No sex, please! Just books.

Today Mom and I went to the community theater to see "No Sex, please. I'm British!" This was a fun mom-daughter day. (We also had lunch - fun!)

Anyway, it was the Q-tip crowd so when the lead actress was pretty quiet at the beginning and not projecting very well, several people around us started muttering (or talking right out loud), "She needs to be louder!" or "I can't hear her!" or "What did she say?" ugh.

The play was fun though and it was really nice to spend the afternoon with Mom. We need to do that more often.

After I got home, I headed south to Kari's for our first night of book club. She had put out a request on Facebook if anyone was interested and while she initially intended it for the youth in her church, she had half a dozen of us adult types who wanted to read too.

So we're reading "Red Letter Revolution". It's an interesting read by Shane Claibourne and Tony Campolo. It'll will truly engage our minds on this one, and it's really nice to have some interaction with adults who aren't talking about work all the time. It'll be fun for the rest of the spring.

West Side Story

This is becoming a habit, but I'm not complaining. Kari and I went to West Side Story tonight. It was playing at the Pavilion and we both wanted to see it. She gets season tickets so she invited me along.

This one is a bit of the opposite from Les Miz. I think I actually prefer the movie version of this one. The acting was good, but the staging and choreography was weird. There were times it I wondered if the choreographer was getting paid by the step, and at other times if she/he had just run out of ideas because the actors just stood there.

Example of the latter - During "Something's comin'", the actor playing Tony stood at the front of the stage, a single spotlight on him and just stood there singing. Don't get me wrong, he sang well, but if I was Tony and I was anticipating something exciting happening, I might be doing more than just standing still. But that's just me.

Lighting was okay, but a couple times it was abrasive. At the end of the song I just mentioned, they had wheeled in the "balcony" with Maria standing on it. All of a sudden the spot was BAM! on her and it was so striking that it didn't feel right. Had they eased into it, it would have made more sense.

The other thing I didn't quite understand, and maybe it was just a movie thing or lack of understanding on my part (both theatrically as well as the language barrier) - often the Latinos would slip into Spanish - in the middle of a song or dialogue for several lines, leaving me, the listener, to piecemeal what was being said.

Other than all that, it was a pretty good play, just not my favorite.

Les Miz!

Today was a big day for me. I got to see Les Miserables again - this time on the big screen. The movie came out in December, but M had no interest in going ("It's all singing, isn't it?"), so when Kari and I made plans to get together, we decided this would be an ideal event (since her husband didn't want to go either).

I'm so glad we did. Even if the stage show will always be superior, the movie was pretty good. I was impressed with the editing - especially during "I dreamed a dream" where basically the camera was just on Anne Hathaway the entire time. Up close, tight shot, and on the big screen, you could just feel the emotion running through her. I was bawling like a baby - and I couldn't even chalk it up to hormones (though I'm sure that helped).

I still think I prefer it on stage, mostly because the acting and set is so powerful, but this was good. And it was nice to have a girl's day even if it was only in the theater, snacking on popcorn and sipping a slushy. :)