Adventures of a Tofu Slut

This not sleeping thing is getting a bit ridiculous. I would like some sleep please! LAME.

As a follow-up to my freecycle post, I've now had the original two takers back out, and the next two that I picked (based on grammar - oh, like you wouldn't do the same thing) be EXTRAORDINARILY complicated. Next time (and there will be a next time; I'm just collecting all the remaining stuff) I'm giving so many qualifications that it'll take a determined person just to get to the end of the email.

I've just started watching The Wire season 4. Love! My favourite moment so far was ( totally awesome. )

I took a brief look through the Fringe play listings yesterday (Fringe! So excited! Also: TJ). So far the themes seem to be opera and hockey. But not together. It's right after I move, so I think I won't be seeing as many things this year, but I'm sure there'll be room for a few things. I WILL MAKE ROOM.

I'm sure I would have many more exciting things to say, but [see first point].

Am very hungry. Very very hungry. This appears to be my default status these days. It's a little distracting.

Manners for Men: Really excellent, funny in a somewhat terrifying way, and awfully depressing. The guy, whose name is Justin somethingthatI'mtoolazytolookup, creates amazing characters with just the tiniest motions.

Curriculum Vitae: Funny wander through one man's work history, framed with silly observations about writing a CV. Tailed off weirdly at the end, but kept me laughing the whole way through.

We also tried twice to get into Talk Thirty to Me and failed both times. The second time, the last tickets were sold to the people right in front of us. Denied!

And now, the interactive portion of this entry:

I am stymied by dinner once again! I spent ages in the grocery store on the weekend, trying to think of what to buy to make dinners for the week, and left with almost nothing. So, what are you eating these days, in this summer weather?

As promised, Fringe reviews from day 1:

First Heist Club: I have this theory that traditional style plays sometimes don't work at Fringe, simply because they suffer in comparison to the inventiveness of everything around them. Although probably that theory just applies to me. In any case, First Heist Club is about a group of women planning to rob an armoured car company, but not everything is as it seems. It was okay - occasionally funny, and a pretty good script, but the cast seemed to be working way too hard for the size of the space, and the beginning in particular was weak. I don't know, it needed something. The people around me seemed to find it entertaining, though.

Napoleon's Secret Diary: Very funny idea, great presentation and I always enjoy Ryan Gladstone (although he stumbled over his words or mixed up lines in quite a few places, which, this wasn't the first show or anything). Also, there were a couple of places where he was clearly expecting the audience to respond back, but since the whole thing is set up as Napoleon talking to his diary, it was completely unclear what was going on. Entertaining, though. There was a hilarious bit about the history of France enacted through vegetables that cracked me up.

Legoland: My first AWESOME show of the season. A two-hander about the ridiculous adventure of a teenaged brother and sister. So funny, very clever writing, fantastic cast, and my favourite kind of Fringe show - non-linear, lots of sidebars, something you wouldn't see elsewhere. Brilliant! Go see it!

And Stratford:

Oklahoma and My One and Only: These were both fantastic. Stratford always does such a good job with the musicals. Neither of these are musicals that I particularly care about, so my favourite parts ended up being the chorus boys - how can you resist dancing cowboys? And My One and Only was full of amazing tapping, and these three guys that acted as sort of a tapping greek chorus. Funny. My one complaint is that someone needs to tell Cynthia Dale she's far too old for the roles she keeps taking. She wasn't terrible, just much older than her co-star.

Merchant of Venice: This has apparently been getting mixed reviews, and I can see why. I think the director was going for a sort of Julie Taymor's Titus or Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet feel (lots of quick cuts, hyper-realism, contemporary and historical mixed into one), but couldn't quite pull it off. Honestly, though, I think a lot of the fault lies in the play itself (sacrilege, I know!). From everything I've read, Shakespeare wrote it as a true comedy, with Portia and her romantic partner whose name I can't remember as the leads. But over the years it has come to be regarded as one of the dramas, with the Shylock and Antonio story as a the central part. So it felt jumpy in mood and in scenes, and the whole ring scene at the end felt very tacked on. The woman playing Portia was great, though, and all of her stuff, especially the bits with the various suitors, was great.

The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead: A one-woman show, with the one actor telling the story (of a woman (the redhead) whose husband leaves her, and then her neighbour (the brunette) sees him with another woman (the blonde)) in seven segments, as seven different characters. Really fantastic. Some of the character transformations were brilliant.

Shakespeare's Will: Another one woman show, this one about Anne Hathaway, reflecting back on her life just after Shakespeare's funeral. This may have been my favourite play of the ones we saw at Stratford. It was really just fantastic.

And now, I am supposed to be at another Fringe show, but I let myself get scared off by the thunderstorm. Oh well. Tonight!

mystery_diva pointed out this video on YouTube which I now desperately need to share with you all. It's Avenue Q meets Fiddler on the Roof, and it's AWESOME.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVtc8jbAYYE&eurl=

The weather this morning

...wait, come back! If I promise to also have a controversial opinion in here somewhere, will you forgive the weather talk?

Okay.

The weather this morning was a little freaky, in a good way. When I left the house I could see this patch of dark, bright blue over downtown - seriously, it was shining and tremendously eye-catching, but it was not normal weather. And then when I got downtown, it was like there was a cap on the city. I couldn't even see the top half of the CN tower, and that was while standing practically right underneath. It was this bizarre combination of fog, rainclouds and sunshine. Gorgeous.

Last night I went to see Spamalot. I was a little bored, to be honest. It wasn't bad, but I checked my watch at least 4 times, and it wasn't even that long. Plus the female lead couldn't sing very well - it's always distracting to me when the song actually references belting or being loud, and the singer can't pull it off (see also: Uma Thurman in the Producers movie). Also, I'm so tired of pop culture (especially musicals, because I love them so), where women are completely sidelined to being sexpots and chorus girls in skimpy costumes. Although this was probably more noticeable to me since I just watched The Producers. The two shows are really cut in the same mode.

On the plus side, there were some funny bits, I enjoyed the complete over-the-topness of the production numbers and Broadway references, and the audience was clearly having such a good time - laughing at the tiniest reference to the movie, cheering when their favourite characters appeared. Also, and completely unrelated, teenage boys really all have the same floppy hair. Ha.

Update: in case anyone was losing sleep over my podcast confusion, I've settled on listening to them at work, and it's fine. I'm not totally concentrated, because I'm working, but then when have I ever been able to really concentrate on spoken audio without visuals? Never, that's when. So, yeah.

Dude, I have been awesome this year, with getting only the good shows. As starfishchick and I were discussing last night, the first show we saw, which we thought was great at the time, is now probably our least favourite. It's kind of wonderful when that happens.

Stealing Venus

A one-man caper experience, telling the tale of stealing the Birth of Venus from an Italian art gallery. The story was fun, but the real entertainment lay in the characters - the South African who found himself inadvertently masterminding the caper, the 7 foot albino Jamaican hired to watch over him, the Irish driver. One scene near the end went on way too long (actors playing drunk gets old really fast), but the first three-quarters of the show was a riot.

After this we went for dinner, and then attempted to go to Antoine Feval, but it was sold out by the time we got there, just 15 minutes after tickets went on sale! Bastards. So we conferred and regrouped and went instead to:

Drama Queen

You know when the first three words you hear are "Champagne chocolate cunnilingus" that you're at an Alex Dallas show. This was fabulous - mostly telling stories about her acting career (including some Sensible Footwear stories) and her father's death. She deftly manages to move between the sombre and silly, and even when she drifts into much-mined, less personal material, her expressions save it all. Very funny, and the audience loved it.

Yay! Fringe has officially begun for me: I have stood in my first ticket-buying line-up and my first ticket-holding line-up, and seen my first show, and in fact, my first sold out show.

The Catering Queen

This got a lot of advance buzz, and I'm glad I made it to the first show (with starfishchick), because it's going to be one that's hard to get into. And it was a good start to Fringe season: funny and well acted, if a little slow at times. It's what I think of as a Type 1 Fringe show: a standard small-scale plotty play that could really be performed anywhere, but is good for Fringe because it's got a small cast and minimal sets. The audience was having a great time, and there were definitely some excellent moments. I just felt it dragged a little in the second half, especially during the scenes with the ex (who was also not the strongest actor on the stage). Alison Lawrence (who also wrote it, I believe) and Dmitry Chepovsky (I totally misspelled his last name) were excellent. Recommended.

Tonight, two more shows, and I need to start planning the rest of my schedule.

Air conditioning!

I got home yesterday to find that it had been installed (which I wasn't expecting, because management said that they would give me warning before the people were going to come into my apartment while I wasn't there, but oh well). I had a moment of panic when I couldn't get it to turn on, but finally I figured out that part of my extension cord/power bar/multiple socket set was dead, which was a relief. Also, I will not be surprised if one day the entire apartment explodes, because there is only one outlet supporting a vast network of cords. Anyway.

It feels entirely decadent having air conditioning, like having a cleaning person or a car and driver. Decadent, and AWESOME.

Then I left my blissfully comfortable apartment, and went to Hello Again. It was good. The show, which I don't really know, other than the pieces that Audra McDonald sings, is totally excellent. The cast was...variable. The soldier, nurse, writer, husband and wife were fantastic (vestra, the writer was in In Trousers last year), but I thought the whore, politician and especially actress were weak (which is kind of funny, because the two reviews I read singled out the whore and the politician as being standouts in the cast, but I didn't think either of them were great singers, and he had no stage presence). So of course the opening and closing scenes were sadly ineffective. But the rest was great! Especially the scene with the writer and the young man in the 70s nightclub. Oh man.

Anyway, totally worth seeing. Hurrah.

RENT! YAY!

Rent is one of my favourite musicals. I'm not obsessed, and I know it's not perfect by any means, but somehow it always manages to sneak onto my Top 10 lists. I'm sure the fact that I saw it in New York in 1995 (?), with the original cast (except for Adam Pascal [Roger], who was replaced by his understudy that day, if I remember correctly) makes a difference in how much I love it, too.

Taken without reference to the stage production, I loved the movie. I really did. Sure, the cast was probably far too old for the characters, but it was just so incredible to see them again. Also, I adore Jesse L. Martin and Anthony Rapp. ADORE.

( In which I ramble about the movie compared to the play, and some of my favourite bits )