As for the show? Well, the Cats performers did not come in dancing along the aisles. We weren't sure if this was a concession to the pandemic. The venue was built in the 70s and feels reassuringly like every building of my childhood, but that means it has ``continental seating'', that is, the only aisles are on the far left and right and the rows are one great arc of up to 99 seats. So there's not much place for performers to interact with the audience. Later research revealed this is a pandemic concession, with all the performers staying on stage. The entrance is foreshadowed with twinkling spots of light against the backdrop, to suggest cat eyes in the dark, and it was a good effective way in.
As the show started I realized it was going to wreck me. The most key song is about regret, after all, and what plot there is focuses on the wish for a new chance at everything, and it's very hard to be in 2022 without thinking a lot of that. Plus, the last time I saw this was of course the movie, in January 2020, when it was the last merry, ridiculous, fun thing we could all gather around to gawk at. (And, as it transpired, was a thing from my last trip to New Jersey working for the company I'd been with since 2007.) So it would and I guess I feel good about that, since it hit on deep feelings they would want to hit.
Less devastating: so, you know how there's the line about how Macavity has broken every human law? When The Flophouse podcast reviewed the movie the gang had a wonderful bit taking that line literally, and speculating about various crimes he had committed, from chewing gum in Singapore through to tax fraud. When I heard the line, I looked at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger, and we both almost cracked up remembering that bit.
Also it struck me that they should have staged it where Macavity's performer was wearing a GoPro so that among the ``every human law'' he violated was the prohibition on recording devices during the performance. This is a good joke and I will not be taking questions at this time.
Midway through the opening song a gigantic boot drops on stage. The cats all stop singing, for a moment, the way they do in cartoons when someone tosses a boot. They then resumed, the way they do in cartoons. It was a funny joke and the giant-ness of the boot did some work in setting the scale of the cats. The impressive thing, though? Neither of us saw the boot taken off-stage. The show has characters, and a handful of props, move on- and off-stage, but they did really well at staging things so that the audience's attention would be somewhere else.
Their performer for the magical Mister Mistoffelees was particularly good at looking like a stage magician, and I thought some of how much stage-magic tricks of pushing attention around play into the show. Mister Mistoffelees also showcased some of the tricks they could not have done in the 80s when bunnyhugger saw the show, also at the Wharton Center: he wore a suit of color-changing LEDs, as part of his ability to interact with dots of light on stage. (At least one of what looked like a pinpoint spotlight he picked up, as a cloth, and tossed to someone else, for example.) When touching another Cat he was able to spread the color-changing light to her fur, temporarily. This is part of what I mean by the stage-magic tricks being used to stage the performance and it all worked fantastically.
So, an anomaly in the play. The Cats put on a play, ``The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles'', because the original (``Growltiger's Last Stand'') was too racist to perform anymore. But there's a line in the replacement that refers to the ``heathen Chinese'' Pekingese dogs which made my notional monocle drop from my eye. bunnyhugger noticed the line too, but because she heard ``winsome Chinese'' which stood out as an odd adjective to put there. It turns out the word was most likely ``winsome'', as that's been the mild rewrite Cats has used in recent years. Which, fine, but then how did I get ``heathen''?
We left in an extremely light snow. bunnyhugger would go back to one of the neighborhoods we drove through for one of her daily walks, hoping to get photographs of the decorated houses and maybe something for her sidewalk-stamps blog. Many of the houses took down their decorations between that day --- the last of the twelve days of Christmas, granted --- and her visit. And there were few sidewalks at all, never mind ones with interesting stamps. And she lost a lens cap.
Are these more photographs of the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights exhibit? Yes. Are they my last? Also yes. Enjoy the last view of this day-after-Christmas event.
Back outside again, and looking at the rainbow wall from near one end of it, where you can see through the great arcing path to a denser wall behind it.
The Felines and Primates house again, seen in its outline.
And one last look at the Christmas trees set up near the entrance, and the entrance midway trees. And this brings us to the end of the Wonderland of Lights. They were giving away activity bags, at the Discovery Center, with things like the arts-and-crafts projects they would have done if it were safe to have groups of kids in an enclosed room. Last year they gave us one. This year we didn't go up for one, saving them for actual kids, although come to think of it this was the last day of the Wonderland of Lights so what did they have to save them for? Ah well.
Trivia: The 1899 treaty by which Spain transferred its Pacific Island holdings to Germany in exchange for 25 million pesetas made no mention of the Marshall Islands, creating an ambiguity about what European powers could claim ownership Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester.
Currently Reading: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749 - 1827, A Life In Exact Science, Charles Coulson Gillispie with Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness.
PS: How All Of 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog, a little statistical review.
