Last night, I went to the Kennedy Center to see "Hairspray". The show was a movie in 1988, but was produced on Broadway in 2002. If you Google John Waters, you will get about 60,000 hits, you can get a professional description of "Hairspray". It is particularly interesting to see the movie stars who were in the original movie. I will give you my strictly amateur version. John Waters grew up in Baltimore, and like most writers, he wrote about his own observations in life. In this show, he created caricatures of people he saw in real life in Baltimore in the 1950s. Television stations in many East Coast cities during the late 50s and early 60s had afternoon shows for teenagers in which teens danced to popular rock music, and this show was about the teen dance show in Baltimore, or more precisely, about the integration of the show by both unattractive teens and Blacks. Waters wrote characters who were caricatures of people. The lead in the show was a "chunky" girl who wanted to be a dancer on the show, but was not "beautiful" enough to be on TV. Her mother was an obese woman, and her dad was was a very thin man who owned a souvenier stand. Her best friend was a pretty dull girl, whose mother was even less brilliant. The pretty girl on the TV show was the daughter of the show's producer, and a spoiled brat. The tension of the show was in the struggle of the plump girl to get on the show. An added struggle was also introduced when she was sent to detention at school and there, learned new dance steps from Black kids who were also in detention. In the end, all worked out happily. The music of the show was good, upbeat, but not memorable. An added bonus in the show last night was that the normal lead in the show was not able to perform and was replaced by her understudy, who was brilliant -- Katrina Rose Dideriksen. When she came out for her bow at the end of the show, she got a standing ovation, and she cried at that. It was quite touching. A very good show. Here is the link:
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/index.cfm?fuseaction=showEvent&event=TFTSH#details
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Lady Windermere's Fan, June 30, 2005
I have seen many plays; I estimate 150 at least. This play was in the top group, perhaps the top 10 of all the plays I have seen. The set alone was one of the most beautiful, most wonderful sets I have ever seen. It was incredibly grand and beautiful. The actors were dressed in formal costumes most of the play, and that added to the beauty and elegance. Dixie Carter was the lead, Mrs. Erlynne, and she was wonderful, and her husband of many years, Hal Holbrook, was in the audience. And of course, the play itself is wonderful. It is truly a wonderful play. I was in awe. They got a standing ovation, and I was among those standing. What a wonderful play. Here is the link:
http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/lwf.html
Here are some wonderful quotes from the play:
LORD DARLINGTON. Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can't help belonging to them.
LADY WINDERMERE. Are ALL men bad?
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. Pretty child! I was like that once. Now I know that all men are monsters. [LADY WINDERMERE rings bell.] The only thing to do is to feed the wretches well. A good cook does wonders, and that I know you have. My dear Margaret, you are not going to cry?
LADY WINDERMERE. You needn't be afraid, Duchess, I never cry.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. That's quite right, dear. Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
LORD WINDERMERE. How hard good women are!
LADY WINDERMERE. How weak bad men are!
MRS ERLYNNE. I can fancy dancing through life with you and finding it charming.
LADY PLYMDALE. How very interesting! How intensely interesting! I really must have a good stare at her. [Goes to door of ball-room and looks in.] I have heard the most shocking things about her. They say she is ruining poor Windermere. And Lady Windermere, who goes in for being so proper, invites her! How extremely amusing! It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
DUMBY. Sensible woman, Lady Windermere. Lots of wives would have objected to Mrs. Erlynne coming. But Lady Windermere has that uncommon thing called common sense.
LADY PLYMDALE. Because I want you to take my husband with you. He has been so attentive lately, that he has become a perfect nuisance. Now, this woman is just the thing for him. He'll dance attendance upon her as long as she lets him, and won't bother me. I assure you, women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other people's marriages.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. [L.C.] Yes, dear, these wicked women get our husbands away from us, but they always come back, slightly damaged, of course.
DUMBY. What a mystery you are!
LORD DARLINGTON. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. I love you –
LORD WINDERMERE. Well, that is no business of yours, is it, Cecil?
CECIL GRAHAM. None! That is why it interests me. My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
LORD AUGUSTUS. I prefer women with a past. They're always so demmed amusing to talk to.
CECIL GRAHAM. [Coming towards him L.C.] My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip.
LORD WINDERMERE. What is the difference between scandal and gossip?
CECIL GRAHAM. Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I'm glad to say.
CECIL GRAHAM. Now, my dear Tuppy, don't be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.
DUMBY. I congratulate you, my dear fellow. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy! But I am interested to hear she does not love you. How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?
CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.
DUMBY. Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
CECIL GRAHAM. [Standing with his back to the fireplace.] One shouldn't commit any. [Sees LADY WINDERMERE'S fan on sofa.]
DUMBY. Life would be very dull without them.
LADY WINDERMERE. [Rising.] She is sure to tell him. I can fancy a person doing a wonderful act of self-sacrifice, doing it spontaneously, recklessly, nobly--and afterwards finding out that it costs too much. Why should she hesitate between her ruin and mine? . . How strange! I would have publicly disgraced her in my own house. She accepts public disgrace in the house of another to save me. . . . There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women. . . . Oh, what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us! For even if she doesn't tell, I must. Oh! the shame of it, the shame of it. To tell it is to live through it all again. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . . Oh!
LADY WINDERMERE. [Rising.] There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women. . . . Oh, what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us! For even if she doesn't tell, I must. Oh! the shame of it, the shame of it. To tell it is to live through it all again. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . . Oh!
LADY WINDERMERE. Arthur, Arthur, don't talk so bitterly about any woman. I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women, as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. And I don't think Mrs. Erlynne a bad woman--I know she's not.
LORD WINDERMERE. [Smiling as he strokes her hair.] Child, you and she belong to different worlds. Into your world evil has never entered.
LADY WINDERMERE. Don't say that, Arthur. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Rising.] I suppose, Windermere, you would like me to retire into a convent, or become a hospital nurse, or something of that kind, as people do in silly modern novels. That is stupid of you, Arthur; in real life we don't do such things--not as long as we have any good looks left, at any rate. No--what consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. And besides, if a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dressmaker, otherwise no one believes in her. And nothing in the world would induce me to do that. No; I am going to pass entirely out of your two lives. My coming into them has been a mistake--I discovered that last night.
LORD WINDERMERE. A fatal mistake.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Smiling.] Almost fatal.
LORD WINDERMERE. I am sorry now I did not tell my wife the whole thing at once.
MRS. ERLYNNE. I regret my bad actions. You regret your good ones- -that is the difference between us.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Yes. [Pause.] You are devoted to your mother's memory, Lady Windermere, your husband tells me.
LADY WINDERMERE. We all have ideals in life. At least we all should have. Mine is my mother.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
LADY WINDERMERE. [Shaking her head.] If I lost my ideals, I should lose everything.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Everything?
LADY WINDERMERE. Yes. [Pause.]
MRS. ERLYNNE. Did your father often speak to you of your mother?
LADY WINDERMERE. No, it gave him too much pain. He told me how my mother had died a few months after I was born. His eyes filled with tears as he spoke. Then he begged me never to mention her name to him again. It made him suffer even to hear it. My father- -my father really died of a broken heart. His was the most ruined life I know.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Rising.] I am afraid I must go now, Lady Windermere.
LADY WINDERMERE. [To MRS. ERLYNNE.] Oh! What am I to say to you? You saved me last night? [Goes towards her.]
MRS. ERLYNNE. Hush--don't speak of it.
LADY WINDERMERE. I must speak of it. I can't let you think that I am going to accept this sacrifice. I am not. It is too great. I am going to tell my husband everything. It is my duty.
MRS. ERLYNNE. It is not your duty--at least you have duties to others besides him. You say you owe me something?
LADY WINDERMERE. I owe you everything.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Then pay your debt by silence. That is the only way in which it can be paid. Don't spoil the one good thing I have done in my life by telling it to any one. Promise me that what passed last night will remain a secret between us. You must not bring misery into your husband's life. Why spoil his love? You must not spoil it. Love is easily killed. Oh! how easily love is killed. Pledge me your word, Lady Windermere, that you will never tell him. I insist upon it.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Humbly.] Nothing. I know it--but I tell you that your husband loves you--that you may never meet with such love again in your whole life--that such love you will never meet--and that if you throw it away, the day may come when you will starve for love and it will not be given to you, beg for love and it will be denied you--Oh! Arthur loves you!
http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/lwf.html
Here are some wonderful quotes from the play:
LORD DARLINGTON. Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can't help belonging to them.
LADY WINDERMERE. Are ALL men bad?
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. Pretty child! I was like that once. Now I know that all men are monsters. [LADY WINDERMERE rings bell.] The only thing to do is to feed the wretches well. A good cook does wonders, and that I know you have. My dear Margaret, you are not going to cry?
LADY WINDERMERE. You needn't be afraid, Duchess, I never cry.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. That's quite right, dear. Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
LORD WINDERMERE. How hard good women are!
LADY WINDERMERE. How weak bad men are!
MRS ERLYNNE. I can fancy dancing through life with you and finding it charming.
LADY PLYMDALE. How very interesting! How intensely interesting! I really must have a good stare at her. [Goes to door of ball-room and looks in.] I have heard the most shocking things about her. They say she is ruining poor Windermere. And Lady Windermere, who goes in for being so proper, invites her! How extremely amusing! It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
DUMBY. Sensible woman, Lady Windermere. Lots of wives would have objected to Mrs. Erlynne coming. But Lady Windermere has that uncommon thing called common sense.
LADY PLYMDALE. Because I want you to take my husband with you. He has been so attentive lately, that he has become a perfect nuisance. Now, this woman is just the thing for him. He'll dance attendance upon her as long as she lets him, and won't bother me. I assure you, women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other people's marriages.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. [L.C.] Yes, dear, these wicked women get our husbands away from us, but they always come back, slightly damaged, of course.
DUMBY. What a mystery you are!
LORD DARLINGTON. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. I love you –
LORD WINDERMERE. Well, that is no business of yours, is it, Cecil?
CECIL GRAHAM. None! That is why it interests me. My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
LORD AUGUSTUS. I prefer women with a past. They're always so demmed amusing to talk to.
CECIL GRAHAM. [Coming towards him L.C.] My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip.
LORD WINDERMERE. What is the difference between scandal and gossip?
CECIL GRAHAM. Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I'm glad to say.
CECIL GRAHAM. Now, my dear Tuppy, don't be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.
DUMBY. I congratulate you, my dear fellow. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy! But I am interested to hear she does not love you. How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?
CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.
DUMBY. Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
CECIL GRAHAM. [Standing with his back to the fireplace.] One shouldn't commit any. [Sees LADY WINDERMERE'S fan on sofa.]
DUMBY. Life would be very dull without them.
LADY WINDERMERE. [Rising.] She is sure to tell him. I can fancy a person doing a wonderful act of self-sacrifice, doing it spontaneously, recklessly, nobly--and afterwards finding out that it costs too much. Why should she hesitate between her ruin and mine? . . How strange! I would have publicly disgraced her in my own house. She accepts public disgrace in the house of another to save me. . . . There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women. . . . Oh, what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us! For even if she doesn't tell, I must. Oh! the shame of it, the shame of it. To tell it is to live through it all again. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . . Oh!
LADY WINDERMERE. [Rising.] There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women. . . . Oh, what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us! For even if she doesn't tell, I must. Oh! the shame of it, the shame of it. To tell it is to live through it all again. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . . Oh!
LADY WINDERMERE. Arthur, Arthur, don't talk so bitterly about any woman. I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women, as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. And I don't think Mrs. Erlynne a bad woman--I know she's not.
LORD WINDERMERE. [Smiling as he strokes her hair.] Child, you and she belong to different worlds. Into your world evil has never entered.
LADY WINDERMERE. Don't say that, Arthur. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Rising.] I suppose, Windermere, you would like me to retire into a convent, or become a hospital nurse, or something of that kind, as people do in silly modern novels. That is stupid of you, Arthur; in real life we don't do such things--not as long as we have any good looks left, at any rate. No--what consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. And besides, if a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dressmaker, otherwise no one believes in her. And nothing in the world would induce me to do that. No; I am going to pass entirely out of your two lives. My coming into them has been a mistake--I discovered that last night.
LORD WINDERMERE. A fatal mistake.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Smiling.] Almost fatal.
LORD WINDERMERE. I am sorry now I did not tell my wife the whole thing at once.
MRS. ERLYNNE. I regret my bad actions. You regret your good ones- -that is the difference between us.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Yes. [Pause.] You are devoted to your mother's memory, Lady Windermere, your husband tells me.
LADY WINDERMERE. We all have ideals in life. At least we all should have. Mine is my mother.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
LADY WINDERMERE. [Shaking her head.] If I lost my ideals, I should lose everything.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Everything?
LADY WINDERMERE. Yes. [Pause.]
MRS. ERLYNNE. Did your father often speak to you of your mother?
LADY WINDERMERE. No, it gave him too much pain. He told me how my mother had died a few months after I was born. His eyes filled with tears as he spoke. Then he begged me never to mention her name to him again. It made him suffer even to hear it. My father- -my father really died of a broken heart. His was the most ruined life I know.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Rising.] I am afraid I must go now, Lady Windermere.
LADY WINDERMERE. [To MRS. ERLYNNE.] Oh! What am I to say to you? You saved me last night? [Goes towards her.]
MRS. ERLYNNE. Hush--don't speak of it.
LADY WINDERMERE. I must speak of it. I can't let you think that I am going to accept this sacrifice. I am not. It is too great. I am going to tell my husband everything. It is my duty.
MRS. ERLYNNE. It is not your duty--at least you have duties to others besides him. You say you owe me something?
LADY WINDERMERE. I owe you everything.
MRS. ERLYNNE. Then pay your debt by silence. That is the only way in which it can be paid. Don't spoil the one good thing I have done in my life by telling it to any one. Promise me that what passed last night will remain a secret between us. You must not bring misery into your husband's life. Why spoil his love? You must not spoil it. Love is easily killed. Oh! how easily love is killed. Pledge me your word, Lady Windermere, that you will never tell him. I insist upon it.
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Humbly.] Nothing. I know it--but I tell you that your husband loves you--that you may never meet with such love again in your whole life--that such love you will never meet--and that if you throw it away, the day may come when you will starve for love and it will not be given to you, beg for love and it will be denied you--Oh! Arthur loves you!
Hecuba, May 29, 2005
Saturday night, I attended the play "Hecuba" at the Kennedy Center. This play is a Greek tragedy written by Euripides in 425 BC. As advertised, the play was very tragic and very sad. It was extremely well done, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but in the end, it was still a tragedy that left everyone feeling pretty horrible. Because I have season tickets, I sit near the same group of people most of the time. ALL of the women were of one mind about this play -- they did not like it. The play is about a woman whose last two remaining children were killed, and then in an act of revenge, she killed two young boys of the man who killed her last son. Everyone lost in this play. However, the play was a morality play -- about the morality of the time. It was a play whose message was that killing was hurtful, although killing for revenge was not only acceptable, but honored. It seems to me that society still believes that revenge killing is a good thing, so I am not sure how far we have come in the past 2500 years. In those days, when armies conquered a people, they killed all of the men and many of the children as well. The women were made slaves. Euripides tried to show that making the women slaves, and killing their children were wrong, and created great emotional pain and suffering. However, he still believed that slavery was okay, in general, and that if a woman's children were killed, revenge killing was right and honorable. Even now, the play was very thought provoking. I was not affected by the tragedy; I had read the play before going, and I knew what to expect. I found the morality of the play to be very interesting. It is also interesting that Euripides was permitted to stage such a play at that time.
Toulouse-Lautrec, April 18, 2005
Today I visited an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art -- "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre". It was a wonderful exhibit. Toulouse-Lautrec posters are happy posters; their purpose was advertising. Their intent was to convey happiness and joy, and they were incredibly successful. It is too bad that Toulouse-Lautrec died at the age of 36; he could have done so much more if he had lived to be an old man, as Picasso did. Here is the link to the exhibition: Toulouse Lautrec
If you love Paris, and love the Montmartre area of Paris, you will love this happy exhibit.
Mr. Roberts, April 3, 2002
Last night, I saw the play "Mr. Roberts" at the Kennedy Center. This play was on Broadway in 1948, and it is about men on a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean during the second world war. I think the play is supposed to be a comedy, although it really was not funny to me. As a comedy, the play is supposed to be shallow, a light-hearted look at the war. To me, it is a characterization of what we think of when we think of sailors during the war -- a bunch of very aggressive young men, who complain constantly on the ship, and get drunk and fight and complain and fight some more. Although they talk constantly about women, they have no contact with women except a prostitute once in awhile. Mostly they drink and fight. Not a very attractive play.
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