Tag Archives: Theater

Fox Lion Is King

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Fox Lion

Last Saturday, Anne and I went to the Fabulous Fox Theater to see the touring Broadway show, ‘The Lion King’. The Fox on north Grand is the heart of the Saint Louis theater district. This theater originally opened in 1929. It is one of five large movie palaces that the Fox Film Corporation built in the 1920s. The Fox closed in the late seventies and reopened in 1982 after extensive renovations. According to Wiki:

The Fox was designed by an architect specializing in theaters, C. Howard Crane, in an eclectic blend of Asian decorative motifs sometimes called Siamese Byzantine. The interior is the architectural twin of another Fox Theatre built in Detroit in 1928. Reporters in 1929 described the Fox Theatres in St. Louis and Detroit as “awe-inspiringly fashioned after Hindoo [sic] Mosques of Old India, bewildering in their richness and dazzling in their appointments … striking a note that reverberates around the architectural and theatrical worlds.” William Fox nicknamed the style the “Eve Leo Style” in tribute to his wife, who decorated the interior with furnishings, paintings and sculpture she had bought on her trips overseas.

The Fabulous Fox Theater itself is half the show on any performance that occurs there. Its architecture is a bizarre cacophony of clashing cultural styles and motifs. Somehow though the Fox pulls off of this brazen concoction.

Hakuna Matata

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Beachy Ground Squirrel at Lovers Point

It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

Anne and I went to see ‘The Lion King’, the musical, at the Fox Saturday night. Saturday morning, she expressed the hope that the musical’s circle of life would also include the decomposers, but as this is a Disney production, I don’t think that will happen. Too bad.

I would have loved to have used a photo from the musical, but none had been made available for my legal use. Disney is such a greedy company, IMHO. So, substituting for a lion king photo, I give you one of Monterey’s fat and not-so-little Beachy Ground Squirrels. 

This particular specimen was photographed at Lovers Point, so named because legend has it that a pair of ill-fated lovers leapt to their deaths there. These squirrels grow big and fat on tourist treats. They can get as big as a ground-hog. They have no fear of humans and can act aggressively if food is about. I know. That makes them the lion kings of the beach.

This is the second time that we’ve seen this musical. The costumes are fantastic. So is the dance. So may photo-ops, so little legal standing. The plot is lifted from the cartoon. The score is embellished. While initially reticent about attending a show on the last holiday weekend of the summer, what with the advent of Isaac, this show will likely be the highlight of our weekend.

Interlude

Now having actually seen the musical again, I hold a somewhat more favorable opinion about it. The costumes and the puppetry are really fantastic. The music is better than I remembered, but the lyrics are not really any better than the cartoon. Likewise the plot. Some bonus points should be awarded for going from a cartoon to a staged musical. One is left to wonder if the original cartoon had been better, might not the subsequent musical too?

Anne loved the show as did the rest of the audience. So, just chalk me up as a crabby old man. I did manage to snap some promising photos of the fabulous Fox Theater.

Muny Night – “Chicago”

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Pagoda Circle at Night

Monday night was Muny night. Anne and I went to see the musical, “Chicago”. We had been going to the Muny on Monday nights for over twenty-five years, but a couple of years ago we let our season tickets lapse. In all of those years, we never ate dinner at the Muny’s Culver Pavilion. Last night, we met our bicycling buddies, Edie and Rob, there for dinner. The food was good and the company was excellent. When she was younger, Edie had been a Muny dancer and palled around with the likes of Eddie Albert and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The Muny use to bring in named headliners for each of their shows, but discontinued this practice under the administration of the previous program director. Money that was once spent on their salaries was redirected to boost production values and buy hotter titles. Still it must have been a heady experience to dance with some of the many luminaries that once graced the Muny’s stage.

Speaking of better production values, new this year is a billboard sized LED screen. I didn’t think that it lent much to the evening’s performance, but it’s still new, so give it some more time. They can always start playing the guessing under which cap is the ball hidden game. The Muny already starts with the National Anthem, which invariably ends with someone yelling “Play ball!”

“Chicago” is a musical set in Prohibition-era Chicago. The story is a satire on corruption in the criminal justice system and the concept of the “celebrity criminal”. The original Broadway production opened 1975. The 1996 Broadway revival holds the record for the longest-running musical revival on Broadway and is still playing. The Muny had to get special permission to put on this show.

There was a bit of a floor show put on in the seats directly in front of us. A young couple was busy necking throughout the performance. The fact that his or her mother (still not sure which) was sitting in the row in front of them, didn’t seem to faze them at all, but neither did the hundreds of eyes behind them. Ah, young lust, I mean love. I only mention this because their necking made it difficult to see around them. Thankfully, the ‘production values’ of the musical’s second act distracted the male member from his intended. By ‘production values’, I mean sex. The second act’s production numbers were particularly amped up over the first act. Ah, young love, I mean lust. 😳

Toreador, don’t spit on the floor

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Dave In Yosemite, Totally Organic, Yet Very Linear

Toreador, don’t spit on the floor. Please use the cuspidor. That’s what it’s a for.

Tonight is a date night. Anne and I are going to the opera. The Saint Louis Opera Theater is performing ‘Carmen’, Georges Bizet’s classic opera about love and betrayal. It is one of Anne’s favorites and tonight’s performance is a belated birthday present for her. In addition to the opera, we are going out to dinner at the Big Sky Cafe. It should be a fun evening and fortified with coffee at dinner, I plan on staying awake through the entire show. Otherwise, our seats become a very expensive place to take a nap. The following is Wiki’s synopsis of the plot:

The opera, written in the genre of opéra comique with musical numbers separated by dialogue, tells the story of the downfall of Don José, a naive soldier who is seduced by the wiles of the fiery gypsy Carmen. José abandons his childhood sweetheart and deserts from his military duties, yet loses Carmen’s love to the glamorous toreador Escamillo after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

Anne took the day off from working in the bathroom and did what all great home improvers love to do, she went shopping. She didn’t want to tire herself out and then consequently fall asleep during the opera. Besides going to the hardware store and buying things is the reward for doing home improvement, or should I say the pre-ward, since it invariably occurs before the work is done.

Dave is coming into town tonight. He and Kennard have concert tickets tonight for “Flogging Molly”, at the Pageant. This band has been a favorite of theirs since high school.

Anne got a wrong number call for David today. At least we think that it was a wrong number. The caller asked if our David was the one that wrote a book. Anne said that she didn’t think so. I know of another David that shares our David’s name that is a war correspondent. He recently made the news by reporting what an American general had told him in an interview. He reported that American special forces are infiltrating North Korea. Said general quickly denied saying this, but was just as quickly relieved.

Dave is pictured above in Yosemite, on our family vacation visit there, last month. While in the park we stayed in a ‘tent cabin’ at the Curry Village campground. These are basically glorified tents, with wooden floors and cots. While there, we were constantly warned about bringing food or cosmetics into the tent at night, because of the bears. We had a steel bear box just outside the tent. On our last night there our other son, Dan, heard and felt a bump in the middle of the night. He said that it shook the tent. The rest of us were asleep. Since, he heard no voices, it could have been another camper stumbling home in the dark, but I prefer to believe that it was a bear. The tents were narrowly spaced apart.

Othello

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I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. – Othello

On Saturday afternoon, NPR was featuring a dark streak of human nature in its programming. There were segments with police interviews of the Green River Killer, the German Jewish chemist that developed the Nazi death chamber chemical Zyklon that in its B form was used to exterminate the Jews and a survey that concluded that +80% of the human race has detailed fantasies about murdering another person. I mention this as preamble to Saturday night’s theater performance of Othello.

The ‘Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice’ is a play by William Shakespeare. It is this year’s selection at the Saint Louis Shakespeare Festival. Saturday night, Joanie, Anne and I went to go see the performance in Forest Park. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant evening for outdoor entertainment, at least not here in Saint Louis. Did I mention the price of admission? It is free. We brought a picnic supper to entertain ourselves until the show started. In addition to our own refreshments, there were numerous other divertissements. From Juggling Jack to the Green Show, there was more to see then time permitted. The play itself was excellent, as the Saint Louis Shakespeare Festival’s productions always are. I’m glad we went on Saturday, because it was a late night.

Comedy of Errors

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Dandelion

Friday night, Anne and I went to see the Rep’s final production of the season. “The Comedy of Errors” started off as usual Shakespeare fare. There is a setting shift from the 16th century Aegean to the environs of New Orleans, or rather “Nawlins”, but this is not unusual. Modern Shakespeare productions update The Bard this way, all of the time. The time is Mardi Gras, in 1936. In the first act, a few local flourishes sneak-in to provide Cajun acculturation, but his written words are otherwise unadulterated. Intermission, the second act begins and then all hell breaks loose.

“Errors” is supposed to be a farce. It comes equipped with two sets of identical twins. The opportunity for mistaken identity comedy is doubled, doubling our pleasure. The audience is treated to Nawlins music, from a jazz funeral march, to a Gospel revival of “The Saints Come Marching In”. Dr. John’s “Going Back to New Orleans”, and “House of the Rising Sun” are also featured. Who knew that “House” was so funny? In one comic medley, both Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski are channeled, along with Janis Joplin, “Busted flat in New Orleans, …”, Elvis, “You’ll never know, What heaven means, Until you’ve been down to New Orleans”, and many other Nawlins tropes. By the time the play is done we’ve seen just about every Southern theatrical cliché and laughed at them. The show is filled with “Amazing Grace”.

The Rep will go dark now, until next season. As is customary, Steven Woolf, Artistic Director for The Rep, comes out before the last show and announces the next season’s productions. He always closes this speech with an invocation to season subscribers, “If you did not bring your subscription form, you know that we have the duplicate.” We know. We had already re-upped by then.