Mapping out the sky

With the arrival of autumn, Victoria's limited but beautiful fall palette has appeared, along with cultural opportunities.

Last Saturday, we accompanied one of elder daughter's godmothers for a "live-streaming" (not live at all, but a specially filmed stage performance) of the Broadway musical version of An American in Paris at the Silver City Tillicum, courtesy of Cineplex. I really wish these streamed plays and ballets were better attended; they're a remarkable opportunity.

As a former subscriber to Broadway Across Canada, I've partaken of a number of movie-to-musical offerings, mostly of films I'd never cared that much for in the first place. Dirty Dancing? Meh. Flash Dance? Bleurgh.

As a result, I was expecting a pretty faithful rendering of the 1951 film, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant.

Instead, we got a rather dark interpretation, showing a version of events set in a recently post-war Paris: disablement, displacement, retribution.

Also, rather more Gershwin tunes than were featured in the frothy, light-hearted film, where the darkest it got was Gene Kelly's character worried, in typical 1950s fashion, about being beholden to his older, more cynical, and, most critically, female, mentor. The male lead in the "live-stream", we saw, incidentally, was not the actor featured in the above trailer.

We were seeing the London West End production, and the singing was fabulous, and the dancing - wow. Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, whose CV in the ballet world is downright intimidating.

There was a high standard of acting, including a fine turn by Jane Asher, who, although a well-known and successful actor in Britain, will probably go down in history as the girl Paul McCartney never got around to marrying.

Seeing as WNET appears to have had a hand in the filming of this production, I expect it to show up on PBS soon.

On Sunday, we began our stint as subscribers to the Victoria Symphony. It turns out that a new Principal Pops conductor has taken over. His name is Sean O'Loughlin, and, of course he seems wildly qualified. Having been subscribers to the NAC Pops for a chunk of our time in Hades, we have grown to appreciate how a conductor can attract impressive guest artists. This certainly seemed to be the case for a concert celebrating Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on Broadway (with Stephen Schwartz and Richard Rogers getting dragged in for good measure). We had a soprano named Lara Ciekiewicz, who is certainly Canadian-trained, and David Curry, who has connections to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and Le Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

I was enjoying them well enough until Curry stepped forward to sing "Finishing the Hat" which is probably my favourite song from what is probably my favourite Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George. (Completely coincidentally, I'm reading Sondheim's critique of his own pre-1980s works in a book called Finishing the Hat. Sadly, Sunday in the Park with George isn't included, being a 1980s musical.)

Anyway, Curry, who played the lead role in a Paris production, actually made my jaw drop. He was that good. I don't have a video of his rendition, but there's this rather fuzzy clip from the original Broadway production, starring a very young Mandy Pantinkin as French pointillist George Seurat:

After the intermission, they were going to do, naturally, numbers from West Side Story. And Curry got me again. It turns out that he's played Tony in a number of productions, and his control was stunning. (The songs from West Side Story are deceptive. Everyone knows them, but they are fiendishly difficult to sing.)

This is from about ten years ago, when he was considerably younger. As were we all.

At the close of the concert, we waiting to file up the aisles. Since we're fans of the front rows, this was taking some time, and suddenly Mr. Curry himself emerged, about to make a bee-line to greet the wife and young daughters of the conductor. I quickly grabbed the opportunity to tell him that "Finishing the Hat" is a particular favourite of mine and that I'd particularly enjoyed his performance. He thanked me courteously and I moved along promptly.

The Resident Fan Boy heard a lady tell David Curry that she hadn't realized how tall he was. He was undoubtedly gracious to her, as well.