He's a Diva!

Well, there's a lot of news to report, but the biggest of all, as I'm sure you've heard by now is Mandy Patinkin. It's taken me a while to figure out my feelings about it, hence the somewhat tardy report. Musically it was wonderful. His voice is still in fine form, and he did a great selection of songs, about 2/3 from Sondheim and 1/3 from other sources. There were some self-indulgent moments, such as unnecessary Yiddish versions of White Christmas, Take Me Out To The Ballgame, and Maria, a very bizarre A Tisket A Tasket, I Lost My Yellow Basket, his crazy stylized movements, and at the very end, a monologue from Princess Bride, one of the worst movies ever. However, the real drama came in about the first 10 minutes. After taking the stage with his pianist and sole accompanist, and opening with Children and Art and Sunday, Mandy began a dialogue and started to segue into a recognition of earth hour, which started right at the beginning of the concert. Now, I don't know if he thought he was performing in Carnegie Hall or Symphony Center or what, but the Chicago Theatre (which is looking a bit dilapidated these days, dirty seats, dirty proscenium, threadbare carpeting) allows drinks in the theatre and provides service to the VIP ticket holders in the first few rows. Well, the waitress came in after the opening numbers and started distributing the drinks to the people who had ordered them, and Mandy had a drag-queen sized hissy fit. At first it seemed like he was joking, but as he kept tearing into the waitress, it just got uncomfortable. She, unlike Mandy, remained professional and finished handing out her drinks, collected her money, all the while with Mandy making shitty comments to her, and then walked out without making any sort of scene. While it was a questionable decision on the part of the theatre, a true artist would have gone on with the show and let the woman do her job. It was very disappointing and took quite a while for Mandy to get the momentum back. The audience around us was very disconcerted and took a few songs for the whispered chattering to stop, although they may have been discombobulated by the overall bizarness of the night, with his stage design and stage presentation. To start with, the staging was rather odd, although I gather it's standard for him. It was him and a piano, performing on a bare, stripped down stage, reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boy's stage design for their 2002 Release tour. He came out, obviously having listened to his own instructions, dressed fairly casually in black slacks and a grey henley, and with a Madonna-style headset, although it was wired, giving him a fairly short leash, adding to the overall bizarness of his presentation. He started most of his songs standing next to the piano, hands glued to his thighs Jerry Espenson-style, and about halfway through each song started doing Mummenschanz-style movements. It was the craziest thing to watch, but his voice was so good that he pulled it off. Having just a piano as his accompaniment also helped keep the histrionic level at tolerable, I gather from some of his reviews that when he's with an orchestra it can get pretty schmaltzy. Highlights included great renditions of On The Atchison, Topeka, & the Santa Fe, Sorry-Grateful, In Sally's Eyes, Franklin Shepherd Inc., a blistering Brother Can You Spare A Dime, and a vaudeville-style When Movies Were Movies, and a terrific ending of the main set with Being Alive, among so many others. Interestingly though, other than the songs from Sunday in the Park with George (the opening numbers as well as Finishing The Hat later on), he didn't do anything from any of the shows he's been in. I can understand having solidarity with Patti and not doing anything from Evita, but I would have thought he would have worked something in from Falsettos or The Secret Garden. Still, it ended up being a great night. If only he had been a little more professional, it could have been a perfect night.

Now, backtracking a few days, I have wireless internet! As usual with Comcast though, nothing went smoothly. They gave us a window of 8-noon, and of course showed up at 11:50 when I had a 1:30 appointment elsewhere. We had told them we would provide our own modem and router, but when I showed the guy what we had, he said that his order showed that they were providing the equipment and since they have to program in the serial number and MAC address of the equipment prior to connection (to prevent service theft, which I can understand), he had to complete the installation with his equipment. We could call later and have them make another trip to uninstall their equipment and install ours (all for an additional fee, plus a rental fee for the time we use their equipment). So, I've got about $150 of wireless networking equipment that's now useless. However, the network is set up, and is FAST, and I kind of don't want to mess with it now that I've got the Tivo connected and all our computers are set up to automatically connect. We'll take a look at the bill and see how we feel about paying a rental fee every month. We already opened the cable modem and router boxes so they can't be returned, but we can save them for our next place or I can try to sell them with my old laptop. It is so nice to not have to manually connect the Tivo to the phone line every Saturday afternoon now. I also got my monthly 30 downloads from emusic in about 10 minutes, as opposed to 6 hours with my cell phone modem. I finished Lauren Kennedy's album (terrific), got Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova's album, which is basically the same as the Once soundtrack, got the cast recording of Gone Missing (interesting, for being only 20 minutes it's strange how it can still kind of fizzle out by the end, but it starts very strong), and started on David Yazbek's Crazy Monkey Man. Next month I'll finish that and get Bea Arthur on Broadway for my companion's birthday (I'm sure I've mentioned his Golden Girls fetish before somewhere on here). Then on Saturday my project was due for class, and it took all of 90 seconds from the time I flipped on the wireless antenna switch until I got to the screen that said Assignment Submitted. So nice.

Speaking of music, there's going to be a lot more soon. While there's no offical word on Gypsy yet (and with the reception it's getting it'll only be a matter of time), it was announced this week that In The Heights, A Catered Affair, South Pacific and The Adding Machine will all be getting cast albums, with a good probability of Glory Days getting one as well. This is going to be a very interesting Tony Awards, and it looks like all the shows (with the exception of Adding Machine which is Off-Bway) are trying to capitalize on that by releasing within 1-2 weeks of the ceremony, and Adding Machine is trying to piggyback on that and release in that time frame as well. One more reason to look forward to summer.

This weekend it's Drowsy Chaperone, hopefully next weekend will be Nine, and then on the 25th it's Sweeney, with hopefully a trip to NY in early June, maybe coinciding with the Tony Awards. Finally, it's show seeing season again!