Rubin and Minchin's Groundhog Day
It was surely one of the hottest days of the year today, and the performers in that theater were all wearing winter clothes and jumping around and dancing under stage-bright spot-lights.
Whereas I’d spent the day at my desk in my pants.
I did some pretty good work, but then I wasn’t dressed in winter clothes under stage spotlights. Still the performers tonight certainly worked with more energy and enthusiasm than I managed to muster. They were impressive.
Groundhog day was an awesome film. Brilliant story structure. It’s repetitious nature gives it a rhythm, day after day, speeding up, faster and faster. This emotional rhyme and rhythm is what all good stories should do of course, but it makes it more explicit and powerful in this cute time-loop story.
And that suits the musical format very well, for good music too has that repetition, beat, melody of structure.
Minchin’s lyrics are hilarious, and his distinctive jazz rhyming structures were audible and smile-inducing all the way through.
That rotating stage confused and befuddled me, the magic tricks surprised me, the car chase gripped me and the stage orchestration looked like choreographed clockwork, underlining the beat and rhythm and repetition of the story and of the music, and all story and all music.
Must be weird having to perform that play day after day until god-knows-when.
Still. I have to go to bed. My alarm clock goes off tomorrow and I have to spend the day writing software in my pants again before I’m off to the Theater.