Watched it yesterday, with one lone other person in the cinema, since in Germany you currently don't have to be only vaccinated, you also have to have a negative test for the day in addition to this to visit museums, concerts, and movies. I loved it. Hats off to Spielberg and Tony Kushner and the entire creative team.

( Spoilers for this movie's specific choices in telling the story abound )

A thing of beauty, joy and sorrow from two days ago: homage to Stephen Sondheim by Lin Manuel Miranda and many, many over people in NYC, singing Sunday (from "Sunday in the Park with George"):

Click to view

This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1468926.html. ( Read more... )

This morning, I saw that another titan has left us - Stephen Sondheim has died. It's one of those moments where you imagine the world stops, at least for a moment, and listens to some incredibly clever lyrics and music to go with it.

I first came across his work in the way I imagine many do, via the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's melodies in West ( Read more... )

Now, I like Tim Burton, I like Johnny Depp, and I adore Stephen Sondheim. But like many a Sondheim fan, I'm not sure the combination of the three would be a good thing, aka Burton casting Johnny Depp in the title role of Sweeney Todd. Mostly because Johnny Depp is an actor, not a singer, and Sweeney really needs to be played by someone who can ( Read more... )

The British Library is a nifty, nifty thing. I spent most of the day there yesterday, and let me tell you, getting your hands on, for example, a letter written by Charles Dickens to David Roberts (a painter of the era) is something else again. (I just wish I were better at decyphering handwriting ( Read more... )

There is something incredibly endearing, to me, when people whose creations I admire show their enthusiasm for someone else’s creations. On a basic level, this is very similar to how fandom works - we get to know a fellow fan of a certain fandom, they’re also enthusiastic about something else we don’t know yet, and we decide to have a look. (That’s ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago, apropos the newest version of The Phantom of the Opera, ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making ( Read more... )

Yesterday was musical day for me. I watched a performance of La Belle Helene by Jacques Offenbach, which stumbled slightly in the first act (note to the performers: yes, it's intentional camp, but you can't do good camp by mere overacting), but then turned out fine. The singing was, too. It's my favourite operetta by Offenbach, and I wonder ( Read more... )