seen online

One pleasant side effect of pandemic rules is the frequent ability to stay home and watch a theatrical live on the computer, instead of having to venture to a distant venue plus all of the time and expense of getting there. The problem is, though, that they don't have the same visceral impact on the viewer this way, and I find I have little to say about them.

The SF Conservatory of Music put on Bock & Harnick's 1966 musical The Apple Tree. It's three one-act shows based on stories by different authors. In the Broadway versions the cast appears in all 3; in this one they were different. Act 2, which is "The Lady or the Tiger?", is the best-written; Act 3, which is by Feiffer at his most Feifferesque, was the best-performed.

The Lamplighters did a celebratory program of numbers from all 14 Gilbert & Sullivan operas, not always the selections I'd have chosen but all well-performed in Victorian costuming.

Great Performances had a documentary on the reopening of Broadway (this was before omicron, though it does record how Aladdin opened for one night and then had to shut down again). Interviews and live footage convey how devastating the shutdown was for theater people whose life this is, how hard it was to get back into gear after a long shutdown, and how joyous the reopenings were. This was all musicals, by the way: no spoken drama. What struck me, having seen only 2 or 3 new musicals in the last 2 or 3 decades, is how many of them are built on pre-existing songs, and how many of those songs are really upbeat and energetic musically but have really depressed lyrics.

Movies are a better choice online because they're made for the recorded medium. I saw The Mauritanian, a legal drama with Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch tussling over the body (literally: habeas corpus) of a Gitmo detainee. If you've ever wanted to hear Benedict Cumberbatch essay a Southern American accent, this is your movie.

One other live event I participated online was the "laying-in ceremony" for my friend Jane who died last month. What her body is being laid into is a compost container, which is a thing you can do in Washington State but apparently not much of elsewhere, and highly appropriate for one who was both an engineer and a gardener. There's now a web page with Jane's wise sayings online, and it includes this essay on people's varying ideas of what doing someone a favor means - and this is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say that people are different.