Pirates of Penzance

Ok, so Sarah’s last post inspired me to post my favorite clip from Pirates of Penzance. If you can get past the minor “cheese” factor, this video is incredible. The General is like a rubber man- I’ve never seen anything like it!

A Behanding in Spokane

There’s a new play I want to see in NYC called A Behanding in Spokane. It’s by Martin McDonagh who I remember from the insanely-good play The Pillowman at Steppenwolf in Chicago. It stars Christopher Walken, Anthony Mackie from The Hurt Locker, Zoe Kazan from It’s Complicated, and most exciting of all—Sam Rockwell. I’ve had a huge crush on Sam ever since I saw Moon. He is absolutely adorable in this screen test for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

William Kentridge's The Nose

I’m curious about William Kentridge’s The Nose, his latest foray into opera that opens at the Met on March 5. An adaptation of an adaptation, Kentridge’s The Nose is based on Dimitri Shostakovich’s (Russian composer 1906-1975) opera from 1930, which was based on Nikolai Gogol’s (Russian novelist 1809-1852) short story published in 1836. The story focuses on a Russian civil servant who wakes up one morning to find his nose missing from his face. When he finds the rogue nose, it refuses to return to his face. I’m not sure if this is just a silly story or if the nose is a metaphor for something else. Either way, the trailer looks really cool with its shadow puppetry and Russian constructivist aesthetic.