RUSALKA

"All sacrifice is useless"--Rusalka

At last week's acting class I did things like a scene from the movie Man in the Moon, where Andy Kaufman brings his friends together early in the morning and tells them he has cancer. (He doesn't.) This week's class I missed, because I preferred to see a Met opera in its digital screening at the Yonge & Eglinton, a new location for me.  I have four others coming up, all in successive months.

I saw Dvorak's Rusalka, with Renee Fleming in the title role. (I saw it before on a DVD of a Czech TV production, which I think was shorter.) It's most famous number is "Song to the Moon," which Tetyana sang at the gala concert and Carrie Parks is singing at this Monday's choir concert.  No doubt it'll be going through my head for a while, like the "Women, Women" number from The Merry Widow that the men sang in the gala concert.

Rusalka is a reworking of "The Little Mermaid": it's the one where a lake nymph falls in love with a human prince and becomes human to be with him, but he forsakes her, leaving her doomed to be eternally undead.  It's a pretty sad story--the prince sees the error of his ways too late and abandons his own life--but has some quirky light touches. (In Czech culture they manage to give light touches to tragedies.) The forest set was phenomenal:  the backdrop resembled a classical painting.

It occurred to me that the prince in Rusalka was a bit like the husband in the Danish show Borgen, who left his wife for another woman then ended up dumping the second woman too.  Some men just don't know what they want (until it's too late!).

P.S.:  After publishing this post I had to edit it right away, because its heading was RASULKA!