09.26.05
Falstaff
After some bagels at home Teresa and I went out to catch a matinee show of Corpse Bride (2005). The movie was very disappointing for me, maybe I am a bit jaded by having seen so much good cinema lately but I found very little in the movie worth watching. It was fun to sit through the credits and recognize so many names though; the movie was produced by LAIKA, previously Will Vinton Studios, the TV/Film company I worked for my first four years in Portland and while most of the animators were Brits a great deal of the production crew were people I had known. Incidentally I picked up a habit from another Vinton ex-pat of referring to the new studio as ‘Dead Russian Dog Studios’ and have now had opportunity to spread that to other ex-pats as well as to the animation set ‘across the pond’ (Nick Park et all).
We left the theater and walked a short distance to the offices of Greenberg Kingsley where we picked up Mark Kingsley an old time (as in from preschool) friend of Teresa and accomplished graphic designer based in New York. Mark walked us to a nearby French Café for some (almost authentic) French sandwiches and conversation. Mark is another fascinating and well opinionated individual and proved a great conversationalist. It is too bad that his wife, Karen Greenberg, could only join us for the end of the meal as she seemed very interesting and I had little opportunity to get to know her. This time the conversation was mostly about the city (town?) in up-state NY where Teresa and Mark grew up. It seems Mark was successful in convincing Teresa to return to New York for some type of school reunion being held there in a few weeks. At lunch’s end (nearly 5pm) Teresa stuck around for a dinner appointment with Peter Lord and I went up town to prepare for the Opera that night.
By 8pm we were at the Metropolitan Opera ready for the evening show of Falstaff, the beautiful comic opera by Giuseppe Verdi, or as I prefer to refer to him ‘Joe Green’. The orchestra was well directed by James Levine and the lead impressively sung and performed by Bryn Terfel. For an accurate and concise account of the performance I will refer the reader to the New York Times review and will only add that a pet peeve of mine are opera singers who know how to sing but whose idea of acting is to raise and lower an arm from time to time, an annoyance delightfully missing from this production and specially from Terfel and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (as the side kick Bardolfo).