BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED

Alan Alda's advice to a young actor: "If you can see yourself doing anything else, do it"--Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened

Saturday night I saw the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at the Kingsway. (Haven't been there since that whaling movie about a year ago.) It was complicated but moderately entertaining.  Those scenes where a whole building gets destroyed in a wizard battle then restored by further wizardry strike me as a cheat!

Yesterday I saw Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened at the Bloor, with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It's a documentary about Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince's 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, with three characters shown in reverse chronological order, going from middle-aged cynicism back to youthful ambition. (I was lucky to see the cinemacast of the award-winning London revival a year or two ago.)

For the original production Prince cast only actors under 25, in the hope of capturing youthful essence, and had them wearing T-shirts with labels like "Best pal" and "Wealthy backer" and "Fan." (I have a feeling he was trying to be original for the sake of originality...)  But critics were largely unimpressed and the original production closed after two weeks, though the show got a cult following through revivals. (Twenty years afterward the cast reunited to perform the songs in a benefit concert.) 

The documentary interviews the performers three decades later and considers how the experience changed their lives.  One of them went on to become a theatre director, and directed this film; another, Jason Alexander, became a TV star on Seinfeld. (Fifteen or twenty actors producing one star:  that gives you an idea of the heavy odds in the profession these people devote their whole beings to!) Quite interesting, especially for Sondheim fans.

I noticed that in Trump's inaugural speech, in a dig at Obama, he complained about leaders who were "all talk and no action." That reminded me of Aesop's fable about the frogs who wanted a king, so Zeus sent them an inert log.  The frogs decided they deserved better than that, so Zeus sent them a serpent who ate them all!

The other day I was translating Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Portuguese (because, why not?). Now that's a speech!