Mendacious

I'm on the mend. I've put the crutches aside and I'm walking with a cane. This is a distinct improvement though I have to resist my tendency to do too much too soon.

I'm reading The Knee Crisis Handbook and coming away feeling guilty that I didn't do more for my health preventatively. This is probably not a valid feeling (most guilt isn't) as I have taken steps to improve my knee health in the past years. The guilt arises from my feeling that if I only control all aspects of my life consistently and perfectly, I will never age and will have maximum success in all my endeavours.

This hyper-control theory doesn't hold up to much scrutiny so don't bother.

I see a orthopaedic specialist some time in the next 10 days and I am trying to arm myself with as much knowledge as possible before then. Still, this has been a humbling experience and it's making my moods a bit swingy.

Living across the road from my friends is turning out to be as wonderful as hoped. appelle and I have been sitting out on the front porch of an evening and reordering the universe in our own image. You may wish to join us.

But my swingy mood was definitely in evidence last night when Appelle and I were chatting and snowmit and spizzy came home. I got really bizarrely manic during the ensuing conversation, embarrassing the 'Mit with my volume and repeatedly cutting off Spizzy when he would speak. I apologize.

I'm having not-coffee later with rfmcdpei and giving him a copy of the Bowie compilation I put together for nyahnyahnyah. Hey, 'Sha! Where are you? I miss you.

Ramble, ramble.

Musical Faggery

First, Fucking Chris Columbus is directing the movie or Rent? This may be sad. At least it's not fucking Alan Parker. Most of the original cast is in the movie which isn't a bad sign, but I fear they will approach the material almost too reverently. Rent needs to be rough around the edges and I think this will be all high-gloss.

Second, I've been listening to the original Broadway soundtrack of Wicked. I approached it with great prejudice because I think that Gregory Maguire's novel on which it is based is insightful, subtle, mysterious and contradictory -- all the things you are unlikely to find in a Broadway musical, especially a contemporary one. Unlike most original cast recordings, there is no synopsis included to give context to the songs. This seems to have been a "no spoilers" decision by the creators.

Luckily the Internet abhors a vacuum, so I was able to get a clue. The smartest idea the creators had was to basically jetison the entire novel and find a slightly different story to tell with similar themes. And really, it could have worked if they weren't trying to put it on Broadway in a way that would also please the kiddies and the tourists from the actual Kansas.

The book is simultaneously brutal, sad and wryly funny. It is about conviction and disillusionment. The musical blows up the fascism of the Wizard's reign into something less sinister and more like a propoganda cartoon. The complex relationship between Glinda and Elphaba (the eventual Wicked Witch of the West) is transformed into what the New York Times noted was something like the best friends in Beaches.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH: In fact, the most heinous crime of the script is taking away the inevitable death of the Witch which, we know from the books and the movie, is a given. But, no! Elphaba is granted an out, a graceful retirement from radical politics and a reunion with the man she loves. In the book, he is killed by the Wizard's secret police and that is the event that forever kills her career as a revolutionary and sends her first into madness and then into solitary cynicism.

Stephen Schwartz's score is vitually indistinguishable from the pap he wrote for Pippin 35 years ago. Or for Godspell, for that matter and it's all a terrible shame. I long for a place where this play could have actually been created properly. It would be a dark and sliding work whose score would have been complex and layered. The creators would not have been afraid of creating a flawed character of the Witch, grappling with her inability to express her love and eternally, dangerously furious at her own impotence.

Despite it all, the Broadway boy in me thrilled to Edina Menzel's voice as Elphaba, especially on the song Defying Gravity. In that scratchy chant and that wild whoop was a momentary glimpse of the Elphaba I loved in the novel.