Good morning, all! I have an event-filled day today: lunch at 1pm with my friend Joseph Rubin, who's now employed by the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players (or NYGASP). We have a project that may start up soon, and it's time to catch up on things. Following that Zach Appel, the young baritone friend of our DR PennyO, is stopping by here for a visit. Zach is now in the opera program of Manhattan School of Music and working with Dona D Vaughn, the mother of my beloved goddaughter Charlotte.
Last night I watched about half of the Rene Clement film GERVAISE, based on the Zola novel L'Assommoir, with Maria Schell as Gervaise Macquart, laundress on the road to hell. Shortly after the banquet sequence and return of Gervaise's lover, which is the halfway point of the novel when everything in the story going well goes to hell as the Coupeaus become alcoholics and lose everythong, the disc began pixilating and freezing, so I had to turn it off. I read the novel while I was in Dublin, and I'd been looking forward to the film. It's too short: events covering 20 years seem to happen daily, the costumes don't move well from the 1850s to 1870, but I loved Suzy Delair as Gervaise's false friend Virginie, although she's more blatantly conniving and duplicitous than the character of the novel. The actress Florelle, star of Kurt Weill's French musical play MARIE GALANTE, plays Gervaise mother-in-law, Madame Coupeau. Now we need a good BBC miniseries of the great novel Nana, Zola's sequel about the rise and fall of Gervaise's daughter, who becomes the biggest musical theatre star in Paris, as well as the biggest whore bankrupting Parisian noblemen and millionaires, before she and the Second Empire die in the Franco-Prussian War.
I'm rereading NANA at the moment, and then I plan to read Zola's novels about two of Gervaise's sons, Germinal, about labor unrest, and Le Bete Humaine, about a serial killer.
