It's a magical world

Beardo. Book and lyrics by Jason Craig, music by Dave Malloy. Dir. Patrick Dooley.

I went to see this with a large group of people celebrating our friend M's birthday (side note: the Bay area is way too small), and in short, it was about as awesome as you could hope a rock musical about Rasputin would be.

( I see visions and shit. It's part of my thing. )

I am failing to convey how awesome this show was in a variety of ways, but it really was awesome: hilarious, absurd, pointed, and really well-acted. The music was great, and all the actors also double as musicians on various instruments, and it was pretty awesome. (The Shotgun Players: really great.) The strangeness of Rasputin's life and career are only amplified by the times in which he lived, and vice versa, and I think the show gets that.

Beowulf in performance by Benjamin Bagby

A month ago I went to see Benjamin Bagby, the noted early music specialist, perform the first section of the epic of Beowulf in the original Old English. Rather than just a straight recitation, which is pretty damn boring, Bagby does a full performance in the style of an ancient scop (rhapsode), and he's really damn good at it--between the surtitles and the performance itself he managed to have the audience laughing, and in suspense, at multiple points, which is damn hard to do even when the audience understands the performance language.

It was really cool to hear the text performed; old English, amusingly enough, still has a very few words exactly the same as our modern English, and it sounds a lot like both German and the Scandinavian languages--every so often there came a line I could understand without the surtitles, which definitely gave a thrill. Hearing the entirety of the first section actually also made me aware of the linkages between all three parts; specifically, the long digression towards the end of the first part, after Beowulf has defeated Grendel (spoilers! Grendel dies!), foreshadows the manner of Beowulf's death in the third part. The poem "Beowulf" by Richard Wilbur has also stuck with me in that context, and came back to me. (Yes; I hold to the more modern tripartite structure interpretation, as opposed to the two-part structure championed by J.R.R. Tolkien in "The Monsters and the Critics." The essay is eminently readable and worth reading, however; it's available here.)

I also tend to agree with placing the date of the poem's composition towards the earlier end of the accepted range: i.e. closer to the 8thC CE than the 11th. It's interesting hearing the poem and hearing the new religion, Christianity, coexisting within it with the Viking culture it overlays; the elements aren't in tension, but they remain heterogeneous. I wound up thinking of Tom Palaima's Phi Beta Kappa lecture, in which he argued that the Greek epics and drama represent the culture's attempt to teach people what war is really like, and that with the advent of Christianity it became more difficult to convince people to kill their fellow men, necessitating the obfuscation of lying about the true nature of war. It's an interesting argument, and I think it could be adopted to Beowulf too; certainly one hears a lot about the aspects of Christianity that fit in the warrior-honor culture of the Geats and the Danes, and very little about the more radical peace and compassion ideology that also is part of the religion, or at least its texts. Like I said, interesting.

The Roman road also really does stick out in the poem. How is it still paved? Seriously, how?

So today we went to see the Star Troupe of the Takarazuka Revue put on "The Scarlet Pimpernel" in Takarazuka. Holy crap it was awesome. For those of you who don't know, Takarazuka is famous for being all-female, and I have to say (especially from way up in the back of the house) it was disconcertingly hard to remember that the people playing the male roles were not actually men. Not so much the parts with few lines, since their idea of masculinity is clearly indebted to the Japanese Army (i.e. lots of blustering anger and shouting), but definitely for the lead male roles. Wow the main otokoyaku got so much applause! Practically every time she walked on the stage, I swear. At any rate, just as a production itself, it was pretty good I thought (the company is clearly swimming in dough: I've never seen a stage with more moving parts), though I swear I went blind from all the sparklies, and the costuming choices were free-handed at best. The best part was when Percy and his cohorts are like "They're searching for the Scarlet Pimpernel in London! What kind of man do they think the Pimpernel is? Strong and cool! So we have to be even more like peacocks!" and they broke open a closet in the wall to reveal...18th century pimp outfits, I kid you not. Floor-length zebra coats with matching hat and pink plumes anyone? Don't forget the sky blue trousers and pinstripe vests! Oh, it was awesome! And at the end of the omake/encore, the lead otokoyaku came out, I kid you not, in a three-foot ostrich- and pheasant-feather contraption. Brilliant. Though, okay, as I said to basically everyone, the text's not-at-all-implicit anti-revolution, pro-aristocracy bias is both grating and interesting, since i can't really think of any other terribly popular texts that have such anti-egalitarian principles and yet are still so popular. I suppose everyone gets around it by playing up the romance.

In other news, we had a party in Kobe this weekend and it was quite awesome. Oh man the nachos and the takoyaki were amazing. I want more nachos.