A Movie Scene Quiz

...oh, I just remembered that bree is in London. Back on Wednesday. I bet she's having a blast!

I hope so, Mac, and can't wait to hear all about it.

I'm back, and I had a great time, but I've been up for about 19 hours, so my report will have to wait until tomorrow. Catch you then.

Sleep tight, bree. I'm looking forward to reading all about your trip!

Since you asked: here's my London report, or "How I spent my summer vacation".

I saw three plays (no musicals, because I planned this trip on short notice, so I couldn't get decent seats for any of the musicals I would have been interested in seeing). The plays were:

Theatre of Blood, based on the 1973 movie, in which Vincent Price played a hammy Shakespearean actor who murders all the critics who have ever given him a bad review, and Diana Rigg played his daughter. Jim Broadbent was very funny as the actor -- when you're as good an actor as he is, it can't be easy to play a bad actor, but he did it beautifully - and Rachel Stirling (Diana Rigg's daughter, playing the part her mother played in the movie) looked and sounded uncannily like her mother. Good, silly fun.

The Home Place, a new play by Irish playwright Brian Friel (his best-known play is probably Dancing at Lughnasa), set in Ireland in 1878. Tom Courtenay plays an Anglo-Irish landowner whose cousin, visiting from England, stirs up trouble when he goes around measuring the skulls of the local tenantry in an attempt to prove his eugenicist theories about the inferiority of the Irish as a race. Friel has translated several of Chekhov's plays, and the Chekhovian influence was very evident (right down to the cutting-down of trees being used to symbolize the decline of the landed aristocratic class - gee, where have I seen that image before?), but somehow the play never moved me as Chekhov's plays do (and as other plays of Friel's have done). Still, it was thought-provoking and well-acted.

As You Like It: a new production, set in late 1940's France, with songs (to Shakespeare's words) performed to music in a sort of "Parisian cabaret" style (i.e., lots of accordion accompaniment). The gimmick didn't bother me, but I didn't think it added a lot to the play, either. I was more troubled by some of the acting and/or directorial choices, as when Rosalind breaks into hysterical sobs when she delivers the line, "O, that thou didst know how many fathoms deep I am in love!" (I suppose it's one possible reading of the line, but it wouldn't have been mine.) Most of the attention the show has gotten in the press has to do with the fact that the role of Celia is played by Sienna Miller, who is Jude Law's girlfriend. She doesn't have a lot of stage experience, but I thought she acquitted herself pretty well.

I also took guided tours of the Royal Opera House and the Globe Theatre (a replica of the Globe of Shakespeare's time, built near the site of the original Globe). One of the most interesting parts of the Royal Opera House tour was the prop-making department, where we saw models of a life-size stag and a bi-plane, both of which are going to be used in a production of Siegfried next season. (Wotan is going to make his entrance riding the stag; don't ask me what the bi-plane is going to be used for.)

I logged a lot of museum miles on this trip: I saw special exhibits on Dutch painting of the golden age (Vermeer, Rembrandt, etc.) at the Queen's Gallery, portraits by Joshua Reynolds at the Tate, and Al Hirschfeld cartoons of British actors at the Theatre Museum. But I also went back to places like the National Gallery and the Courtauld Gallery to visit old favorites. (My reading matter on the trip was Joyce Grenfell's autobiography, "Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure". She writes about visiting museums with her father in her London childhood, and says, "We went to the National Gallery and the Tate and the Wallace Collection not once but often, just to make sure old favourites were where we had left them." I do the same thing.)

The highlight of the trip may have been my visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden on Sunday afternoon. The garden, which contains plants that are/were used for medicinal purposes, was founded in the 17th century to help apothecaries learn to identify plants. It's open to the public only at limited times, including Sunday afternoons in the summer. I went there thinking it would just be an ordinary Sunday afternoon, but it turned out to be the Sunday of the garden's annual fair. So, for a couple of hours, I wandered around an English garden in beautiful summer weather, eating strawberries and cream and watching small children squeal with delight as they watched a Punch-and-Judy show. Bliss.

How wonderful! I'd be jealous, but I'm too pleased that you had such a great trip.

Thanks, mac!

What a delightful trip. You described it perfectly - "Bliss".

So, did all the performers in "As You Like It" have pleasant singing voices? I just can't imagine all of Shakespeare's lines being sung. But --since you mentioned Rosalind's tearful rendition of her lines, I'm assuming just certain portions of the play were set to music.

The theatre and museum tours sound great - particularly the opera house. Now, we'll have to to do some sleuthing concerning that bi-plane. (lol)

Thanks for posting, bree.

No, As You Like It wasn't completely sung, although I can see how my description of it could have given that impression. But there are a lot of songs written into the play, i.e., passages that Shakespeare clearly intended to be sung rather than spoken. (At the moment, the only one I can think of is "It Was a Lover and His Lass", but trust me, there are many others.)

There's no surviving "original score" for the play, so, in any production, music has to be provided for those songs. Usually, someone just supplies some faux-Elizabethan-style folk music. The gimmick in this production was that the music used for the songs was supposed to sound like what might have been sung by Edith Piaf or Yves Montand in a Paris cabaret in the 1940's.

The singers were good -- in fact, I think some of them may have been chosen more for their singing ability than their acting ability.

I want to thank you ladies for your movie recommendations. Without going back to check your lists, I'm fairly certain I've now seen all of them and have enjoyed what I've seen.

Here's one adapted from a novel:

Julia Roberts (1) + William Holden (1)

Hi Aggie! <waving> I've been wondering where you were, and now I know! You were watching movies - I should have guessed.

I need a hint on this one. All I can think of are two not-quite-right titles:

(The) Dying Young (Roberts) + The Lions (which is wrong, because William Holden was in a movie called "The Lion", not "The Lions")

or

(The) My Best Friend's Wedding (Roberts) + The Man from Colorado (Holden) (which is wrong, because the movie, The Best Man, is based on a play, not a novel)

Ah, you missed the boat with those two guesses. If you hurry across the bridge you just might catch another boat and the right answer, too. :wink:

Waving back at you, Mac.

Oh, I should clarify that the "boat" reference has nothing to do with the title. But one of the words is in the William Holden movie.

Here's another hint:

The first word of the title is contained in a Van Morrison hit (Glenn Close danced to it in that movie in which she adopted a baby)

and

the second word of the title is contained in the title of a Broadway musical.

Thank goodness for Google, since I (a) don't know any Van Morrison songs, and (b) had never heard of Immediate Family (the movie in which Glenn Close adopts a baby, and dances to "Into the Mystic")!

Mystic River (Roberts) + The Bridge on the River Kwai (Holden)

Yes - Mystic River.

I liked Julia Roberts in "Mystic Pizza". As for "Immediate Family", I must admit the only part I liked was when Glenn Close danced to "Into the Mystic." I could have said a musical about Huckleberry Finn and you wouldn't have had to google.

Here's another movie that I saw recently that was adapted from a book.

Meryl Streep (2) + Rita Hayworth (1) and Janet Leigh (1)

(Janet Leigh would have been 77 today. )

Watching and recording "The Red Shoes" now. I was so elated by the music I thought I'd try on my tutu. Bad idea. It shrunk.

But oh, I do love that movie.




Here's another clue:

Dan Aykroyd (2) + Steve McQueen (1) + Woody Allen (2)

Au contraire, I think your tutu is looking tres chic.

Good morning, Mac. Good to see you.