good entertainment, bad entertainment

[firstfrost]

Mikado Friday night. The music sounded stronger than many G&S shows have. I really need to pretend I don't hear the plot, and just listen to the music and watch the goofing around (which was all a lot of fun to watch). Novel revelation: Age makeup is sharpened! In the graphic "sharpen" filter sense; the edges around the darker lines are extra-lightened. And, I have finally figured out how to keep Copytech from pixelating any art on the programs.

twe's party full of a Million Little Kids yesterday. I kept expecting her place to have more circular connectivity. The Forces of Darkness were undefeated at crocamole, and my flicking fingernail is still sore.

Brunch this afternoon at Minado with mjperson and ilhander for their birthdays, with special guests Whole Bunch of Other People. That was fun, though had the traditional problem with large mobs of only talking to the nearby people. We contemplated lily pond party mechanics on the way back, but without a dedicated computer and antigrav, it's probably infeasible.

Three Sisters at the ART tonight. I have never seen so many audience members sneak out partway through. Lady With a Lapdog (which my fingers keep trying to type as "Lady With a Laptop") was another of my less favorite ART productions, so I will freely admit to some possible anti-Chekhov bias here. But gah, it was a two and a half hour play padded out to three and a half hours by Significant Pauses. And it was a confusing and boring play to begin with. (Extra-boring in the first half, in particular.) At least they gave us a good dose of writhing on the floor. I also don't understand the directorial choice to obscure a lot of the dialogue with loud atonal music (including all the ending lines), or by staging some of it behind a glass wall.

[Note: justom claims it's not a boring play, just a slow one in which not much happens.]

I leave you with a quintessential ART moment:

Me: "Excuse me, did you say you were familiar with the original?"
Other Patron: "Well, I read the translation, at least."
Me: "Um, well, could you tell me, when he brought on the singing severed head in a fishtank, what was up with that?"
Other Patron: "Oh, in the original, that was a silver samovar."
Me: "Thank you! That makes so much more sense!"

Comments

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

So what is the technical difference between a play which is boring and one which is slow and free of occurences?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose "Waiting for Godot" is slow and nothing happens in it, but I don't find it boring. I think that's because of the presence of clever dialogue, though, which this didn't really have. :)