I have a song to sing, oh . . .
Jan. 22nd, 2006 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaFirst Yeomen of the Guard rehearsal today, and what fun will it be!
First off, a little bit of self-promotion: I have done this for four
years in a row now, and while the greetings the first two years I came
back were cordial and friendly, the greetings this year tipped over
that line into over-joyed greeting of a long-lost friend. Big smiles
when I walked in, big hugs when I walked around, and Roland Bailey even
remembered my last name! He though my first name was Ava (which it's
not), but I figure that since he has been with the production for the
past 46 years, one must show up a bit more than four years in a row for
him to deign to put both monikers in his memory. And what is more, my
favoritist peoples from last year are also in this year: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
parisienne
and Margaretta, and already we are forming a trio of evil, starting
with Margaretta giving us rides home. I must, however, emphasize that
this trio is going to be nothing like the trio of obnoxious diva-ness
that I was complaining about last year. When we snicker at turns of
phrase that require an audience more mature than we feel like being
(such as during the song "What a tale of Cock and Bull"), when we
gabber together during breaks, and when we talk about people behind
their backs, it will all be done with the milk of lovinghumankindness
in our hearts. Also, the best we can scrape up among us is two speaking
lines and no solos, so we're in no danger of becoming divas.
It's a pity about the no solos, though. This play has some of the most beautiful music I've heard in Gilbert and Sullivan, and the chorus has a very limited role in the play, which means that although we'll be spending a good bit of time on chorus music, some of the loveliest stuff we'll be hearing at best only rarely, whenever we're around while the principals are rehearsing, which means that I'll have no chance of memorizing the words to them. I particularly want to learn the song "I have a song to sing, oh," which seems so prescient at the beginning of the play, and then turns out to be playing games with you. It's a song that essentially tells you the story of a standard Gilbert and Sullivan play, but this play turns out to be not that. No one ends up marrying the right person. Two marriages are of the Koko-Katisha type, where an unwilling partner proposes (or accepts the proposal) of an undesireable lover in order to gain something: in the case of The Mikado, it's the happiness of the main characters who truly love each other, and the sacrifice is comic. Here, however, the sacrifices (and there are two of them) are made in order to buy the silence of people, because if they are not silent, the law will step in and pronounce death on other characters. The only marriage that can possibly be spun as perhaps happy involves a man--protected by the two sacrifices I mentioned earlier--who woos the girl through trickery. He's the catalyst for the entire play, because all the events devolve around his reprieve from a sentence of execution that he doesn't deserve, and everyone in the play likes him and admires him as a brave and courageous man, and two of his friends (one of them, a woman, is actually in love with him herself) sacrifice their entire futures to unhappy marriages for him. But all we see of his behavior that allows us to judge his virtue is the way he steals girl away from her betrothed, who genuinely loves her, and at the end of the play the betrothed dies of a broken heart. Dies! Dead! This is not a happy play. I have, however, high hopes for it being good, and I need to find myself a good recording of the music.
In other news, do you remember my hoping that my mouse won't do anything inconvenient, like die somewhere unreachable and then proceed to rot? Well, guess what: it died somewhere unreachable, proceeded to rot, and for the last few days I've been burning lots of insense left over from my first year in an attempt to cover up the smell. I do hope that this doesn't last too long (it's a small mouse, without much flesh to rot), because as much as I like insense, I like burning it on my own terms.
parisienne
and Margaretta, and already we are forming a trio of evil, starting
with Margaretta giving us rides home. I must, however, emphasize that
this trio is going to be nothing like the trio of obnoxious diva-ness
that I was complaining about last year. When we snicker at turns of
phrase that require an audience more mature than we feel like being
(such as during the song "What a tale of Cock and Bull"), when we
gabber together during breaks, and when we talk about people behind
their backs, it will all be done with the milk of lovinghumankindness
in our hearts. Also, the best we can scrape up among us is two speaking
lines and no solos, so we're in no danger of becoming divas.It's a pity about the no solos, though. This play has some of the most beautiful music I've heard in Gilbert and Sullivan, and the chorus has a very limited role in the play, which means that although we'll be spending a good bit of time on chorus music, some of the loveliest stuff we'll be hearing at best only rarely, whenever we're around while the principals are rehearsing, which means that I'll have no chance of memorizing the words to them. I particularly want to learn the song "I have a song to sing, oh," which seems so prescient at the beginning of the play, and then turns out to be playing games with you. It's a song that essentially tells you the story of a standard Gilbert and Sullivan play, but this play turns out to be not that. No one ends up marrying the right person. Two marriages are of the Koko-Katisha type, where an unwilling partner proposes (or accepts the proposal) of an undesireable lover in order to gain something: in the case of The Mikado, it's the happiness of the main characters who truly love each other, and the sacrifice is comic. Here, however, the sacrifices (and there are two of them) are made in order to buy the silence of people, because if they are not silent, the law will step in and pronounce death on other characters. The only marriage that can possibly be spun as perhaps happy involves a man--protected by the two sacrifices I mentioned earlier--who woos the girl through trickery. He's the catalyst for the entire play, because all the events devolve around his reprieve from a sentence of execution that he doesn't deserve, and everyone in the play likes him and admires him as a brave and courageous man, and two of his friends (one of them, a woman, is actually in love with him herself) sacrifice their entire futures to unhappy marriages for him. But all we see of his behavior that allows us to judge his virtue is the way he steals girl away from her betrothed, who genuinely loves her, and at the end of the play the betrothed dies of a broken heart. Dies! Dead! This is not a happy play. I have, however, high hopes for it being good, and I need to find myself a good recording of the music.
In other news, do you remember my hoping that my mouse won't do anything inconvenient, like die somewhere unreachable and then proceed to rot? Well, guess what: it died somewhere unreachable, proceeded to rot, and for the last few days I've been burning lots of insense left over from my first year in an attempt to cover up the smell. I do hope that this doesn't last too long (it's a small mouse, without much flesh to rot), because as much as I like insense, I like burning it on my own terms.
