Sunday 04/28/2024
Pretty much sat around my room playing music and amusing myself for the morning. I found a couple songs to add to my repertoire, like “Margaritaville”. Things that (1) have a fairly simple chord structure, so I can play them, (2) have lyrics that I can get into, with a story line a/o poetic imagery, (3) and are fun to sing. Margaritaville fits all those to a T. “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Gentle on My Mind”, Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluja”. I keep finding more.
At 1 I joined an 11-person carpool to the Pear Theater to see “The Chinese Lady” about a Chinese girl who was exhibited as a curiosity in a freak show in the 1840s. It tried to tell the woman’s life story with only two actors, a lot of talking to the audience, toward the end got into the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and various atrocities against Chinese. Well acted and produced, as usual, but not entertaining.
Last night’s play, “The Skin of Our Teeth” was pretty well described in the Wikipedia article on it. Which I read on my phone during the first intermission, just to find out what was going on. (Because local theaters no longer go to the expense of printing programs with notes and info in them, grump grump.) It also was very well produced, elaborate effects, costumes, sets, incredible production values for the tiny little Bus Barn theater. But in the end it was preachy and didactic for a modern audience — maybe it hit home, made some points in 1942 but geez, today’s audience has seen three more wars than they had seen in 1942, and the cold war and global warming, and we know all too well that humanity just keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over.
My main gripe at that play was that the theater chose to stick with an 8pm curtain time, when they knew darn well that the play ran 2:45. They could have started at 7 and sent us home at 10pm.
Codgerville 