One look at this, and you’ll say goodbye to your appetite! Wait, I’m sure that’s not what they’re going for…
(On another level, the reflected palm trees fit in with the travel theme.)
Category: Life
Watching Evita: Deja Vu
Last night we went out to see Evita at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. It was a good production, but it was a slightly odd experience for me because it was based on the original staging by Hal Prince. Back in college, I was in a production of the show at school…and our director also based it on the original staging. Visually, the show was almost exactly what we would have done if we’d had the budget. (And a full orchestra, and more experienced actors, and so on.) They did make different choices in characterization at points—Eva was harder, Che was more comedic, etc.—but there was a definite deja vu element. (Katie will get her turn at deja vu next week when we see Carmina Burana.)
It also got me thinking about the structure of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows . His early works, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Cats and tend to be much more presentational. There’s lots of breaking the fourth wall, large chunks of Evita are symbolic (and the second half of act 2 is very disjointed), and many of them actually have narrators (Judas, Che, or just “The Narrator” in Joseph). But by the time you get to The Phantom of the Opera, the structure is entirely narrative. I’m not sure how much of that is Lloyd Webber changing his style and how much of it is moving to a new lyricist (Tim Rice worked on Joseph, Superstar and Evita). I don’t know Starlight Express very well, but what I’ve heard seems to fit more with Phantom, Sunset Boulevard, and Whistle Down the Wind.
Looking over at that site, I’ve discovered three more ALW shows I didn’t even know about. It’s not surprising when I think about it, though. I have been out of the musical theater loop for a few years. I mean, the big exciting musical event for me this year? The film adaptation of Rent that opens next month. I’m really looking forward to that, and the show is almost 10 years old!
Unconventional Naming
I was recently reminded that Kevin Smith’s daughter is named Harley Quinn Smith. At the time I thought it was crazy (though really, who am I to talk about people naming their kids after fictional characters?), but compared to Nicholas Cage naming his son Kal-El, it seems positively ordinary.
Web worm in MySpace
Worms of the future: someone on MySpace *ptui!* came up with an actual JavaScript worm using cross-site scripting exploits and XMLHTTPRequest. In 24 hours, the worm had forced 1 million users to add him to their friends lists.
Personally, MySpace bugs the heck out of me because it seems to have a culture that encourages embedding images from other sites. 18% of hits to hyperborea.org from other websites are from myspace. Admittedly that’s inflated by the fact that attempts to embed images from my Flash site redirect to the actual articles, so it’s probably more like 10%, but it’s still insane. Earlier this week I started blocking hits from MySpace to images posted on this blog, and I plan to do the same with the Flash images over the weekend. You like my photos? Great, link to my actual site! You like the scan I have of some movie logo? Great, copy it and upload it to your own site!
Hawaii: First and Last Views
Here’s our first view of the island of Hawai‘i, as our plane approached on Sunday morning, April 3. Snow-capped Mauna Kea is rising out of the clouds, with Mauna Loa behind it.
A week later, we spent Sunday evening waiting for our flight out of Kona Airport. (After a disastrous experience at LAX in which we arrived 2 hours ahead and got to the gate with maybe 15 minutes to spare, we showed up early for the flight home. But Kona’s much smaller and better organized, so it took us maybe 15 minutes to check in. There wasn’t even a line to go through security!)
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on our Hawaiian vacation. I’m sorry it took so long to finish it, but hey, I managed (just barely) to beat the 6-month marker!
Hidden Mountain
There was one morning in Hawai‘i that the clouds in Kona cleared and we could actually see something of Hualalai, the volcano that makes up the western side of the island and on whose slopes we were staying. Here’s the view from our hotel room balcony.
Usually it looked more like this:
Note: Our stay in Kona was April 4-10, 2005
South Coast and Black Sand
Flashback to April and Hawaii. On the day we drove to Kilauea we stopped at various places along the way. And since it’s a nearly-100-mile drive from Kailua, there was a lot to see.
We never made it down to South Point (the southernmost tip of the island), partly because of time and partly because—believe it or not—our car rental contract forbid us to drive on the 12-mile road out to the point! Supposedly it’s poorly maintained—or it used to be, and the policy hasn’t kept up—and they don’t want the wear and tear on cars that aren’t designed for it. As I recall, rental trucks and SUVs don’t have the restriction. This was the closest we ever came to it, and you can only barely see it way off in the distance.
If you look at the end of the spray near the visible point, then go straight up toward the horizon, you’ll notice that the sky-sea line dips downward slightly and there’s a faint darker patch of sky. As far as we could tell, that’s the promontory heading out toward South Point. Even then, we weren’t quite sure. Update: It’s not. I checked the map when I finally uploaded these images to Flickr, and the highway doesn’t get close to the ocean on the west side. It’s a viewpoint near Haleokane, east of Naalehu and east of the turnoff to South Point Road. We’d already passed it!