a reason to not love Phedre (like her being his step-mother wasn't enough racine....).

-this play...is one gigantic tirade. 

-So Phedre was done at the Lyttleton at the National. woo the national. Two hours. No interval. it's straight up tragedy the entire two hours. i sorta wanted to die. heh. 

-the set was amazing! it was like set in this rock, desert-y area, which we all decided worked really well, because it just show how desperate the situation was, how oppressed they were in thsi area, any color or happy pretty palace would have led you to beleive everything was fine and that they were happy. you did NOT get that impression, it had a ground and a ceiling made of "rock" and then sand all around the stage/platform, at one point the king through a sword in the sand and it went all the way down!! it was cool.

-acting was pretty good. Helen Mirren as Phedre was wonderful. I personally didn't care for teh king at all. I had trouble understanding him and i didn't feel like any of his actions were motivated, which of course bothers me. 

-there was tons of motifs of ocean, neptune, the sun, the idea of a monster (phedre), the beast that kills hippolytus is said to have the head of a bull (hint hint, minotaur reference, curse of phedre)

-interesting constuming: everyone was kinda in contemporary clothing except for phedre, who had this beautiful purple gown. she also had her own entranceway that no one else took. Really separated her fromt eh rest of the world into her own world of tragedy and curse. Hippolytus is of a foreign mother but seems to fit in this world much better than phedre does.

-my problems with it: everything is exposition! nothing happens on stage! bleh. I also didn't like the fake crying at the end. don't cry if you can't pull it off, you just sound silly. no interval in that is dumb, sunday matinee, man i was trying to not snooze. 

billy elliot

-SO. someone who use to be a professor at Duke who knew Clum used to be dating (i know, pretty removed) tis dude named Lee Hall. Lee Hall originally wrote Billy Elliot as a play, sorta an autobiography about his life. However, people were like, no dude this has got to be a movie so off it went to the movie many people have seen. Then Elton John wanted to write music for it to make it a musical and there ya go. 

-It takes place int eh North of England in a mining area. for while england ran primarily on coal so they were very important and had become nationalized

-the play takes place in 1981-82, during a minder strike because Margaret Thatcher had beat the Labour Party (who was getting funding from the unions) and thought the first thing to go should be the miners because they were the most powerful, which pretty much led to the destruction of the coal industry and caused great economic problems for everyone who relied on that industry, lots of people int he north.

-one change Lee hall made from the movie to the musical: he really emphasized the social problems of the miners in Billy's life. --- we all liked that.

-originally Billy Elliot was going to be about a boy who wants to become a writer, but that wasn't going to sell well, so they turned him into a ballet dancer, but many of the characteristics of his life are extrememly similar to that of Lee Hall (mom died at age 11, brother who's way older, etc). 

-Obviously, typical thoughts about him being a ballet dancer come out of that area

-first of all it was only something that higher class, posh people did and could afford.

-second, gender issue: girls do ballet not boys, ballet is "gay" so billy would be defining sexuality

-it was also a big deal for them to go to london because no one could afford it

-but he does hooray!

-the most important idea in it in my opinion: it's not just about Billy becoming a ballet dancer, it's about the fact that he's the luckiest kid alive because he's going to get out of this. the miners lose the strike and have to return to the mine, knowing they all will eventually lose their jobs as they are eliminated, billy will be completely out of it. and it's really exciting.

-i learned they have  Billy House. where once they do like a year's worth of auditioning for billys (aged 11-15 and no more), and get to about ten, they send them off the the Billy House for a year of training, and then generally each production has three rotating billies and an understudy/sick billy. child labor laws. ...

-Clum has seen Billy Elliot more than 7 times and thought the night we saw it was the sloppiest he had ever seen it! dang it.  He also thought they hammed up the laughs to much in this show, and it's really much more sentimental than it was. which makes me sad.

I thought it was good. my only issue was that i didn't like the dad or the brother at all, they would just start shouting at each other and keep it up the entire scene, it was bad. i also didn't like the ballet teacher at all. i didn't like her voice and i didn't like her dancing. issue. haha. but billy was good. i thought his voice was a little weak, sad, but he still did a good job considering he's like 12!!!! and they had this baby boy (like four years old) running around the stage sometimes and he was SO CUTE. i love babies. haha

 

Shall We Dance

I student rushed this today because Clum told me he thought I would like it because i liek dance! :) teehee. and it was at Sadler's Wells which is ten minutes behind Langton Close so that was nice. I got second row in the balcony for fifteen pounds which was great for two reasons: I had a fabulous view and no heads to worry about. and two because i was sitting next to six really old ladies who had all come together and were so cute and wanted to know all about what i was doing and everything I had seen and then after the show got up and started dancing. so cute.

the show: 

the show was pretty much another Adam Cooper love child (Adam cooper of matthew bourne's swan lake, Billy elliot when he grows up in teh movie, and tons more etc). he choreographed it and starred in it. which is interesting, but will come up in a second.

-the story was very simple: guy searching for true love travels around the world and runs into six different women from different places. dances with them, loves them, either leaves them, or someone else makes him leave. he finally finds the one in the end who turns out to be the girl who played the best friend of each of the other six girls at all the other places, ie "the right one was right in front of your face the whole time." beautiful dancing and beautiful costumes! man id give anything to do a show like that. it was beautiful and looked like so much fun. they did a 15 min tap sequence that was just great. so good. 

Adam Cooper's wife was actually one of the six women so that was pretty cool to find out. she was bigger than the rest, i thought that was interesting, but a great dancer.  

-the music was actually a dedication to Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein, aka hoof n horn's bff), so it had a whole bunch of songs form the king and i, carousel, ghost town, flower drum song, babes in arms, oklahoma, no strings, on your toes, do i hear a waltz, cinderella, and state fair. so that was cool to recognize some of the songs.

-again, gorgeous dancing, but i think i liked dorian gray better, just more interesting/quirky.

i came back to langton close and grabbed eugenie, taty, ted, and kyle and we picked up cameron on the way and were off to Soho to see an added performance (i told you on ichat, mom, that clum added a show wednesday night and that the schedule was different). We were looking around for teh theater and saw this restaurant called Las Iguanas and kyle and i had just been talking about how much we missed mexican food and there it was! hooray, so we went there and splurged a little bit (which made me happy, real food, real sit-down restaurant), and it was a lot of fun. I got, omg, a butternut squash, spinach, and chick peas enchilada with rice and beans that was heavenly. so good. so that was fun and then we had to run to the theater because we were gonna be late. 

we saw tonight, Dreams of Violence, which Clum didn't know anything about except that it got good reviews. it was in sort of another pub theater. maybe 200 seats at the most. 

-show was about a woman and her crazy family pretty much. kinda apologia, but a comedy. in a way. im not sure what questions or ideas or anything it raised or brought up, but it was still enjoyable. woman dedicated to protesting for lower class people, drunken mother who moves in with her, nympho exhusband she's trying to divorce, senile, crazy father in a retirement (cutest character), and son whose a drug addict. all of those things combined, don't sound like a pretty picture. but it was really funny and i enjoyed it. a little unclear abotu the ending, but hopefully we talk about it in class tomorrow and we get the whole thing cleared up.  

some quotes:

"she doesn't live here."

"but she molts here."

"there's so much i regret."

"join the club."

"divorce time."

"you think sex was the problem."

"no, i think you were the problem."

"you think you can stop me, but I can't even stop me."

"Joe, Joe Joe, am I ever gonna fall in love again?"

"I miss the certainty of belief."

"We were so hot, we didn't make it to the bedroom, but we're too old to get off the hallway floor."

"I hope you don't think I'm a stalker, but I've been following you" (haha)

"I slip."

"I catch you."

tomorrow is my second to last day here and im not happy about it. not to mention, i dont get to do anything "fun" because geoff and i had scene practice with matt ryan at three so we have to practice. BUT we're going back to teh Forge tomorrow night so that should be a blast. :) and then priscilla. oh boy, last show. :(

all for now.

much love,

becca

but there's no place like....