The Lydster, Part 119: The Lion King

The Lion King: March 2, at 12:15 pm, at First Presbyterian, 362 State Street, Albany, NY.

LionKing_Poster
lionking.picThis is what The Daughter will be doing this weekend, playing the young Nala in The Lion King. So far, the only Christian adaptation I’ve seen is the song He Lives In You will be God Lives In You. There are Equity (professional) actors playing Scar and another role.

It would seem unseemly, I suppose, for me to say that my daughter is the best dancer of the kids performing. There was a sample of the production at church on February 16. Now, if a half dozen people, unsolicited, tell The Wife and/or me that The Daughter was great in that dance number, perhaps the best in the troupe, we shan’t become TOO proud, even though we might agree. Though she’s no longer taking ballet, I think the experience has served her well.

She has worked very hard learning her dialogue and the songs as well. If you’re in Albany on March 2, stop on by.

N is for Nutcracker

The NY Philharmonic plays a section from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker followed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing the Ellington/Strayhorn arrangement of the same section.

You are almost certainly familiar with the music from The Nutcracker, a two-act ballet, with “a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It was given its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on Sunday, 18 December 1892… Although the original production was not a success, the twenty-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was.” Jaquandor shared a link to all the music.

The Nutcracker Suite is also “an album by American pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington recorded… in 1960 featuring jazz interpretations of ‘The Nutcracker’ by Tchaikovsky, arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.”

Overture
Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes)
Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)
Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy)
Entr’acte
The Volga Vouty (Russian Dance)
Chinoiserie (Chinese Dance)
Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)
Arabesque Cookie (Arabian Dance)

I discovered on YouTube a “Live From Lincoln Center special called ‘Nutcracker Swing’ featuring both the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis that originally aired on PBS in December 2001.” The compiler said: “As far as I know this special never aired again, nor has it ever been made available to purchase anywhere…The way it works is that the NY Philharmonic plays a section from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker followed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing the Ellington/Strayhorn arrangement of the same section.

“The special starts with four sections from Wynton Marsalis’ “All Rise,” [parts 2-5], introduced here by Leonard Slatkin [part 1].

There are several other iterations of The Nutcracker, but I’ll deal with just one more. Nutrocker, a rock version of The Nutcracker March, was recorded by B. Bumble & The Stingers, released in February 1962, and went to # 23 in the US and # 1 in the UK. Emerson Lake and Palmer performed it live about a decade later.

These variations show how rich the original music is.

Of course, “the complete Nutcracker has enjoyed enormous popularity since the late 1960s and is now performed by countless ballet companies, primarily during the Christmas season, especially in the U.S.” In the Albany, NY area alone, there were at least six different companies performing it in December 2012. On December 16, I watched the Albany Berkshire Ballet performance at both 2:30 (so my daughter could see it) and 6:30 (the performance my daughter was in, as an angel). THAT was a lot of Nutcracker for one day!
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American Ballet Theatre’s Paloma Herrera in the Nutcracker with Gennadi Saveliev

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

The June swoon

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals.


This has been the busiest June I can remember. I was in charge of the Friends of the Albany Public Library annual meeting, which involved arranging for the speaker, planning a dinner for 20, and getting a plaque made, the latter two of which had more complications than I need to go into here. But it ultimately went off successfully. The best part is that I discovered an old-fashioned drink called a sidecar; I loved it!

Our church is in covenant with one of the local schools, and one Saturday, that meant putting together a playground, which entailed, among other things, clearing a field of weeds and a tremendous amount of trash. Here’s a brief news story.

I attended a comic book show. Went to at least three parties, with another two this upcoming weekend. I’m not even counting visits to the dentist and eye doctor.

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals. The first was at her public school, where she was a new recruit in something called Step. A couple of weeks later, her ballet school was having its annual recital. That school’s founder is one Madeline Cantarella Culpo. One of her grandsons is Michael Culpo, a Division I basketball player, while one of her granddaughters is the new Miss USA, Olivia Culpo; she is understandably proud.
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Why I am getting so much spam on this site, over 300 per day? The filter catches it, but it’s still tedious to remove. And most of it is of the bad spam variety, from companies selling electronic cigarettes, payday loans, or “pantyhose covered female foot fetish,” filled with suspicious links and unreadable text. Whereas GOOD spam is: “Helpful info. Lucky me I discovered your website by chance, and I am shocked why this accident didn’t happen earlier! I bookmarked it.” I know it’s a lie, but at least it’s pleasing to the eye.

The Lydster, Part 77: Dancing Queen

Lydia is the house choreographer.


As I may have mentioned, Lydia has been taking ballet lessons once a week since October 2009. It was almost inevitable, since, in the year or two before that, she would move around the room so gracefully and deliberately that people kept asking, “Is she taking dance lessons?”

This was NOT anything that we pushed her into doing, but rather something she asked to do a few times before we relented. While I’m not anticipating her become a prima ballerina, it has instilled in her a sense of confidence she had been lacking.

It has also made Angelina Ballerina on PBS her favorite TV program.

Her school did a recital in June – this was Lydia’s costume – and she said she was nervous, though she didn’t appear to be so.

Now, she is the choreographer at home; not only does she design the moves, but she also selects the music, quite well, I think. Her mother has become her primary dance partner, with her stuffed animals and me as her captive audience.

Jingle Award: The E-Ticket

I recognize the library as the remedy to all of life’s problems.


Jingle gave me an award, and the rules of the award say – they ALWAYS say – you’re supposed to tell seven things about yourself. Well, OK, but I’m going to cheat and tell a story, with the items thus revealed.

The Wife, at my encouragement, went to see Bill T. Jones at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center a week ago, on Thursday night while I stayed home with the daughter.

1. I appreciate dance, but don’t go out of my way to see it.

I heard about this particular dance about Abraham Lincoln from watching Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

2. I miss watching Bill Moyers.

My wife went online to order the tickets on Wednesday, but you’re supposed to print your ticket or tickets, which basically is a bar code or a bunch of bar codes. We experienced the same thing when we went to see Cats at Proctors recently.

3. I hate the cost-saving measure (on their part) of having the customer have to print the ticket.

Oh, and not incidentally, these tickets, almost invariably, are UGLY. I have tickets to shows I went to years or even decades ago that I’ve kept; these are NOT keepers.

Well, our desktop computer was being cranky – again – and the Wife ordered the tickets on the laptop, from which we had never printed.

I suggested rehooking the Internet connection doohickey –

4. I am not particularly technologically savvy, except in the eyes of those who are even less so

to the desktop, see if it worked again, and try to print from there.

Thursday night, I get home from work, and the Wife said she didn’t print the ticket yet. Yikes – had she called me, I would have printed the ticket at work and brought it home.

5. I HATE dealing with things at the last minute when it is avoidable; sometimes, it’s not avoidable, but…

She said that I said that I could just take the printer cable to the laptop and print that way. I said that’s NOT what I said. I said to take the Internet cable and reconnect it to the desktop and try to print from there.

6. I HATE it when people say that I said things I didn’t say.

So I made the switch, but unfortunately, the desktop was dormant for so long that I was going to have to reboot it – WHICH TAKES FOREVER – and it’s now 6:30 pm for an 8:00 show that’s a half-hour away.

I said, “You should go to the library and print your ticket from there.”

7. I recognize the library as the remedy to all of life’s problems.

And so she did, successfully, print her ticket at our neighborhood library – YAY, neighborhood libraries! – went to the show and had an enjoyable time.

And after she left, I DID try to link the printer to the laptop, but the laptop required software for which I did not immediately know the location.
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And I’m supposed to bestow this award on others. If you are reading this, and I’ve never bestowed anything on you before, consider yourself bestowed.

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