Darwin Award Narrowly Avoided

Several days ago, a woman visiting Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison climbed over the barrier into the giraffe pen where she got kicked in the face by the young giraffe.  Police said she's lucky she didn't suffer worse injuries.  She has also been charged with harassing zoo animals.  

What kind of nimrod thinks it's a good idea to try to enter animal pens without authorization? See my other post on this topic. 

Mariusz Kwiecien is singing in LA BOHEME?

That's odd.  Usually Kwiecien sings a bunch of Casanova-type characters.  Is he singing Marcello or Colline?  He certainly cannot be singing the role of Benoît the landlord or Alcindoro, Musetta's sugar daddy in Act 2.  

I usually see Kwiecien as someone like Escamillo, or Onegin, or Don Giovanni.  He's also done Silvio in Pagliacci, Enrico Ashton in Lucia di Lammermoor, and Sergeant Belcore in The Elixir of Love.  But I have never heard of him doing the role of a frustrated painter whose coquettish girlfriend keeps playing with him all the time.  

Did I read the cast sheet right? 

PRINCESS IDA or CASTLE ADAMANT

If only I had enough words to describe the complicated goofiness that is Gilbert and Sullivan's little-known work Princess Ida.  This parody of feminism not only takes a swing at the rise of girl schools, but also takes the opportunity to mock everything academic in general, not to mention taking a few jabs at Darwin's theory of evolution. This being a farce, and a Gilbert and Sullivan farce at that, time and logic absolutely do not apply in any way, shape or form.  

This being a three-act operetta and having a somewhat more complicated plot than most of Gilbert and Sullivan's other works, I'll only give a brief summary.  

Basic plot goes like this: Princess Ida, the daughter of King Gama, has founded a school for girls at Castle Adamant and refuses the company of men considering them to be the scum of the earth.  Prince Hilarion, whom Ida was engaged when the two were babies, still wishes to marry her.  Suffice it to say hilarity ensues, Ida and Hilarion reconcile, and everyone gets married an lives happily ever after.  

The main high points of this show were King Gama's ridiculous aria in Act 1, and the antics of Hilarion his buddies when they disguise as women in order to infiltrate Castle Adamant.  Actually, with the style of costume they chose, they looked more like 19th Century monks or Anglican bishops.  A lot of the comedy came from their hilarious inability to fully discguise the fact that they are men.  Cyril gets drunk in one scene and starts singing a bawdy song and Hilarion grabs the wine jug and takes a swig (one of those I-Need-A-Drink-To-Distract-Me moments).  

The only downside was that the men's chorus was little more than a quintet.  That is even worse than last year's performance of Iolanthe where the men's chorus was an octet.  So the Madison Savoyards are doing The Mikado next year instead of the originally planned The Gondoliers.  The group needs more men*.

Great show nonetheless, and I'm looking forward to The Mikado next year.  
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*This is a recommendation for any men who are interested in trying out for the chorus next year. 

Robin Williams: 1951-2014

On August 11th, 2014, the great comedian Robin Williams died at age 63, possibly by his own hand.  He had been battling depression for quite some time.  I didn't see much of him; I saw Disney's rendition of Aladdin far too long ago for me to fully appreciate Williams' role as the voice of the Genie.  I did, however, get to enjoy him as the voice of Fender in the movie Robots, and later as the Teddy Roosevelt model in Night at the Museum when I saw it back in late January of 2007.  

My mother told me the story of Williams' audition for the role of Mork in the TV show Mork and Mindy.  The casting people were asking the candidates (for lack of a better word) to show how an alien might sit down.  While the other sat down in a regular way with some little oddity here or there, Williams sat on his head.   
     He is also remembered for his serious roles, such as The Dead Poets Society.  I only saw a clip from that one, but what performance.  In particular, the way he said "Capre Diem" makes it one of the most memorable movie quotes ever.  

Robin Williams was a splendid actor and comic.  He will be greatly missed. 

Jabberwocky: It's A Satire, Not An Antagonist!

I hate it when people try to adapt Lewis Carrol's masterpiece Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and keep crossing it over with his other masterpiece Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.  This often leads to some of the lamest, most overdone, phony-baloney plot-devices ever found in the history of satirical literature.  Such stupidities include, but are not limited to, making the Queen of Hearts a tyrant when she's merely grouchy, mixing her up with the Red Queen (who was of a much more amiable nature), making Alice come back when she's a young woman and finds that Wonderland is in grave danger, the list just keeps going. 
        Perhaps the worst plot device of them all is making the Jabberwock a threat/antagonist in the story.  The monster only appears in a nonsensical poem Alice reads and is only mentioned again when she talks to Humpty Dumpty about what words of the poem even mean.

Before I go any further on this, let's look at the poem itself for a moment.  

                                             'Twas brillig and the slithy toves

                                         Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

                                         All mimsy were the borogroves

                                         And the mome raths outgrabe.

                                             "Beware the Jabberwock my son,

                                         The jaws that bite; the claws that catch.

                                         Beware the Jubjub Bird, and shun

                                        The frumious Bandersnatch."

                                          He took his vorpal sword in hand:

                                          Long time the manxome foe he sought. 

                                          So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

                                          And stood a while in thought. 

                                          And as in uffish thought he stood,

                                         The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

                                         Came wiffling through the tulgy wood

                                         And burbled as it came. 

                                 

                                         One, two!  One, two! and through and through

                                         The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!  

                                         He left it dead and with its head,

                                         He went galumphing back.   

                                         "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

                                          Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

                                          Oh frabous day!  Caloo Callay!"

                                          He chortled in his joy.                                          

                                        
                                             'Twas brillig and the slithy toves

                                         Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

                                         All mimsy were the borogroves

                                         And the mome raths outgrabe.

This poem is a satire of the heroic epic.  It has the bold hero going and slaying the monster.  But the monster has a name that sounds more like a parrot squawk than anything else.  And the young man is little more than a teenager.  He also comes galumphing back instead of a heroic march.  And the monster is burbling rather than roaring.  That sounds more like a comic creature than a terrible one (although truth be told, it did scare me as a child).  I could go on about the meaning of the words in the poem, but that would take too long. 
So let's take a look at the titular creature next. 
     

Look at that thing!  Its neck could not possibly support its head at all.  And do you really think its claws could catch anything?  And its teeth look more like those of an herbivore.  That tail looks very weak as well; it's just dragging on the ground.  All in all the Jabberwock looks like a very disjointed and out-of-order creature that can't really survive.  

So why do people insist on making it a villain?  The so-called Jabberwock in the America Magee's Alice video game looks like rancor-dragon cyborg on steroids.  And the one in Tim Burton's latest badfic looks like the result of what happens when Smaug has a drunk night out with a pterosaur.  And both of them make it a threat.  THAT DID NOT HAPPEN IN THE BOOK!  Plus, it never even made an appearance outside of the poem.  
      Also, making it the chief henchbeast of the Queen of Hearts is one of the worst plot devices ever conceived.  It not only is a terrible cliche, but replaces the Beamish Boy with Alice, and thus takes away all the humor from the poem.  The two Alice novels are satirical novels that poke fun at the society of the day.  They are not dark fantasy epics.  

If there's any group that successfully pulled off making a good adaptaion of Lewis Carrol's work, it was the Muppets.  

This version does the story right, namely that it adapts the story without sacrificing any of the original satire, (or more precisely, the Muppets used their own version of satire, but it was satire nonetheless).  And as you can see, they kept the monster looking looking very much ridiculous.  

So take the hint, Tim Burton and company!  Lewis Carrol's works are meant to be hilarious and not fantasy epics.  Please be so kind as to note that the poem Jabberwocky happens to be a parody of such epics.  And with that in mind, LEAVE IT THE KRIFF ALONE!