Went to City Center to see the Encores presentation of Stephen Sondheim's 'Merrily We Roll Along'. In his book 'Look, I Made a Hat' Sondheim has written "I was in a morass of despair after the joyful public slaughter of 'Merrily we roll along'." The show ran for about 60 performances and was bashed by the critics as not making any sense. One of the problems was the fact that the play runs backwoods from 1976 to 1955. The book has now been cleaned of any confusion, and it is very witty. One of my favorite 'bits' is a conversation between a young woman and an older woman.
Young Woman: "I work for Look Magazine'.
Older Woman: "Well, that's good."
Young Woman: "I hate it."
Older Woman: "Well, that's why they call it work."
It has some of his finest 'tunes': Not a Day Goes By, Old Friends, Our Time, Opening doors, Good thing Going.
The Encores production was beautifully done. I expected to see a couple of people sitting in front of microphones reading from a script accompanied by a piano. After all I paid $26 for my seat. It was a nine piece orchestra, a cast of 26, 3 excellent leads: Colin Donnell, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Celia Keenan-Bolger, well staged and choreographed with videos to carry the story . The production was as close to a Broadway production as imaginable. I loved it. It closed yesterday after a 2 week run. Maybe it will show up on Broadway, as did their great production of Patti LuPone's 'Gypsy".
Merrily?, I roll along. What I'm reading in the news.
The Villager:
Rape suspect arrested. He dragged his victim down the subway tunnel of the 'J' train where he beat her and raped her. He has 27 prior arrests.
In the Times:
Dozens of Tubas stolen from LA Schools. The Tuba is used in a very popular Mexican music style known as "banda". A band with a Tuba can make up to $3000 a night.
In the Sunday magazine section:
"The way Greeks live now" by Russell Shorto:
A woman tells him: 'I was sitting at an outdoor cafe, and a clean, well-dressed man of about 60 passed by and politely asked if he could have the biscuit that came with my coffee.'
'The standard short answer to how Greece got into this financial mess is that it borrowed too much and spent unwisely. Beneath this, people like to look for a cultural root. Most popular, outside Greece, is the north-south explanation, which holds that northern Europeans are efficient and hard-working, and Southerners, while they may have better food and better sex lives, relax too much to run an efficient economy. But numbers don't bear this out: in 2008 the average German worked 1,426 hours and the average Greek worked 2,116 hours. The Greek explanation is that Greece is a remnant of the Ottoman Empire, top-down rule and bribery. The Greeks believe their bureaucracy is a menace. 'Fakelaki', cash stuffed envelopes, are needed to secure the multiple signatures in order to get anything done in Greece.
There is more pain in Greece than I care to write about and everyone seems to agree it will get worse.
One last fact. When the government announced a severe reduction in salaries, a woman was asked how she would manage on less money. She laughed, like many Greeks, she hadn't received a paycheck in months.
From Lucretius:
On the nature of things.
'For sundered from its junctures, the supply
of matter would travel aimless through the void;
or better, it never would have joined to make
one thing; so scattered, it could form no junctures.
For surely not by planning did prime bodies
find rank and place, nor by intelligence,
nor did they regulate movement by sworn pact;
no, changing by myriads myriad ways, they sped
through the ALL forever, pounded, pushed, propelled,
till, trying all kinds of movements and arrangements,
they came at last into such patterned shapes
as have created and formed this Sum of Things.'
Sounds like The Chaos Theory of 52 B.C.E.
