Author: David Gorsline

Some links: 42

A few weeks ago, Bas Bleu retraced the track of a bicycle trip she took across France 30 years ago, this time en voiture. I’m reading her reports completely out of order, chronologically and geographically, but I don’t think it matters. You could pick up the thread with her in Bordeaux, perhaps.

Show Boat

Kern and Hammerstein’s breakthrough musical gets a simplified and trimmed production in Arlington. This 1927 show from the novel by Edna Ferber shows the traces of turn of the century operetta and music hall—songs that don’t fit into a simple verse-chorus structure are plentiful and two songs of the period are interpolated—even as it takes on social issues, chief among them race and class relations. Plays that capitalize on backstage shenanigans are so common as to pall (if I see one more riff on Moon Over Buffalo I can’t be held responsible for my actions), but the current piece, which follows 40 years in the life of a Mississippi River show boat of traveling players (something like vaudeville with a paddewheel), is still charming.

Some of the cast manage the challenge of aging four decades in the course of the evening more gracefully than others. Delores King Williams’s Queenie, of the supple voice, is a pleasure to listen to. She’s part of the most energetic and enjoyable number of the show, the playful “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Act 1. The dancing in this number is modest, but appropriate to its time. Elsewhen in the show, swing player Patrick Cragin, playing the role of hoofer and stage villain Bobby Smith last Saturday night, also shows some fancy tapping.

The show’s signature song, “Old Man River,” is a lovely piece, but I found the choice to reprise it twice (with little change in emotional temperature) a bit odd while chunks of plot were clearly jettisoned in Act 2 to keep the running time down. When Joe (amiable VaShawn McIlwain) takes the dynamics of “I’m tired of living,/And scared of dying” to a 10 the first time through, there isn’t any place for him to go. Notwithstanding, music director Jon Kalbfleisch’s orchestra of fourteen supports him with one clean, clear voice.

  • Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, directed by Eric Schaeffer, Signature Theatre, The Max Theater, Arlington, Virginia

Easy pickins

Over the holidays, Leta’s family told me about a natural phenomenon more or less peculiar to Mobile Bay. From time to time during the summer months, low oxygen levels in the bay drive the resident fish and shellfish up into the shallows of the eastern shore. The swimmers arrive in such numbers that hungry Alabamans come down to the beach with washtubs to collect a jubilee of easy-to-catch seafood. Harold Loesch and Edwin May have studied the phenomenon and written it up in journal articles. Conditions that seem to promote the (usually pre-dawn) event: winds out of the east and a rising tide.

Upcoming: 20

I received a flashed version of my judging assignments for WATCH this year. Lots of Bills, some old friends (the evergreen TBD tallest among them), some new releases, and two of the increasingly popular Really? A Musical of That?.

  • Reefer Madness, the Musical, Studney and Murphy
  • The Lion in Winter, William James Goldman
  • I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, DiPietro and Roberts
  • The Miracle Worker, William Gibson (no, not that one)
  • As You Like It, William Shakespeare
  • Evil Dead, the Musical
  • Company, Stephen Sondheim
  • A Party to Murder, Kash and Hughes
  • The Pajama Game, Adler and Ross
  • Little Women

I haven’t auditioned for anything yet, but scheduling and interest conflicts are sure to arise. Let the trading begin!

Powerful Kramler: Nabokov decoded

Kinbote writes of dialling 11111 to summon first responders to the scene of the shooting (“I then dialled 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 1000). At the time of these events, various countries were beginning to adopt 3-digit emergency telephone numbers, following the lead of Britain’s 999. New Zealand introduced a 111 emergency number in 1958; the year before, California rolled out a ZEnith 1-2000 (presumably one asked for rather than dialled this number, since Z is not assigned a digit on the telephone dial); Australia adopted 000 in 1961. Use of 11111 for emergency purposes is undocumented, as far as my searches go.

Old World/New World: “…the disguised king’s arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole.” (note to line 691) As is often the case, a New World family of birds (the black and yellow Icteridae, “jaundiced ones”) is not closely related to its Old World namesake, in this case the orioles, family Oriolidae.

Nabokov appears to have introduced two coinages in the book, one by Shade (“And that odd muse of mine,/My versipel, is with me everywhere,/In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” [ll. 946-948]) and one by Kinbote (“The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day.” [note to line 802]). Versipel is glossed as a back-formation from versipellous, “changeable; protean; having a form, nature or appearance that changes often.” Ancillula is from the Latin, and is a diminutive of ancilla, “handmaid.”

There’s a snag

Saved to my to-read folder: a new special report is available from the American Bird Conservancy: Landowner Stories in Bird Conservation: Managing for Cavity-Nesting Birds in Ponderosa Pine Forests. Birds of particular conservation concern include Flammulated Owl (Otus flammeolus), Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), and White-headed Woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus).

The year in review, 2009

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 2 January: WATCH assignments for the calendar year were distributed over the holiday break.
  • 2 February: wood s lot reminds us that it is James Joyce’s birthday.
  • 1 March: Only a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening).
  • 3 April: “Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens.”
  • 1 May: Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stuart Jeffries explores the recent population explosion of bangs…
  • 2 June: Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
  • 2 July: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997, at a time when the city’s black upper-middle class is enjoying both economic good fortune and the prospect of genuine political power.
  • 2 August: Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown.
  • 6 September: Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park…
  • 3 October: “At the heart of the Park idea is this notion…”
  • 1 November: George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print…
  • 2 December: I came across the following turn of phrase in Chapter 13 of So Big.

The year in review, 2008 and 2007.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2009

Taking a couple of classes, plus a concerted effort to spend more time in the field and documenting it, means I have lots of field trip notes this year.

2008’s list.