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Opera Wednesday
Today is 🎺 Opera Day 🎻, so take a deep breath and give us all your best window-breaking note.
Shower Acoustics
There’s no half-singing in the shower, you’re either a rock star or an opera diva. ~Josh Groban
I’m more of a bubble bath kind of guy, but there’s not always time for that.
Sometimes you’ve got to stand there and enjoy the acoustics.
Fortunately for Kelly, my enjoyment of the acoustics centers around playing a YouTube video on my phone rather than belting out a tune to wake her up.
Truth be told, I sometimes feel like singing and most times I don’t.
Naturally, I feel like singing more when there’s Christmas music on, but there are some songs that I’m compelled to sing along with.
California Cow singing Swagger Jagger in the Shower (Real California Milk Commercial)
Actually, I’m more inclined to sing in the car than in the shower. Fortunately for me, Kelly doesn’t mind. See? I told you she was a keeper…
I Miss Looney Tunes
Best of Opera
I’m going to seem like a grumpy old geezer but, when I was a kid, cartoons were funny and age-appropriate. I could watch them with my parents and they weren’t embarrassed to watch them with me.
The way that the Looney Tunes made use of classical music was instructive for people who wouldn’t have any other exposure to it.
The music also provided a comical cadence and a platform to build ridiculous cartoony antics on. Bugs Bunny in a tailcoat dancing on the keys to the tune of Tchaikovsky or Elmer Fudd with his spear and magic helmet are a happy marriage of the sublime and the absurd.
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Unfortunately, today, the cartoons seem designed to be as visually and topically as grotesque as possible. The animation is a nightmare despite the fact that computer programs make it easier than ever for someone to produce professional quality cartoons from their laptops.
I understand that jagged caricatures are the style du jour, but I’d rather see the stylized realism of anime or the proportionally quasi-realistic depictions you’d see in Looney Tunes or Tom & Jerry.
Not Really Into Musicals
In opera, there is always too much singing. ~Claude Debussy
Musicals have an approach to storytelling that gives them a unique advantage over basic prose. When you need to provide exposition, you break out into spontaneous song and dance numbers that explain things that would require subtext, an expository monologue or a classic lore dump.
The songs in musicals can do any or all of these at once while distracting you with the spectacle of song and dance.
Amadeus funny clip – The emperor attends rehearsal (ballet with no music)
We accept this as part of the theatrical formula just as we accept the premises of bullet-dodging martial artists, superheroes, faster than light space travel or other things requiring the willing suspension of disbelief that my favorite genres depend on.
Some people don’t go for fantasy of any kind. They like biographical adaptations or reasonably believable stories such as whodunits or rags to riches stories. I like these from time to time, but I prefer things that are more fantastical.
High School Musical 4 – SNL
What I cannot really give my willing suspension of disbelief to is the spontaneous song and dance in the midst of otherwise mundane storytelling. Personally, I find most of it painfully cringy.
I have a soft spot for the Wizard of Oz, mainly because it’s a fantasy. Musical asides in a story full of witches, animated scarecrows and flying monkeys is just about tolerable. Having Dickensian orphans, cowboys or urban jerks shooting dice leap into choreographed dance is not a convention I can get behind.
I really hope that The Sentinels catches on and becomes popular enough to convert into an animated or live-action presentation some day, but I dread the idea of it becoming a musical. I just can’t…
Rogers Musical (Full Version)
I don’t know if the fat lady has sung yet or not, but I’m done for the moment. I hope you’re enjoying your week and that you sing shamelessly in the shower when the moment strikes you.