A bunch of reviews
Mar. 27th, 2017 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI had a very nice Saturday in New York City. Really reminded me how much I miss living there - not so much because I would *do things* if I were there, probably, although not working/attending class seven days a week and having enough money to live on might mean that I would, but just because of the atmosphere. All the people, the narrow and shady streets, the buildings packed together, the smell and the noise ... I still love it. Dad and Owen and I went to the Morgan Library and ate halal food in front of the NYPL.
Happy to report that I enjoyed Hamilton, although I still don't quite get the intense adoration. After thinking about it it's similar to other shows with huge fanbases like Les Mis and Rent in that it's epic and serious and the characters face real peril and have deeply-held ideals. Those two are also both rock operas, and I've heard from a few people that they don't like a mixture of spoken lines and singing because that breaks the suspension of disbelief, basically. But it seems like another level of fandom from them, unless it's just because I wasn't paying attention to ticket prices in the '90s? Maybe it has to do with the fact that the major '90s musicals overall seem to have been fairly serious, while over the past ten years big revivals of musical comedies/movies->musicals have been happening a lot, as well as "small" pieces about the characters' internal lives? And Ragtime perhaps missed the boat by coming in at the end of the '90s when people might have been tired of it, and it's REALLY hardcore, too, not just people campaigning against injustice but there's a bunch of explicit racism.
(Speaking of revivals, I'm pretty sure that I'll be seeing Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! sometime this year. I'd also love to see War Paint and Present Laughter, but ... let's see what happens with this job interview before I make plans for things.)
You lose something without the original cast of any show, but they were still very good. Seth Stewart (Lafayette/Jefferson) was a standout to me, just bursting off the stage in both roles, and so was Bryan Terrell Clark (Washington). Still in awe of the dancers - I love Broadway dancers, they're just so good. When King George did his first song I was a bit :/ because he was not Jonathan Groff, but then he was such a ham that by the second song I was into it, and I was thinking the actor reminded me a lot of Taran Killam, only to realize after the bows when he spoke about Equity Fights AIDS that ... that was Taran Killam! Pretty cool.
I was really surprised that John Laurens (incidentally, played by Anthony Lee Medina, who went to high school with my brother's girlfriend) had such a small role. Did Les Amis fandom latch onto Laurens/Lafayette/Mulligan or something? Or did people get really into reading up on the history in general and then got into them? Because it just seems a bit out of proportion over on Tumblr.
I don't normally pick up on these things, but I was really impressed with the counting in "the Ten Duel Commandments" being repeated by Eliza and Philip, long enough afterward that I'd forgotten it, and then of course being used in both Philip and Alexander's duels. :O Mind blown.
"The Room Where It Happens" was definitely my and everyone else's favorite song. Probably a very common opinion but still worth saying, I feel.
I have also consumed a piece of contemporary literary fiction! That never happens. It's called Indelible. The book is divided among three perspectives: Magdalena, a young Lithuanian woman who can see words on people's skin that tells their future or past or personality; Richard Beart, a forcibly-retired English teacher on the trail of his late mother, a famous and celebrated writer; and Neil, Richard's son, studying abroad in London. Richard once employed Magdalena's mother as a cleaning lady, and they still have a distant kind of relationship, so when Magdalena is living in Swindon she and Neil meet up to exchange belated Christmas presents for their parents; while in Paris, she runs into Richard, who doesn't recognize her, and so the triangle of meetings is complete.
It's definitely "magical realism" and not fantasy, because it's suuuuper literary. It's one of those books that I don't feel emotionally connected to for a long stretch of time, but then I realize I'm halfway through it and I want to know what happens next. Part of the reason for my lack of connection is that so much of the book is Neil and Richard's perspectives, and they're pretty dull: Neil is an undergrad dude (who idolizes a history professor that tbh does not come off as as cool and knowledgeable as he's supposed to) and Richard is so stereotypical a literary fiction male author self-insert that I kept double-checking to make sure the author was female (he got forced out of his job because he was trying to help a girl who was being sexually abused by her father, only she said that Richard did it instead; he's searching for the shoes his mother was wearing the one time he saw her, when he was three, in a meeting that literary scholars agree never happened, and nobody really gets what he's trying to do and he's really awful at explaining what seems pretty simple to me). But Magdalena's sections are fascinating, if only for the descriptions of what she reads on people, and while the mystery of Inga Beart's total abandonment of her son and eventual self-mutilation and death at first seemed kind of contrived, I got really into it by the end.
It's really the ending that worked for me - I'm sure a lot of readers felt it was really obvious, but it took me by surprise and was very satisfying.
I'm also just about finished with E.F. Benson's Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893). It's one of those stories that reminds you how flexible the boundaries of an era are - it really reads as Edwardian, or even 1920s, especially in terms of dialogue. Dodo is this young woman in society who fascinates everyone with her charm and ability to talk nonsense for long periods of time; she gets married to a somewhat dull but devoted young marquis when she's in love with someone else. Like the David Blaize books, it's always made clear what the proper morality is, but it's still pretty lively and enjoyable.
Happy to report that I enjoyed Hamilton, although I still don't quite get the intense adoration. After thinking about it it's similar to other shows with huge fanbases like Les Mis and Rent in that it's epic and serious and the characters face real peril and have deeply-held ideals. Those two are also both rock operas, and I've heard from a few people that they don't like a mixture of spoken lines and singing because that breaks the suspension of disbelief, basically. But it seems like another level of fandom from them, unless it's just because I wasn't paying attention to ticket prices in the '90s? Maybe it has to do with the fact that the major '90s musicals overall seem to have been fairly serious, while over the past ten years big revivals of musical comedies/movies->musicals have been happening a lot, as well as "small" pieces about the characters' internal lives? And Ragtime perhaps missed the boat by coming in at the end of the '90s when people might have been tired of it, and it's REALLY hardcore, too, not just people campaigning against injustice but there's a bunch of explicit racism.
(Speaking of revivals, I'm pretty sure that I'll be seeing Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! sometime this year. I'd also love to see War Paint and Present Laughter, but ... let's see what happens with this job interview before I make plans for things.)
You lose something without the original cast of any show, but they were still very good. Seth Stewart (Lafayette/Jefferson) was a standout to me, just bursting off the stage in both roles, and so was Bryan Terrell Clark (Washington). Still in awe of the dancers - I love Broadway dancers, they're just so good. When King George did his first song I was a bit :/ because he was not Jonathan Groff, but then he was such a ham that by the second song I was into it, and I was thinking the actor reminded me a lot of Taran Killam, only to realize after the bows when he spoke about Equity Fights AIDS that ... that was Taran Killam! Pretty cool.
I was really surprised that John Laurens (incidentally, played by Anthony Lee Medina, who went to high school with my brother's girlfriend) had such a small role. Did Les Amis fandom latch onto Laurens/Lafayette/Mulligan or something? Or did people get really into reading up on the history in general and then got into them? Because it just seems a bit out of proportion over on Tumblr.
I don't normally pick up on these things, but I was really impressed with the counting in "the Ten Duel Commandments" being repeated by Eliza and Philip, long enough afterward that I'd forgotten it, and then of course being used in both Philip and Alexander's duels. :O Mind blown.
"The Room Where It Happens" was definitely my and everyone else's favorite song. Probably a very common opinion but still worth saying, I feel.
I have also consumed a piece of contemporary literary fiction! That never happens. It's called Indelible. The book is divided among three perspectives: Magdalena, a young Lithuanian woman who can see words on people's skin that tells their future or past or personality; Richard Beart, a forcibly-retired English teacher on the trail of his late mother, a famous and celebrated writer; and Neil, Richard's son, studying abroad in London. Richard once employed Magdalena's mother as a cleaning lady, and they still have a distant kind of relationship, so when Magdalena is living in Swindon she and Neil meet up to exchange belated Christmas presents for their parents; while in Paris, she runs into Richard, who doesn't recognize her, and so the triangle of meetings is complete.
It's definitely "magical realism" and not fantasy, because it's suuuuper literary. It's one of those books that I don't feel emotionally connected to for a long stretch of time, but then I realize I'm halfway through it and I want to know what happens next. Part of the reason for my lack of connection is that so much of the book is Neil and Richard's perspectives, and they're pretty dull: Neil is an undergrad dude (who idolizes a history professor that tbh does not come off as as cool and knowledgeable as he's supposed to) and Richard is so stereotypical a literary fiction male author self-insert that I kept double-checking to make sure the author was female (he got forced out of his job because he was trying to help a girl who was being sexually abused by her father, only she said that Richard did it instead; he's searching for the shoes his mother was wearing the one time he saw her, when he was three, in a meeting that literary scholars agree never happened, and nobody really gets what he's trying to do and he's really awful at explaining what seems pretty simple to me). But Magdalena's sections are fascinating, if only for the descriptions of what she reads on people, and while the mystery of Inga Beart's total abandonment of her son and eventual self-mutilation and death at first seemed kind of contrived, I got really into it by the end.
It's really the ending that worked for me - I'm sure a lot of readers felt it was really obvious, but it took me by surprise and was very satisfying.
I'm also just about finished with E.F. Benson's Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893). It's one of those stories that reminds you how flexible the boundaries of an era are - it really reads as Edwardian, or even 1920s, especially in terms of dialogue. Dodo is this young woman in society who fascinates everyone with her charm and ability to talk nonsense for long periods of time; she gets married to a somewhat dull but devoted young marquis when she's in love with someone else. Like the David Blaize books, it's always made clear what the proper morality is, but it's still pretty lively and enjoyable.
