There Are Pandas In The Sky (4 June 2007)

So I expect everyone is paralysed by the need to know: did I survive without Sarah, while she stayed with Jane & Ed in New York?

In brief, no, or at least I did but only for five days, which was unfortunate, as she was away for seven.

I did get up to some drinking hi-jinks (hi-drinks?) on Friday and Saturday night, which kept me happy - and surprisingly chirpy the morning after - but I crashed and burned in terms of things to actually do on Sunday and Monday.

Tuesday night I went to see Into The Woods with Kim from High Spirits. Kim loves this show and sang a very creditable version of Giants In The Sky at the performance party last month. I've heard the soundtrack once, but nothing really stuck out. It's a Sondheim show: the first half is a bunch of fairy tales working themselves out, and the second half is a kind of examination of what happens when you get what you wish for, plus a mass murder of cast members the like of which I haven't seen outside of And Then There Were None or a teen slash movie. Nothing to complain about there, although I strongly suspect the first half is deliberately long so that the principals who get wasted in Act Two don't feel like they're only being given half a role. So I sat there at the back, watching this, and I thought: this is incredibly dull and only slightly funny, and (although technically I had forgotten the details of the Rapunzel story) this show is just telling me a bunch of fairytales which I already know. No dramatic tension, even in the little story of the baker and his wife trying to steal an important fairytale object from each of the plotlines so as to persuade a witch to lift a curse of infertility on their house. In other words: blah.

Now Act Two is much better. Radically better, and the only problem is, although it needs Act One in order to function dramatically, Act One is so goddamn dull that you have to wonder if this was the only way Sondheim could find to tell the story. Because, had I not been operating on instructions from Sarah to watch and report, I would have left at the interval. Calling it the halfway point would be an extreme stretch of fractions... 1/2 is not equal to 2/3 even for a value of 1/2 as large as this. And it's not like the music improves in Act Two; it's somewhat simplistic throughout, and there's only a couple of actual tunes in the whole show. But, under orders, I stuck around, and was rewarded by the aforementioned random killing spree at the hands (or rather feet) of an irate giantess, and by a couple of good-ish emotional songs, and by at least an attempt to explore an interesting theory of how to live life.

Unfortunately, here's where my several upscale criticisms come in. The point of the show is (sort of) that you should live your life as best you can, grab the amazing moments and cherish them, because your life might be cut short without warning at any moment. Now that's a laudable point, and there are some great stories to be told around it. But it doesn't help that the characters in this one are nominally from fairytales. I found it very difficult to think of them as real people. Telling a symbolic story with symbolic characters isn't as effective as telling a symbolic story with real ones. Wicked, and other such fairytale retellings grounded more thoroughly in a realistic or semi-realistic history, only work for me because of those details and that grounding.

(Magic is always a problem; you need to spend an awful lot of time investigating and defining the rules, or people will say "Well, it's just magic isn't it? Why don't you just magic them back to life or whatever?" And indeed, considering that the story featured numerous people being killed in a very final manner, it didn't help that in the first-half closer, the witch character brings a cow back to life with no obvious side-effects - no "Buffy's mom" issues, or see also the excellent joke "What would Beethoven say if he was alive today? Let me out of this coffin!")

Another problem, and it's somewhat unfair of me to level this accusation at a show written in 1987, but I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to see a show about how death can strike at any moment and you should make the most of your life, well, there's a better one, and I've been in it. After A New Brain, everything else is, well, a bit downhill. I don't just say this because I've been in it, mind you; I just think it's a better show. It's more compact, it has more tunes, it's funnier; it's just generally better. It has real people in it and if anything it creates a modern fairytale, like the Mr Men. I appreciate that Into The Woods came first, and that if I'd seen it in 1987 I might have been as dumbstruck by its genius and its metaphorical content as I was a few years ago by A New Brain. But I didn't, I wasn't, and I ain't; sorry, Stephen.

And still more unfortunately, thinking it through a bit later, I realised that the theme of the show, to be explored in detail in Act Two, is mentioned very casually and then dismissed in a song in Act One, which for me made the lengthy exploration of it a bit moot. "Yes, you said that earlier", etc.

I think it was at best an interesting failure - which is better than a dull failure, but obviously less actual fun to watch than many kinds of success. I should say the cast - most of whom were professionals working for free, in a two-night concert performance in aid of preservation efforts in Stanley Park - were pretty damn good. Which I expect when I go to see a show, but it's nice when it actually happens. And Agony is a very funny male duet (with an equally funny reprise) which would be cool for Burge and I to do sometime. Somehow. So the upshot is, I can't blame the cast for my not rating the show. They did a bang-up job; I just didn't like the material.

And I got to say 'moot', so it's not all bad.

Moot!

Sarah's flight arrived at YVR (Vancouver Airport - at least try to look cosmopolitan will you?) at 1:40am on Wednesday. A dutiful, although somewhat tired, Panda was awaiting her in the arrivals lounge. I stood by the glass and stared at the visible end of the travelator, mentally admonishing each passing traveller for Failing To Be A Bunny, until finally - she was there! WHEEEE! I bounced up and down a lot and grabbed her the moment she came into reach, even though there was a big railing in the way. I missed her awfully.

New York was, in summary, fantastic and beautiful and emotional, and I'm glad she got to go. Sometime soon I'll join her on a trip. (I might try to persuade her to write about it, although I suspect the best you'll get is me taking rough dictation.) Excellently, she found me a couple of James Agate books. James Agate was an English theatre critic whom I discovered thanks to a Radio 4 programme years ago. He was arrogant, opinionated, verbose, and utterly dedicated to quality in theatre, and his diaries and reviews make for fascinating reading. The period and literary references alone take me ages to track down. But I can't get enough of it. We've slowly pieced together a semi-collection of Agate's books - his diaries, Ego, run to nine volumes of which I think I have six, plus some samplers, and I have some of his criticism as well. It's a collection I'm expecting will take years to complete, and that suits me, because everything I have thusfar by him stands up to rereading like nothing else on Earth. Quite remarkable. And Sarah spotted these two collections on a top shelf in a random bookshop where she had a ten-minute time limit. Wotta goil!

And now the Jaysmith Music Update. LA!

You'll remember (at least I think I've said before) that Ieva runs three choirs: High Spirits (which we both belong to), Afternoon Delights (Sarah only), and Simple Gifts (neither of us here). High Spirits performed this season's first Outreach concert - a snazzy term for playing in an old people's home, like Princess Marina House - this Wednesday. We survived it rather than excelling, although most of it didn't sound too bad. I still can't be having with songs in foreign languages, but the audience likes the sound so who can complain? You know what I'm like before, during, and after a performance: buzzing! I did approach one song near the end with a feeling like a student who knows he hasn't revised, but fortunately, as happens oftimes, my throat knew what was expected of it even if my conscious brain was a bit trepidatious.

On Saturday we had an extra, somewhat epic, rehearsal, the high point of which was the addition of drums and bass to some of the songs. Now I and several other lucky members of the choir (including James The God) can hear drums anyway while we're singing, but having real ones is always good. Songs like Sing Sing Sing positively blistered along. Result! So the full concert (on Sunday) should sound legendary. And Panda has to scat! Twice! This actually makes me feel very nervous. I should definitely do what Marvin recommended at the workshop, which had occurred to me as a good plan anyway: learn a couple of excellent-sounding scats, and make it look like I'm improvising them on the spot.

On Sunday, Simple Gifts performed their big church concert for the season. And, to our surprise, Ieva invited Sarah and I to perform as guests! We thought about what to do for a while, and then decided, on about Thursday, that we should write a couple of new songs. To perform on Sunday afternoon. Are we nuts? Well, a bit. I don't know that we really convinced ourselves that this was a workable idea until Friday night, but the upshot was, we came to the concert armed with As Yet Unnamed Song About Travelling, a folky Sarah solo, I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls, an enthusiastic Rat Pack blast for me, and All You Have To Say, the wedding song we wrote a few weeks back. We sang with microphones, which worked a treat - I think we're both still a bit nervous with them owing to our much greater experience not using them, but their power is clear to behold, especially the radio mic I had! - and the songs went down a bit of a storm.

And today Sarah wrote the music for some lyrics I wrote a few weeks ago, for a song called Fireflies. At this rate we'll have an entire album in a couple of weeks' time. Family & Posse members will receive copies of this as soon as possible :)

It's been really far too hot here for the past fortnight or so, even with the new bedroom fan we bought before Sarah went away, and which in her absence I promptly forgot we owned, leading to seven nights of sweltering in my stupidity. So we've had the balcony door open all night, and it's just about cool enough to consider going to bed. So, take care, pay your taxes, and in Justine's case, watch out for the world's funniest birthday card, arriving soon. Of course it might just be us who think it's funny... tee hee! Much love to all; Panda zonk now.