Tall Lark, or Winsome?

This New Year’s season, there’s been a lot of talk about bucking the resolution cycle.  Frankly, I find these anti-resolutions to be too well-intentioned.  If you’re going to go low, go big and low.  My anti-resolutions, in no particular order:

• Sit more.
• Go to the gym… and personal fitness history museum.  Use a coupon for discounted admission.  It’s not that good.
• Dance as if no one is watching.  Then realize the window shade was open the whole time.
• Cook with Velveeta cheese products daily.  Limit shame to none or less.
• Read a book about that very specific guilt you feel when you realize you don’t read good books.
• Get in a public Twitter fight with a loved one.  Then engage in exhilarating, mind-blowing, make-up retweets.
• Apologize for nothing.  Then, on one random day in July, apologize for everything. 
• Disavow any political interest.  Then blame 2012’s winning political party for everything shitty in 2013.  Be sure to hold identifying friends and family members personally accountable by posting news articles to their Facebook wall with the caption “YOU DID THIS!”
• Finally write that screenplay that perfectly combines the genre of film noir with a sports underdog story partially based on true events.  Only you can do it.
• Disengage more with the community.  You’re the one who’s right.  They’re a bunch of assholes.
• Record your performance of “And I am Telling You…” from Dreamgirls. Use the stuffed animals left over from your childhood as audience.  Send a VHS copy to Jennifer Hudson.  CC her talent agent.  Include self-addressed, stamped envelopes.
• Reconnect with an old friend.  Then hide from that person for another ten years.
• Drive your car more and destroy your bike.  Destroy a stranger’s bike.  He was probably a dooshy hipster anyhow.
• Play board games more.  Like the one where you line up cups of beer on a sheet of plywood and throw ping-pong at them while drunkenly cracking off-color jokes.
• Get Healthy, the latest energy bar from The Hershey Co.
• Antagonize friends for watching shitty TV.  Then ask if anyone watched Glee last night.
• Sometime in late December: find a Mayan, steal his calendar and laugh.
• And on December 31, 2012, try not to lock yourself out of the house, in the cold, with only a T-shirt, sweatpants, a phone, and your wit to keep you warm.

Happy New Year’s to all and to all, never change.

But who will play Tall Hipster Bane!?

The Scandi style caught my eye. It’s not my perfect aesthetic, but I appreciate the thought behind it.

For your Monday morning inspiration: An incredible Rube Goldberg machine that not only attempts to break the Guiness record for length (with an impressive 232 separate steps) but also attempts to recount the entire history of the world, from creation to the end of days. Minor points off for the loud siren (be ready to lower the volume), but big points for the theatrics and bonus points for the audible geekgasms in the audience. Too cool!

I find this both delightful and terrifying.

Brilliant news. Lilley, the creator and star of 2008’s ‘Summer Heights High’, is comic talent unlike I have ever seen.

I try very hard to be unflappable, but damn if this didn’t shake me. Sarah’s talk hits points I should try to keep in mind more often, and her skill is unquestionablly brilliant. For once, the comic and the cynic in me stayed quiet, no doubt caught up in awe. I am betting you’ll be caught up too. So well done.

The source of my double-take-turned-big-thrill from last night.  Yay, Brian!

PBS recently aired the 25th Anniversary concert of Les Miserables.  The concert was filmed last year in London’s O2 arena and, epic in every over-produced way, it clocks in at nearly 3 hours.  Plus, since it aired on PBS, there an additional hour for paying the piper.

A sampling of my thoughts, in chronological order:

• Oh, man!  I have not seen this show in ages.  Terribly exciting!
• What!?  PBS CEO Paula Kerger tells me I’ll be petitioned for loose change between acts!?  Well, for a show about class structure and the “wretched poor”, I suppose it’s appropriate.
• Who does Jean Valjean remind me of?
• Could a black Javert be nicknamed Blavert?  In any case, he’s fantastic.
• Damn, I wish I could sing like that.
• Oh, glad to see the Les Miz fan club gets to play the part of the redundant mega-chorus, replete with a classy tri-color T-shirt motif.  Glad to see the budget held out for that authentic French look.
• Lea Salonga plays a great Fantine, though I have to wonder how much of her career will be spent surrounded by actresses portraying prostitutes.
• Wild applause for both of the Thénardiers.  Must hone up on my West End stars.
• Speaking of: Stars is easily the best song of the first act.
• Gavroche looks too old, Eponine looks too young, and what!?  Why is Nick Jonas playing Marius!?  I never asked where was he now?
• General Lamarque is dead.  Act, you filthy Jonas.  Act.
• No applause for Cosette’s entrance?  There’s that good ol’ fashioned British snobbery, eh, guv’na?
• Cosette asks Nick Jonas to “make no sound.”  I couldn’t agree more.  And yet, the Brits can’t get enough of him!  Don’t pander to the American celebrity—don’t encourage him, you fools!
• Not even done with Act I and the conductor seems exhausted.
• A bearded Bradley Cooper.  Valjean reminds me of a bearded Bradley Cooper.
• So many unnecessary Jonas shots.  He is being woefully out-sung.
• Oh, thank goodness for three red flags at the end Act I. I had momentarily forgotten that this production is mega-super-XL-t-shirted-huge-too-big.
• Half an hour of fundraising makes for a fantastic intermission.  Gives me time to dig out my ant-Jonas medication.
• It’s unfortunate Eponine reminds me of Lea Michele.  I’m sure this actress is not nearly as insipid on-camera and off.
• Oh no!  Nick Jonas has to pretend to be upset while a woman who is obsessed with him dies at his feet.  Surely Nick Jonas has not seen this scene numerous times before.
• You know what this show needs?  More big ass turntable.
• I like my revolutionary battle sequences to look like the climax of a Metallica concert.
• “Bring Him Home” is my favorite song of the entire show.  And I would wager that Alfie Boe, playing Valjean, does it better than anyone else I have heard.
• An oboe solo is a pretty bad time to have a wavering pitch on your oboe…. eh, guv’na?
• I don’t remember Thénardier’s Dog Eat Dog being so lyrically fun.
• OMG.  Alert the Twitters.  Nick Jonas has been shot.  No, what?  It’s just his character?  You mean now he’s acting?  Dammit!
• Dear Javert:  Just reach up a hand and drag Marius off the bridge with you.  Sad to see you go, but your passing would not be futile.
• Down from the peak and into the valley.  Nick Jonas’ Empty Chairs at Empty Tables is embarrassing and makes me want to destroy fragile items.  And yet the British audience still loves it!?  Are we watching the same show?
• Oh, right.  The marriage.  And why not?   A show this epic could not be epic without it.  But more of the Thénardiers makes the scene worth it.
• I fully expect someone onstage to pass out during this finale.  Yes, down goes a tenor!  It’s officially a finale.
• A red-white-blue flash of light at the end, just to remind us that this is France.  Crazy, right?  Cut to a woman in the audience sobbing with mascara streaming down her face, bows, star wipe and we are out.
• BONUS:  What’s this?  Encore!?  Original cast!?  And all the Valjeans?  Are we about to have a Valjean-off?  The lights are dimming—it’s a Valjean-off!  It’s feels like an über-competitive Three Tenors concert.