long live live theatre!

we saw an updated musical version of the three musketeers last evening at the utzon (he of sydney opera house fame)-designed music house in esbjerg. and the music was...wait for it...80s glam rock with a bit of madonna, cyndy lauper and eurythmics thrown in. and as weird and possibly awful as that sounds, it really wasn't. it was awesome. a cleverly-done update that made the three musketeers story relevant for today and totally struck the right notes of nostalgia for those of us who grew up in the 80s. to take a story that everyone knows so well and has seen a million times and to couple it with music that we've all sung along to a million times transformed both into something new and fresh. it was a bit of what the russian formalists called "making strange," and it just worked. it helped that the acting was great, the music was great and the lighting was very cool. and the way they played with mixing english and danish was brilliant as well. in this day and age with all of the amateur talent competitions in prime time and "reality" television featuring people of limited talent, it was refreshing to see performers who were just genuinely good at what they do. and theatre just lends an immediacy and an intimacy that watching netflix on the iPad just utterly lacks. long live the theatre!

i'll surely go to hell, but first we must drink together

i went to a play this evening. a two-man show in an intimate setting, right here in my own little town. it was an adaptation of dostoevsky's short novel (it's not exactly a novella and not fully a novel) the eternal husband. the two actors were very good and although it was actually a dostoevsky i didn't know, but it had all of the elements of dostoevsky at his finest. that special politeness and humility with which half-mad characters speak to one another. glimmers of raskolnikov, the underground man, saintly but mildly insane and surely consumptive but beautiful women. clever lines, "go to hell." "i'll surely go to hell, but first we must drink together." and the undercurrents, oh my the undercurrents.

it struck me that we have no undercurrents today - everyone's letting it all hang out, spilling everything, without subtlety, not letting anything at all bubble below the surface. i think we need more undercurrents. and by that i don't mean hidden agendas (there are surely enough of those, tho' often they aren't that well-hidden); i mean real, raging emotions, boiling just below the surface. now we just get all of that out of our systems passive aggressively on facebook. and i'm beginning to think it's not good for us.

there was a point during the first act where i welled up with tears, thinking of my favorite professor from iowa who died a couple of years ago. i felt a longing to discuss what i'd seen with him that just about bowled my over. and a sorrow that that was no longer possible since he's gone. i would so love to have talked over the performance with him. he would have known how to positively direct all of the emotions and small glimpses of my own madness it brought forth in me.

my advice - get out there and see some live theatre. there's nothing like it.

the wind is a-howling

the wind is howling outside and it's been raining all day. we had a great afternoon celebrating a belated (and vegetarian) thanksgiving with friends. there was a hilarious game of cranium, which the boys came back and won after the girls (being me and j) utterly failed to guess sabin's brilliant (eyes-closed) drawing of a rainforest. honestly, we deserved to lose. but at least there was a beautiful pie.

tonight was the last episode of the brilliant danish crime show, forbrydelsen (the killing).  an enigmatic ending, especially since they say they won't make another series. but i won't say more as it's just starting in the UK and i don't want to spoil it. suffice it to say it's definitely worth watching. dark and ominous and so capturing the state of society and power today.

we went to a play last night - a real live theatre production. it was a two-person performance at mungo park in kolding - smilet er den korteste afstand (a smile is the shortest distance). it was a very good and thought-provoking performance. there's just something about live theatre - it gets at the whole range of emotions in such an immediate and raw way - one that television or even film simply can't. the two actors were very talented - singing, clowning one minute and very dramatic the next. it was a grueling 90 minute performance for them and they took us on an emotional roller coaster ride, and all they had onstage with them was a grand piano. very brilliantly done. we've got to prioritize seeing more theatre in 2013.

afterwards, we had dinner with our friends at a mexican restaurant. for some reason i never learn not to eat mexican food at restaurants in denmark. it's always disappointing. and has little or nothing to do with real mexican food, tho' the chicken in my burrito was really good, it wasn't really particularly mexican. there's no spicy kick to it (don't be misled by the pickled jalapeños) and they always put creme fraiche in the guacamole. plus they used parboiled rice - that stuff should be outlawed. but the company was good and it was a very nice evening.

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what's the best thing you've read in 2012?

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oh, i like this blog (in danish). 

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the f boards: feathers. felted. food porn - savory. food porn - sweet. forage. Foraging (shared board, hence the capital letter). foxy (this is one my favorites visually). future thinking.