How About This Idea

 I read it in this morning's Globe & Mail, the story of POWs assigned to a minimum security camp in the boreal forest of Manitoba. No one bothers to escape, but the POWs slip away at night through the bush to town dances a few miles away. There it is--love, music, chorus of characters, subtext, humour, passions, journey, landscape. One of the POWs meets someone in town. A fraught relationship ensues. Community prejudices activate; time and world events intervene; individual passions prevail, or not. There's a stand-off, a burial, an ultimate celebration (not necessarily in that order . . .).

Oh yes, one of them gets the idea to order watches from the Eaton's catalogue, out of which they make the compasses they need to find their way through the bush to town.

Continuing

Continuing along the lines of matters raised in the previous entries--thank you for sticking with me, aunt Taco and uncle Bean--I'm setting aside my Charlotte and Wilbur again.

For one thing, I've got the forthcoming production of "Wilbur's Tale" (Tic Toc Ten Performance Festival, streaming April, 2021), co-created with Sarah Bergbusch, to give me my Charlotte's Web kick. For another, I read about the production of Charlotte's Web, the Robinette adaptation, that Alberta Theatre Projects staged for their Christmas show, 2017. (That production featured a web made of circus rigging, over which a human Charlotte in harness climbed and crawled--Charlotte played by Manon Beaudoin, whom I would meet two years later during her turn as Golem in Globe Theatre's The Hobbit.) While I'm no fan of the Robinette, the fact that it was so recently done by one of the major regional theatre companies tells me it's unlikely another would be interested in even a better adaptation of CW at this time.

So it's on to other things. I intend to re-open this blog to other than musical theatre concerns that have taken up the last hundred or so entries. 

These may include: the way they call hockey games on tv these days, how to succeed at being my mother's table without even trying, that time the river rose so fast we had to wait eight hours, or who might live in that third-floor room.