Thanksgiving

And so the Holiday season has begun.

My brother Jason and sister-in-law Lisa stopped by to visit us Wednesday night. K. and I had opted out of the larger familial Thanksgiving because she wasn't up to it, but my sibs were kind enough to see us a bit on their way down to San Marteen. We met their very excited, very large boxer-pit-bull dog and talked for a bit (with the sibs, not the dog). Cupcakes were dropped off. It was nice seeing them.

My actual Thanksgiving on Thursday kicked off with a bit of busy-ness. First thing, I had to run up to Andronico's to get our deserts and sides. Sadly, they make you jump through hoops now, such as getting a slip for your food, paying for your food, and then having to come back to pick up your food. Their delivery was also lacking, as it included green beans in a zip lock bag. Not very class-ay. (But, the food was tasty as ever.)

After getting home, I then ran out to have a light lunch with my friend Eric R., who was visiting from New Zealand and stopped by on his way back to the airport (after visiting his parents for the last several days). We went to the only restaurant I could find open in Downtown Berkeley (The Original) and talked a bit. It was nice to see Eric, but it's been a long while since he's gone, and time has moved on.

After I arrived back home, I read for a while, then K. and I cooked our food (including our ham) up for a supper at about 4pm. While things were cooking and while we were eating we watch Downton Abbey, because K. and I have developed the habit of marathoning a TV show on Thanksgiving when we're home. The show was good (it was the back half of season 3) and the food was delicious ... particularly the ham. There are now huge piles of leftovers.

The rest of the day was restful. I worked on the two novels I'm reading (Shadows Edge, The Thirteenth Tale), plus a large graphic novel that I'd set aside for Thanksgiving (X-Men vs Apocalypse I). I usually have a "no work" policy on Thanksgiving, but I've got too much up in the air now, so toward the evening I started doing some editing and writing too -- knocking a couple of things off my Designers & Dragons TODO list and also making some notable progress on my next article for Wizards of the Coast.

So, now the holiday has come and gone, but K. and I still have a few fun days of other stuff planned and we have food (ham in particular) that will carry us into the next year ...

A Little Princess (The Musical)

Kimberly and I saw A Little Princess put on at the Berkeley Playhouse this afternoon. This is a recent musical adaptation (2005 or so) of a book from a hundred years earlier.

I had fun. It was joyful and energetic, as the plays always are at the Playhouse, and there were some very talented singers there, including the girl who had played Annie and Charlie (of the Chocolate Factory) in previous productions. (She played Becky here.) Sadly I thought the best two singers were folks with relatively small parts of just one main song each; it turned out that one of them was Wilson Jermaine Heredia, a Tony-award winning actor from Rent (where he played Angel). We'd previously seen him in the movie. He totally rocks for taking part in a community theatre.

Unfortunately the book for the musical wasn't nearly as good. Basically the first act consists of star Sara Crewe leaving Africa and going to a girl's school in Britain, where she spends about 2 minutes being bullied by the girls there, then she immediately turns them all into her friends. What follows is over an hour of girls bonding at school. The second act was better, but then the authors inexplicably decided to end it with a Deus Ex Queen Victoria, where the Queen drops down from the heavens to solve all the problems. Seriously. One can see why someone thought it was clever to mirror the ongoing theme that all girls can be little princesses with a meeting with the actual Queen, but ... it's really hard to make deus ex machinas work, and this one didn't quite make it there. Overall, it felt like too many events were dumped into this play and thus none of them got much attention. Oh, and the whole thing dragged. At 2.75 hours including intermission, it could have been trimmed, and the first act was the place to do it.

Beyond that, everything was laid out to be a lot too reminiscent of Annie (girls who are down-trodden in an all girls' institution, while a jealous caretaker is mean to them) and some of the songs were way too mundane. ("A Broken Old Doll" felt like it could have come from any musical ever.) And as K. said, we kept hearing again and again (in song) how Sara and her father missed each other.

That's all a pity because there was a lot of clever storytelling. Act I is largely split between Sara's bonding experiences in the girl's school and her father's adventures searching for Timbuktu. Sometimes the scenes were entirely overlaid with each, usually with one of the scenes being non-vocal. Some of the non-vocal scenes were even carried out in silhouette. It was pretty cool storytelling. And I did like some of the song's: Pasco's "Captain Crewe" (which he rocked), Sara's "Soldier On" (which she rocked), and the dreamy "Timbuktu" (complete with Gilbert & Sullivan references).

So, 2012's last musical was mixed, but as I said I mostly enjoyed myself anyway (except when the play was really dragging). Given the last Shotgun play was mixed too, I'm hoping the year's inal performance will be better! (That's a weird-sounding thing at the Shotgun, and unfortunately "weird-sounding" and "thing" doesn't fill me with hope.)