Destination Unknown

Urinetown: The Musical

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:40:26 -0700

I went and saw Urinetown: The Musical tonight at the college. This is a Broadway musical produced locally with local talent, and I am very happy to yell KUDOS to my good friend Laura for doing an outstanding job as Little Sally. Laura, you stole the show!

So, Urinetown. It's a very strange show, and is very self-referential and is pretty much a spoof of musicals while being a real musical itself. The purposely ridiculous premise is that there has been a 20-year drought and that both private toilets and public urination have been outlawed, so that everyone now has to pay a monopolist public toilet magnate for the privalege of going to the bathroom in a public commode. I can't imagine a more bizarre concept, but it's camped up the point that you can't help but laugh.

A big round of applause also to Adam Savage, who played the toilet mogul Mr. Cladwell, and did an outstanding job, as well as to the actors who played Hope, Officer Lockstock, and Bobby Strong.

Again, Laura: you rock!

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Indian Pueblo Cultural Center

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:35:49 -0600

Sunday morning, before leaving Albuquerque, we went to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Strix had heard that it was a neat place to visit, so as long as we were in Albuquerque with a morning to spare, we went to check it out.

There are 19 Indian Pueblos in New Mexico. Ethnically, they belong to specific tribes, like the Hopi and Zuni tribes, but they are otherwise isolated communities of Native Americans, having been isolated by the influx of European settlers in the late 1600's and again by a push for Indian land following the Indian Appropriations Act in 1851. Today, many of these communities have been designated Indian Pueblos and granted a degree of home-rule, much like the larger Reservations.

The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center was built as a place to celebrate the cultures of those Pueblos... and to sell their goods. They do a good job on both counts.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the Center was the shape of it. It's a D-shaped building with a courtyard, which has circles in the center of it.

GE Cultural Center

This is reminiscent of the shape of some of the more famous Native American ruins of New Mexico.

Pueblo Bonito

This is the much larger Pueblo Bonito, an extensive Anasazi ruins site in Chaco Canyon.

We arrived just in time for a demonstration of native dance. I stupidly didn't bring my camera, so you get treated to blurry camera-phone pics. Enoy:

A couple of the several murals out in the courtyard.

The Silverfox Dance.

Dancing

I apologize for the quality of this video. It's very poor. But, at least you can year a little bit of the singer/drummer beating out the rhythm of the dance.

After watching the dancers, we visited the museum which was followed, predictably, by the gift shop and gallery. Honestly, we spent more time in the gift shop and gallery, and I was astonished by the high quality works of art there.

One thing I find interesting about Native American culture is that much of it is centered around the preservation of traditions. However, when you look at the "traditions," much of it does not date back to before the Spanish colonization. "Traditional" Native American food contains ingredients that didn't exist before the Spaniards came (like the "traditional" Navajo fry bread), and are influenced by Spanish and Mexican cuisine. Many of the dances were actually created in the 20th Century for competitive Powwow events. The costumes contain things, like tin bells, which they could not have had prior to Spanish colonization. Many of their arts and crafts, today, like their pottery, have been updated to include techniques that didn't exist before colonization.

At the same time, even if their cultures aren't "authentic" in their tradition, in that they are a fusion of Native American and European cultures, they are still unique, and therefore worth preserving. I was glad to have visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

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Outdoor Theater

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:18:33 -0600

Strix and I have gone to see two outdoor plays recently at the Lions Wilderness Amphitheater. The first one we went to see was Cyrano de Bergerac. As most everyone knows the basic premise, I won't bore you with it, but it was very well done, and the lead role was very expertly played by Brian McCann, an actor from Philadelphia who is spending the summer in New Mexico. I was also quite impressed with the swordplay.

On a side note, I didn't know until I just looked it up know that the play Cyrano de Bergerac was based on a real person.

The second play we saw was Crazy for You. This is a cobbled-together musical, recycling a number of old Gershwin toons like "I Got Rhythm" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The plot of the play is that a young man who wants to sing and dance on stage, but really works for a bank that his mother owns, is sent to Nevada to foreclose on an already-closed playhouse in a little dying town called Deadrock. Predictably, he falls in love with the woman whose father owns the playhouse (the only woman in Deadrock) and decides to try to put on a play in the playhouse to raise enough money to save it from foreclosure. The woman won't have anything to do with him, and while she's secretly smitten with him she thinks he's a crackpot. The man then does what any sane person would do, and dresses up as a famous producer from New York and tells her that he is there to help her put on the play. Eventually, of course, the real famous New York producer shows up, and wackiness ensues.

I will say that I was in a bad mood at the amphitheater when we watched this play, anyway. There was a busload of ill-behaved teens from a church youth group there that night, and then the family in the row in front of us and to our left kept talking during the play and jostling the bench back. That being said, I don't think I would have liked this play under the best of conditions. It is just a contrived, empty way to reintroduce old songs from old plays. The lead character, Bobby Child (played by Robert Mitchell), was as ridiculous a character as I've ever seen, the total stereotype of the young man with stars in his eyes who just knows that if he got his break he could make it big!

That being said, the actor Robert Mitchell does know how to tap dance, quite well, and the actors did the best they could with the material they had.

The amphitheater itself is quite small, and the only seating is in the form of stone benches, so bring a cushion. If you're lucky, you can get one of the benches with a wooden back to it. Unless, of course, the people sitting in the same row as you keep jostling the wooden back, in which case you are unlucky again.

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