Well, dear readers, I am home and it’s late and therefore I must write these here notes in a hurry. I must say, September is flying by, like a gazelle with a nose ring. I have just returned home from The Big Picture, a film music concert at the Hollywood Bowl. I used to go to the Hollywood Bowl all the time in the mid-1970s. In those days, it was 90% classical music, with a little jazz and occasionally some film music thing. These days it’s really not all that much classical music, because it seems it’s easier to sell jazz and movies and musicals. We arrived at around five-fifteen and went to the restaurant that’s on the grounds of the Bowl – it’s run by Patina, who has places like this at a lot of venues. There were about eight or nine of us at dinner, including some film music fans from the UK, Sweden, and Italy. I ordered a small wedge salad, a half-roast chicken and a small side of mac-and-cheese that I shared with my pal and Outside the Box editor, Marshall Harvey. Everything was very good, although the skin on the chicken was very fatty, which makes me want to vomit on the ground – once trimmed, it was fine.
At seven, we made our way to our box seats in the Terrace II section (really the best seats in the house). As we headed to our box I locked eyes with Mr. Bruce Vilanch, so I went over and gave him a hug and a kiss. He pointed out that Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner were sitting just a few boxes away. At that point, I didn’t really see anyone else I knew. And then the concert began. Apparently they do these Big Picture concerts every year now, conducted by David Newman. The host for the evening was Jason Alexander, who now sports a toupee. It’s odd that after heaven knows how many years of Seinfeld and other TV, films, and theater, that he would no longer want to look like what people know, but I guess it makes him happy. I couldn’t really get used to it. First up was an opening piece saluting Paramount Pictures’ 100th Anniversary. It was a wonderfully put together piece, a film montage, with music from Paramount films. Then we had a long sequence from Wings, with its original score from way back when – it’s fun to see the footage and hear the live orchestra. But I have to say, unlike days of old, they now mic everything within an inch of its life and a lot of what we hear is coming through the vast speaker system. I don’t have a program in front of me, but we got a bit from the Claudette Colbert version of Cleopatra, we got some Herrmann Vertigo, and we got Franz Waxman’s Sunset Blvd. The first half went by very quickly, surprisingly so.
The second half was filled with the 60s through today, starting with the stunning final cue from Henry Mancini’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, then moving on to The Godfather films. After that it was Forrest Gump, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Star Trek reboot, the most recent Mission Impossible movie and the evening’s one total misstep and sop to today’s audiences – Transformers. Just watching that wretched dreck and hearing that horrendous thumping that’s supposed to be music was excruciating. The fact that these Tranformer movies are huge hits shows just how far we’ve devolved – movies for little boys (and yes, I understand some of the little boys are in their 30s, and that’s all I’ll say about that). The orchestra was great, Mr. Newman is a terrific conductor, and Mr. Alexander got us from piece to piece, with some of the jokes landing and many just sitting there like so much fish. We had great seats and it was just a very pleasant two hours.
Afterwards, we went backstage and said hello to David Newman (I should have told him we were reissuing David and Bathsheba), and I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in years, probably a decade. I met this gal in New York – in fact, we went to the opening night of the Vertigo restoration at the Ziegfeld Theater. She worked for Mandy Patinkin. She moved out to LA and I saw her a couple of times out here. I guess she still lives here and I met her husband and her friends, all very nice.
Prior to all that, I’d gotten a good night’s sleep (it’s really the first night’s sleep in almost two weeks where I felt I really slept), decided to do a two-mile jog, walked a bit after that, then the helper came by and got some invoices. Other than that, I really just relaxed and took it easy and never felt like doing the little bit of writing I have to do.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I must get another good night’s beauty sleep.
Today, I shall do the little bit of writing I have to do, then I’ll try to do a jog, then I’ll eat, and then we have a long first Kritzerland rehearsal, after which I shall relax.
Tomorrow, I have to catch up on a lot of stuff, and hopefully get some packaging approvals. Then we have three days of rehearsals in a row – Wednesday with our guest stars, Thursday our regular casts’ second rehearsal, Friday our stumble-through, and Saturday sound check and show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, write, maybe jog, eat, rehearse, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your all-time favorite Henry Mancini scores and songs? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where my dreams shall not be accompanied by music from Transformers, but from the classic films of old.