Accent on Youth

Unlike professional reviewers, I don't have an editor breathing down my neck. (Just a boyfriend.) I also don't get paid, so it doesn't behoove me to be bitchy when something is good or gush when something is bad.

I also don't care if the show is still running by the time I get the review up!

TheBrit and I were in New York to give him some time to see his grandmother. (She passed shortly after he saw her. I'm very glad we went to New York so he could see her.) Accent on Youth came up as an option because TheBrit knows I love seeing shows (though he's not as in love with musical theatre as I am) and suggested that we catch a Broadway show and sent me a short list of what he thought we would both be interested in.

I admit that I am a David Hyde Pierce fangirl. No, he doesn't solve poverty in his spare time (that I'm aware of) but he's an actor of the old school, when it felt like a craft, not an industry.That, and DHP has awesome comedic timing while still being erudite. I love that.

The play consists of one of the standard plotline setups - discovery of young ingenue, love found, love lost, bla bla bla...

It's formulaic. It's ancient. And it is the easiest storyline to write and screw up. This was not screwed up. I liked it so much that I actually want to own the script so I can look at the lines and the stage directions.

The stage opens on a late 1920s/early 1930s New York City brownstone (or so I assume) sitting room. To the left is a double desk (the type where two people sit opposite each other) with a secretary. To the right is a couch, chair, and the ubiquitous wall bar with a decanter of scotch/whiskey/bourbon. Charles Kimbrough (Jim Dial im Murphy Brown) is playing the sidekick/butler. DHP comes on stage from what is inferred to be the bedroom and the audience applauds. (I will comment on this later.)

The play was rife with commentary on the duplicitous nature of theatre/film and how people will say anything to have the sensitive actors think they're loved and impressive and to soothe the egos. And then, out of nowhere seems to come a snide but completely accurate comment about the audience. (I believe it was "theatre would be fantastic if it weren't for the audience" or something similar.) The whole thing was suitably meta and probably broke the fourth wall a little too much for people during the original run in the 1930s.

In a lot of ways, it what your typical May/December romance theme has been since the origins of theatre. It has the additional flavour of the young love theme so popularized in Romeo and Juliet and the like.

Reviewers hated this play. They considered it to be humourless and stilted. The audience I saw it with found it suitably amusing. I liked it. So neener, professional reviewers.

(I secretly suspect that professional reviewers are supposed to hate everything that I'd love and love everything I'd hate. At least in the US.)

Reviews and opinons to come!

Oh man, it's been busy. Aside from not feeling well (apparently, it's a pre-requisite for turning 30 in my body), it's been a constant whirlwind of events here.

So, here's a list of the reviews and posts and whatnot to come over the next few days...

Accent On Youth (play)
Exit the King (play)
Waiting for Godot (play)
Bam-Bou (restaurant)

...I'm sure I'm missing something, maybe The Brit can help me out.

And yes, I've turned 30. Oh, my... 30. I suppose it should be scary and bad, but it's really just another year. Or so I keep telling myself. I've compensated for aging by dyeing my hair blue. A friend of mine came over (thanks Emma!) to help me out with the bleaching and dyeing. My hair takes after its owner - certain parts of it were just resistant. I figure that I'll muck around with it when it's time to do the redyeing. Still need to get a haircut done and then the following cut, I'll have them do a professional bleach/strip job and come home and have The Brit goop me up.

However, the dyeing led to two awesome things aside from the blue hair: awesome bacon and pea pasta dinner of numminess and the best tweet that was ever tweeted in the twitterverse. In England. That hour. Originating from the 3rd floor of a building.

"I have lube, Emma, and food. I'll leave it to you to imagine what we'll be up to."

So, my early mid-life crisis has displayed itself in the form of blue hair. I like the front colour better than the back and will probably do that on my whole head for the next time. Or if the back blue washes out before the front does.

I swear, I'll do the reviews soon! Promise!

17 days and counting...

17 days until I see TheBrit again (yay!) and 23 days until I'm back in London.

Apparently my father wishes to "check him out" and "explain to him that if he screws over my daughter he'll be finding out what CPR is." I think my father has a few latent issues. No matter how amusing he might find it, I don't appreciate the threat to my boyfriend/partner's well-being. Yes, yes, I know he's being Daddy Protective, but still. I'm thirty in a little over a month and the amount of involvement he's had in my life lately has been minimal. (Likely because I am thirty in a little over a month.)

It's strange. I never thought I'd be the one to settle down. I honestly figured that I'd have a string of interesting relationships throughout my life but never really decide to kick it into wedding bells and all that jazz. Now that it looks like that's a possibility (and because he reads this, TheBrit is not allowed to tweak about anything I say about this here. Neener.) I'm figuring out the thing that probably tweaks me most about marriage. My family. Yep. I don't think everyone I'm immediately related to has been in the same room... Ever. And I suspect that I will have a full-on Bridezilla meltdown if they don't all play nice. Eloping sounds better and better and better every moment that I think about it.

We're past the historical need to "blend families" via marriage. There is no business or lineage bonus to this pairing. I am no longer considered chattel merely because of a consequence of sex. Sure, my upper body strength sucks, but I'm a fully capable person in my own right and don't need to be "given away" or otherwise transferred from my household of birth to a future spouse's household. I do not represent the continuation of any lineage (and if anyone's expecting it... Grow a uterus and do it yourself. Mine is not for rent, lease, or sale).

And honestly? I'm going to be 30 (at least) when I finally do get hitched, if TheBrit and I decide that's how we want our relationship to progress. Yeah, I dig his folks and his family. They don't drive me crazy like I'm sure they do to him sometimes. And he digs the ones of mine that he's met. I just really don't need my father to put him through some arbitrary bullshit adversity test. You know what, Dad? He may not be a hunter and a fisher, but we don't need to share every single hobby. I understand that he's a separate and distinct person and what he does with his spare time and money is up to him. We have enough in common that we suit one another quite well. Hunting and fishing are not the day in, day out existences that he and I both value. It's a skill, and should the apocalypse come, he'll learn or starve...

I don't need an alpha male. I really don't want one. (They're boring, they smell, and really, they're just not good people all the time.) What I have is the possibility of a wonderful life with a person that suits me more than I could have imagined in my life, and I'm really fucking lucky. I don't care about what he can't do. I care about who he is and how good of a person he is to me and for me. If you disapprove, then that is your right. But you will be down a daughter, because this person is who I choose to cleave to, not required to as a result of a genetic pairing.

"Are you two going to have 'normal' pets?"

I've had people ask me that ever since TheBrit and I started discussing pets. I love animals. I feel towards animals the way that every other woman feels about children. They are a requirement in my life.

Out of respect to TheBrit's lack of pet-ownership status ever in his life (Seriously? I wasn't aware that there were people out there that never had pets. Between pets, sure, but never?), we have decided to start small.

First it was ferrets, and then TheBrit found out about African Pygmy Hedgehogs...

Now, I've wanted a hedgie for a while. They're small, they're cute, and they're pocket pets. Not high-load interaction, so they really are a good starter animal for TheBrit. Nevermind that I'm going to be the one doing most of the day-to-day care (because TheBrit comes home just on the weekend) so he won't be doing the daily or weekly cage cleaning.

Given that, I figured TheBrit wouldn't be too curious about what it entailed. Was I ever wrong. I love being the know-it-all, and I'm having to rush to keep ahead of him. He's been devouring information and I suspect that within a year of having one hedgie, we'll be getting a second, as well as the cadre of ferrets (which would be the next step up from hedgehogs, I suppose).

Eventually, I will have my cats and Great Dane. But the pet list is currently looking like this...

Hedgehogs
Ferrets
Ball Python
Cats
Giant-breed Dogs

Probably not all at once, but the hedgehogs and ferrets are looking as though they'll be within the next year. We're looking at getting the hedgie after we get back from our antipodean jaunt and the ferret will probably come a half-year later.

All I have to say to that is, YAY PETS! I miss having animals around. They make my life full.

[Edit: Apparently TheBrit kept a goldfish once. It wasn't well cared for (his admission) and didn't live all that long. Do we think this counts?]

But that doesn't go in sushi!

I'm probably a little more fascinated with Guy Fieri than a woman has a right to be, but I have to say, as bizarre as 'gringo sushi' sounds, I really want to make some.

It seems that it would be less food than a sandwich, keep better/longer than regular sushi, and have the bonus of not completely grossing people out on the train. Yeah, TheBrit and I do a fair bit of train travel. It's because I'm equally fascinated by trains. I love taking the train.

Anyway, my ideas for take-along 'gringo sushi'...

BLAT (bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato) topped with a fresh garlic aioli.
Avocado, asparagus and shrimp
Turkey, stuffing, and a bit of cranberry chutney
Chicken tikka
Soft boiled egg and lean bacon with hollandaise dipping sauce (yes, I'm talking about an eggs Benedict sushi roll)

...And pretty much give anything listed on the menu linked above a go.

TheBrit and I keep picking up kinda crap to-go food in the train stations and I'd really quite like to make use of my bento boxes for when we travel, and really, what better to put in bento boxes than some form of sushi? I'm trying to think of other ideas. We generally travel between breakfast and lunch, so those and brunch ideas would be quite welcome.

Spring Awakening (Novello Theatre, West End)

Spring Awakening... It is to late 19th century Germany what Heathers was to 1980s America.

Random? Yeah.

Accurate? Sort of.

I wish I had the program in front of me, because it had an excellent blurb about the original author and the reinterpretation as a rock musical. The long and short of it is this - dude who originally wrote it was writing a commentary on the stress of German education among the upper echelon and how it led to a potential spate of problems, especially when dealing with arbitrary measures to determine who can proceed and who cannot. When it was published and originally performed, it was so censored that the entire point that was trying to be made was lost on the censor's floor.

100 years later... Some one else comes across it and goes "hey, let's turn this into a musical" and so current day Spring Awakening was born.

A few things that made my American brain go "bwuh" was the vowel sounds from British mouths. The difference between "Gowd" and "Gahd" was making me go "oh, almost!" from having listened to the soundtrack so many times. Changing the name of one of the characters from "Fanny" to "Laura" or some such also mildly irritated me, but I realized that it was a serious enough part of the play that the invariable titters from the audience would break the tension. (Fanny, in BritSlangSpeak is roughly equivalent to pussy in American - a euphamism for the external female genitalia without the insulting quality of cooze, twat, or cunt.)

I also fell completely in love with the actor who played Georg. I think he out of all of the cast embraced their character without overacting. Melchior was good, but a little shy at times, which was not in character. Hanschen hammed it up a bit, but I think his character leans that way. Otto was grand. Moritz had a HUGE problem with controlling his volume, particularly when miked, and blasted out the audience's collective eardrums when he was supposed to be intense or enthused. His energy was good, but his control was lacking. The girls were generally unremarkable, but they were designed to have a role that progressed the boys' plot. Though, the girl who played Anna (I think) looked remarkably like a young Emma Watson with the way she was styled.

My favorite part, and the part that it seemed took the audience the longest time to catch onto was the manner in which the adult roles were treated. All of the adult characters in the play were performed by one actor and one actress. The commentary on the essential interchangability of adults in a teenager's life is a wonderful insight into the size and scope of an adolescent universe.

I wish that I'd been able to get a photo of the set. It was a combination of controlled chaos, but it incorporated everything that was needed for each scene without being cluttered. The use of vertical space is what kept it from being too insane.

A big thank you to Kevin Spacey and the other producers (both executive and assistant) for having the faith and the vision to bring this to London. Yeah, it'd done well in New York, but American audiences are different from European audiences, especially when it comes to how they view their children and schools.

Avenue Q (in London)

First, let me say that the only way this could have been more awesome is if it were "Avenue Z" because then the Brits would be calling it "Avenue Zed" and that would have sent me into a titter every time.

TheBrit and I went to see Avenue Q the weekend after I arrived back in London. I'd been wanting to see it for a while, but the main impetus was that it was CLOSING. (What?!) So we got tickets to see it the last week it was in town. (Much like when we went to see Spamalot... last week of showing.)

Since we saw it, it apparently became so much in demand that it's now on hiatus and will be re-showing in a new location starting June 1.

I don't know if TheBrit grew up on Sesame Street like I did (I suspect not), but the Muppet Movies were ubiquitous throughout the Western World. At least there was a bit of commonality there.

I seem to recall finding out when I was younger that Sesame Street was supposed to take place Small Town, New York. Stony Brook, or something like that. Someplace where there was still a small town feed, but a need for the brownstone type buildings. So, this was a bit like going to see Sesame Street's big city cousins (being located in Brooklyn).

The composition of the set was fantastic. I was half-expecting a bodego to stand in for Mr. Hooper's store (I'm dating myself here), but it was just an apartment block and the people (and muppets) that resided there. Kate Monster, Trekkie Monster, Princeton, Rod and Nicky, and Christmas Eve, Gary, and Brian. Two things struck me during the watching - the use of screens that gave the little PSA-type cartoons ... I don't remember that from my tenure of Sesame Street, though it may be happening now, and that when addressing the muppets the puppeteers and the human characters looked at the Muppet they were talking to, not to the actor.

The music was fantastic, and translated well to a London audience, most of who had limited exposure to Sesame Street. There were a few jokes or callbacks that were Ameri-centric and may have been slightly lost on the average Brit: Gary is Gary Coleman (whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis?) and the development of a Monstersorri School...

Music, muppets having sex, the Bad Idea Bears (more booze, more fun, yay!), and the energy was just suck you off your seat awesome. The most amazing thing to me, though, was when the puppeteer for Kate Monster also had to do the voice for Lucy The Slut, the muppets were on two different people, but the voice actress ran the entire conversation. It took me a bit to realize it was the same person because I'd been sucked into the entire "the muppets, they're real!" world they created.

I think, though, that my favorite part was unintentional. The woman hired to play the role of Christmas was Chinese. The character of Christmas is supposed to be Japanese and limited to working in a Korean restaurant. (Though, they did change that line to something else because Korean restaurants aren't as prevalant in London as in New York.) [Edit: looked at the cast info for the London crew - either they've changed actors or I mis-read the blurb - she's Filipino, but has studied in China. Playing a Japanese woman. Who's mistaken for Korean. Awesome.]

It's strange. It's twisted. It's a great story that hits home if you're a muppet, a monster, or a human. Trekkie Monster's porn fixation is phenomonal. A song just for me ("Schadenfreude") was great. TheBrit and I went and found the Broadway soundtrack a day or so after seeing it. My singing Trekkie Monster's part during "The Internet is for Porn" caused him to almost fall off his chair with laughter (though that may have been me pelvic thrusting against him with such ferocity) and we now have a number of inside-joke-slash-catchphrases from seeing that show.

Go see it. If you don't, my only response can be... Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Run away! Run away!

Wait, maybe that's not the kind of 'retreat' they meant.

Anyway, I get this email from TheBrit around noonish stating "I need a reply, they're sorting out food for the meeting..."

Better him than me working in a company that does those things. I figure after 7 or 8 years of doing the good spouse/partner/whateverIam thing for this, I can beg off for one event per year if necessary.

I digress. So, he sends me this:

Starter

Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup with Smoked Paprika Cheese Straws,Mint Crème Fraiche and Toasted Sunflower Seeds

OR

Salad of Artichokes with Wild Mushrooms, Soft Boiled Quail Egg and Truffle Dressing

Main

Roast Breast of Corn Fed Chicken with crushed La Ratte Potatoes, Ratatouille Timbale and Basil Butter Sauce

OR

Basil Polenta with Grilled Halloumi Cheese, Warm Tomato, Olive and Balsamic Salsa

Dessert

Dark Chocolate and Cherry Delice with Pistachio Ice Cream

OR

Nothing

Meaning that I have to make a decision.

Now, I'd like to think that he knows me well enough to know my answer for everything but the starter, because that one was a bit of a toss up, and I'm kind of hoping that he goes for the soup so I can try it. But... Choice between veggie and meat? Meat. Choice between chocolate and nothing? Please.

So, I sent back an email simply stating: Salad, chicken, chocolate. Which sounds a bit like the world's strangest shopping list. "Honey, I'm feeling fat, but I need protein, and I'm PMSing. Get me something to eat?"

Conversely, it could be a damned good chicken mole (pronounced mole-ay... no idea where the accent goes) salad. (Though I have to admit, I've never developed a taste for chicken mole.)

Now that I've committed to the meal, I have to find a dress.

Fuck.

Delays, delays, delays

Sorry for the non-posting. Two things happened over the last week. The Brit found a plane that was heading in my general direction and got on it, and found his way eventually to my little plot of the US. So, there was some distraction with the "but, you're supposed to be in Coventry... WHO ELSE KNEW?!"

And the rediscovery of my love of cricket with the England v. WIndes test match highlights.

Oh yeah. And the arrival of my PSP and the ability to play Patapon and look like a defect on a sugar high. "pon pon PATA pon! Attack my pretties! BWAHAHAHA."

Yeah, it's good.

In preparation for my move across the pond in May, I've discovered places in London that will happily deliver exotic meats such as springbok, reindeer/caribou, alligator, kangaroo, ostrich, and bison to my door if I spend a mere £65. I've already informed the Brit that there will be consumption of meat that he's never thought of before. The venison sausage with pasta went over like gangbusters during the winter trip, so I figure kangaroo helper would be good.

Apparently, in a counterpart in the US, you can get lion ribeye steaks.

I've had bear. It's okay. Nothing to go "omg, this is the bestest meat EVAR!" over, that's for certain. I have to say, I'm not a big fan of eating omnivore (bear) and the carnivore I've had (crocodile and alligator) wasn't that delicious. If I knew that the lions were being fed high quality aurochs, then I might give it a go. But carnivore doesn't equate with really tasty to me.

Now giraffe... I would eat that in an instant. Zebra, too. (I bet it tastes like horse but spicier.)

So basically, I spent the last week torturing the Brit with my cooking, torturing myself with the near-availability of exotic meats, and torturing my roommate with the sounds of *pata pata pata pon*.

Somewhere in there I did coursework and other grad-school related things. I'm really mentally over it. Can I just write my thesis and be done?