Good morning, all! Today I have a meeting with Brad Haak, conductor if MARY POPPINS, about a couple of charts for Ashley Brown, Mary Poppins herself! Yesterday, I had a meeting with the new conductor for the Gay Men's Chorus about four orchestrations of at least three long pieces - one of them very long - and I need to count the bars today and see if the small sum the Chorus is offering is enough to perk my interest.
Yes, DR slingshaw, I did indeed see the ever-lovely Ben last evening, both as I got to the theatreand as I left the theatre. It really is a gorgeous production, with imaginative scenery and costumes that run the gasmut of periods: the British characters appear to be dressed in Renaissance fashions, the wicked Queen looks rather Bohemian with her headdress, the Romans, several of whom DR MBarnum would want in his next sword and sandal fantasy, are in classic uniform of about 10 BC, but it all works in this mythic territory and time in which the play is set.
The number of folklore themes in this play have me wondering about the Brothers Grimm, who actually were more fakelorists than folklorists, and I wonder how much of Shakespeare's plays, which had been translated into German, influenced their Household Tales, which appear to have come less from the real folk and storytellers and more from the nannies of middle-class families, who often were retelling Perault and the other tellers of the 17th-Century Cabinet des Fees. I kept thiking of Snow White in Act Two, but there are the three brothers on a quest (Imogene is disguised as a boy), there is divine intrusion from Jupiter and a few ghosts while the dead mother in the Grimm version of Cinderella throws dwn from the tree under which she's buried the dress for the ball. Rapunzel is locked away in a tower and the Prince who finds her banished and blinded by the witch, and Imogene is a prisoner in her castle while her banished husband is blinded by the lies of Iachimo. And this is only one Shakespeare play!
