FOLLIES

Last night I went to the Event Screen cinemacast of London's National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.  They showed an interview with Sondheim where he said that in early drafts the show had a great start with introductory scenes, but started dragging when the plot came in.  So in later drafts they got rid of the plot!

About halfway through the show they got sound problems from the London end.  The accompaniment was coming through fine, but you could hardly hear the singing!  During the number "Hey, Mr. Producer" people in the audience started singing the song themselves! (They must have known the score well.)

I could have stayed until they sorted it out but I had a bit of a headache and left early.  It didn't help that the place was packed and I could only find a seat in the front rows near the screen.

John Snow and I were going to have lunch today, but he sent an email delaying it a week.  Of course, I only got around to reading the email after going there and waiting half an hour! (My email backlog is bigger than ever...) On top of that, the St. Clair street car had a derailment and they replaced it with shuttle buses.  The electronic board said the next bus was coming in nine minutes, but nine minutes turned into another half hour so I went home by subway.

But when I got home I was in a good mood again, for it turned out that that book of Canadian short stories had arrived in time for Sunday's Reading Out Loud Meetup. (I was worried about that.)

I finished my Portuguese translation of The Wizard of Oz tonight. (Moving ending!) And I had a dream about a TV show where space aliens took over a supermarket and sent super-robots to catch people who stole food!