Monday, I went to a reading by Sarah Arvio and Mark Strand at KGB Bar -- neither were particularly engaging, but it was still an entertaining enough night. I launched a companion blog to this one called RP Poetry where I'll be posting poems as I refine them.
On Tuesday, I worked tirelessly on a paper for journalism that was finished in the wee hours of the morning.
Wednesday was a day of relief and recovery from the paper-writing process. Patrick Healy, a leading political reporter for The New York Times, came to visit our class and had a lot of interesting things to say. While many of us in class had admired his writing from examples read in class, none of us had expected him to be so wonderfully attractive -- and gay. In fact, he was voted Hottest Gay Journalist in New York on the Left Behinds blog.
Wednesday evening I went to Lincoln Center to see a panel discussion with playwright Sarah Ruhl, a moderator (who, I believe, forgot to introduce herself), and actress Blair Brown (pictured, in that order, at right) about Ruhl's play The Clean House, which is currently playing at Lincoln Center Theater. It was a very interesting discussion about Ruhl's writing, and I bought her book and had her sign it. I'm going to see the play on Saturday, so I'll comment more when I have more to say.After the discussion, I read Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson in Starbucks and then met up with my friend Ryan, to whom I gave my Suddenly Last Summer opening night ticket. We walked around after he got out of the show for a bit and talked, which was quite fun. On another related note, the show got relatively good reviews!
Today was course registration. I got into all of the classes I wanted besides for Creative Writing, for which I'm third on the waitlist. Those are:
- Major Playwrights: Caryl Churchill, David Hare, and Tom Stoppard
- Intermediate German II
- Conversations of the West: Antiquity and the 19th Century
- and Creative Writing
It seems like it should be a challenging and fun semester overall. I really hope I get into Creative Writing so I've at least got two elective classes that I'm genuinely passionate about.
After class and registration today, I went with Emma to a reading of Zorro, a new musical with music by The Gispy Kings. It was an insider reading, full of people in the theatre business -- the creative team, producers, and other theatre folk. I won a pair of tickets on Broadway.com's Stage Notes blog, so I was sort of excited about it. It seems like it could potentially make an interesting show.
Only not. Ugh, it was so very, very tedious. The music was very repetitious and simplistic. Many of the lyrics were in Spanish, which, though adding to the mood of the show, did nothing for my understanding, and, unlike the use of Italian language in The Light in the Piazza, did nothing to illuminate a language barrier or anything interesting like that. Eden Espinosa was fine as Luisa and Ivan Hernandez was quite good as Diego/Zorro, but the piece is just a hot mess. Characters are not established well enough early on. There is no solid opening number (it's in Spanish), the "I want" song driving the lead character(s) forward is far too late in the show and uninteresting. The show just needs a jolt of energy and craftsmanship. It admittedly got a little better as it went along, but never to a degree where I thought it would be ready for a Broadway stage any time soon. Ideally, it should be back to the books for the creative team of Zorro. Realistically, we'll probably see it treading the boards in the next year or so, another bombastic, underwritten, overproduced mess of shit.
What a week. And it's not even over yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment