A Night at the Fox
As recently was the Baltimore performance of The Lord of the Rings Symphony by Howard Shore, so now, free of worry of spoilers, do I finally post in public a long-before written entry. A tale of an evening with annewashere and culfinriel and missysedai almost two months ago now, a night at the magnificent Fox...
We rushed in, blew past the ticket agent, scurried hard to the left. Reached the foot of the great winding staircase that twisted all the way up the height of the massive Fox Theatre, from ground floor to the uppermost balcony. And the moment our party set foot at the bottom of the great winding stair, the exact moment, the triumphant trumpet fanfare of "The Bridge of Khazad-dûm" roared and rumbled through the halls. The timing was just *perfect*, like the orchestra had been waiting on cue for just that moment...
I couldn't help but pump both my fists in triumph as we ran up the winding stair, and my ear-to-ear grin probably could have lit the darkened stairwell by itself. :-)
- In the reckless, heady years right before the devastation of Depression and World War, all across America were built magnificent, richly decorated movie palaces. Few now survive. Of these, the Fox Theatre in Detroit is the largest. Built in an age now long gone, while so much else surrounding it has fallen to ruin, abandonment and decay, the Fox was preserved and restored to the glory she had on the night she opened -- and what glory!
Detroit's Orchestra Hall up the street, which I have written of before (In the Houses of Eutrepe), I am told has better acoustics; my ear is insufficently trained to tell. But in contrast to Orchestra Hall's clean, elegant, classical styling, the Fox is a riot and revel of ornate colors dancing over every rose marble column, gilded cornice, and illuminated stained glass window. Elephants marching across the carpeted floor and stencils placed by hand orbit the ceiling around a two-ton, thousand-plus piece stained glass chandelier. Hindu, Persian, Chinese -- the Fox is a wild pan-Asian fusion of all these architectual styles in red and green and blue and gold. It's like somebody put Beijing's Forbidden City, Tokyo's Nikko Toshogu, the Golden Temple of Amritsar and several strong hits of LSD into an architectual blender and then poured the results into a ten-story tall box in the middle of Detroit. They just don't *build* stuff like this anymore...
Five thousand people it seats, and not a bad seat in the entire house. I know, becuase just a few rows from the very, very, *very* top of the theatre was where missysedai and Mark and culfinriel and I were seated, and we could hear and see everything. annewashere got seats further down closer to the stage, but I think our "cheap" seats worked just fine. :-)
The beginning of this story is chronicled in its entirety in the pages of this diary in a hilarious series of comments captured here, from my first happy discovery flipping through the city newspaper that the grand Lord of the Rings Symphony was coming to Detroit. Within a few comments, m'Lady Sedai and partner-in-much-mischief missysedai had grabbed tickets via theonering.net's early advance purchase password; a few comments down from that, annewashere had joined us, and near the end of the comment series, culfinriel...
culfinriel comes from the same constellation of medical activist comrades as come resonance42 and mdrnprometheus. Once a leader in the Medical Student section of the Medical Society of the State of New York, and now in St. Louis doing Opthy, of the very first evening I met the charming, witty opera-singer turned physican I wrote in Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez, of an evening spent at the palatial Commander's Palace in New Orleans geeking over Sindarin. Of further adventures with the proud Tolkien fan-girl I wrote in Night on the Reef (that's us on Waikiki at top left). Her sister lives in the Ann Arbor area, and I'm always up to hosting lovely ladies at my humble abode, so excited as all punch was I when she decided to grab a flight up north to catch the closest approach of the LotR Symphony and a weekend with us...
And of course, I need write little more about the long-as-your-arm list of adventures we've all had here in the Ann Arbor - Detroit - Toledo axis of the rasfwr-jians, from which this diary itself literally comes. It was, in fact, with missysedai and annewashere (bottom left) that I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, from which the right hand silly picture is taken.
Tolkien's works are very special to me, for reasons I've written before. To share it with close friends, be they forged in the heat of medical activist struggle or the humor of online exchange and mischief grand and merry, a greater treat. To roll it all up into a grand evening out -- what gentleman *wouldn't* leap at the chance to spend an evening in the company of warm, witty women? ;-)
I was already dressed for the occasion, racing literally directly from the across the street wedding of my SCAdian Lady Giovanna and her (now) husband Gregoire (and of that happy event, and the happy history behind it, of life with the merry folks of Cynnabar, is another entry for another day) to Zanzibar, the unique Asian-Western Fusion restaurant on the northwestern corner of the central campus here at Michigan. Worried I was going to get there late, I happily ended up being early, enjoyin the crisp autumn early evening on the sidewalk outside. Soon enough, missysedai and annewashere arrived, to much big hugs; and then, a little later, culfinriel, dropped off by her sister, luggage in tow.
Zanzibar, like virtually every other restaurant in Ann Arbor, I had first and most often eaten on medical center business, and I've enjoyed it very much each time I've been. It was, indeed, where missysedai and annewashere and montoya and Jesse had hosted pokeypenguin when he had come all the way up to Wolverine Country to see us all, as told in A Snowy Afternoon in Zanzibar. Now it was culfinriel we hosted in a long, lazy, happy dinner from appetizers to mocha coffee drinks (and a silly little cow for Missy, hee!). Once and yet again I had the happy chance to intersect friends from different circles of my life, as culfiriel hit it off with the rasfwr-jians wonderfully, and we talked about everything and anything at a comfortable pace. We did end up running a tad bit late coming out of the restaurant, but Cest la Vie -- the symphony was multiple hours long, and if we missed the early bits, we'd certainly at least catch the bulk. :-)
- Which is how we ended up racing into the theatre and up the stairs just as in the musical score the Fellowship was escaping down the collapsing stairs of the mines of Khazad-dûm, the fantastic acoustics of the Fox bringing the symphony's roar ringing into even the deep back hallways and access halls of the great theatre. Up seven or eight flights we wound until we reached our high-top seats, temporarily grabbing a landing place until the Breaking of the Fellowship, and then settling into our proper seats for the rest of Howard Shore's musical journey.
Of my final, overall thoughts of the gift Peter Jackson gave us all who hold the stories Tolkien first wrote I penned in Kiwi Cheers; and Howard Shore's grand orchestral work -- all three movies worth -- are an integral part of that magic. All of the themes, the cues, the fanfares and melodies were ones I knew very, very well, beautiful in their own right, and still the greater for the narrative moments forever attached. From the desperate flight through Moria where our party joined the Shore and the Fellowship that evening at the Fox, to the pounding drums of the Uruk-hai. From the hardanger (Norwegian fiddle) melody of the horse lords of Rohan, to the thunder of trumpets as the beacons race to life across Amon Dîn, Calenhad and Halifirien, all the way to the climax on Mount Doom and bittersweet epilogue at the Gray Havens. All of these musical cues are things many of us can hum from memory, and I think Howard Shore chose very, very wisely in the selections he made to play this evening. Certainly in the third and final movement, from the only one of the three soundtracks I actually own, the tracks he picked for The Return of the King are exactly the ones I would have chosen as the best of that album which I have listened to at full roar many an early morning in my laboratory office...
One might fairly ask why, if these are musical pieces that one knows backwards and forwards already, would one spend thirty-five dollars to go see it in person? I would suggest, at least for me, the answer is in fact the reverse -- it's precisely *for* music one adores that one should go the extra mile to see it in the settings in which such music was meant to be done, rather than shelling out for music you might or might not like. Great theatre halls are precisely designed to take music and turn it into an experience, by the way they can wrap and surround you in crashing tempests of sound in a way only the most expensive home theatre systems can, and the Fox and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra certainly accomplished that. The difference between listening to the musical tales on a pair of Altecs, and having it come at you from every angle, live and in person, is like the difference between artificial cocoa flavor and Lindt. And the production company arranging the tour added appreciated, subtle other touches to the show, from gentle changes in the lighting from set to set, to showing appropriate bits of art from Alan Lee and other of the famous illustators whose works both graced many editions of the Lord of the Rings through the years and whose visions were adopted by Jackson himself. And of course there were the ancillary atmosphere of the opulent theatre around us, seemingly leaping from the pages of a lurid 1920's pulp adventure novel, and the seas of impeccably dressed Tolkien fans in mundane finery or garb of Middle Earth.
But most of all, I think, it was the sharing of the experience with good friends -- not even merely acquaintences, but with fellows with whom a long and happy history has been shared. The sharing of the show, the emotions, the anticipation before, the thrill during, the bubbling afterglow afterwards. Like in the LotR movie experiences before, times when I looked to my side just to see the ear-to-ear grin of the lady by my side, the breathless wow wow wow exchanged during intermissions, or afterwards, the barely repressed glee. A joy shared is a joy multiplied, especially with friends who enjoy Tolkien as much as missysedai or annwashere, or an outright, silmaril-class Tolkien fangirl like culfinriel, whose very LJ handles speak of their love for the marvelous world Tolkien brought to life. And too, throughout the symphony, the musical cues themselves reawakened and evoked a rich bouquet of attached memories on many levels, like a puzzle box of the Imperial Chinese courts. Memories of the unforgettable scenes Jackson and company painted on the silver screen associated with each cue. Memories of the specific evenings spent with family or friends in the theatre, watching them for the first time. And echoes of everything else ever shared with those same family and friends, story after story, moment after moment, of which this special evening at the theatre became yet another...