pedanther

1. My Fair Lady opened last night. The show came together pretty well during dress rehearsals, and although we had a few opening-night excitements, the audience seemed pleased. (At one point, I was halfway through a costume change when I realised that I still had another scene to do in the old costume before I changed into the new one. Fortunately I had time to change back.) We also got a good review in the paper, both in the sense that it said nice things about the production and in the sense that it had actual things to say about the production beyond "it is on" and "here's who is in it", which isn't a given with the local paper.


2. Over at Mark Watches, Mark has finished watching Babylon 5 and Crusade. I really enjoyed revisiting Babylon 5; I probably could have done without rewatching Crusade, except that now I've done it I never have to do it again. Now Mark is catching up on the last few years of Doctor Who, which is something I'd like to be following along with but what with it being crunch time on My Fair Lady I haven't had time to keep up.


3. The new collection of Liaden Universe short stories came out recently, with a bunch of stories I'd already read in their original venues and two that were new to me. One I found a bit disappointing; the other was much more interesting, and speaks to the time and place in which it was written in that way science fiction often does when it's telling a story about some other time and place entirely.


4. Back in February, I remarked that I have a significant backlog of board gaming I haven't blogged about. It's only gotten bigger since then.


5. I'm intrigued enough by what I've seen of Observation, a new science fiction thriller game, that I bought it in a recent sale. Unfortunately, it then turned out that it will only run on my computer with the graphics settings dialled right down, which has happened often enough lately with interesting new games that I'm beginning to think it might be worth actually getting my computer's graphical capabilities upgraded. But while I dither over that, I'm not getting any Observation played either.

Observation is set, at least in the early bits I've seen, on a near-Earth orbital space station where something goes wrong, leaving one of the crew isolated and trying to figure out what's happened with the sometimes-unreliable assistance of the station's damaged AI. It's very atmospheric -- I gather it has several key people, including the set designer, in common with the well-regarded Alien: Isolation game. Also the lead cast: the scientist and the AI are voiced by the actors who were Ripley and Samuels in Alien: Isolation.

One of the intriguing things about the game is that it's the disembodied AI, not the human scientist, who is the player character.

Casting has been announced, and rehearsals begun, for our production of My Fair Lady. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a fair amount of overlap with the cast of our production of Oliver! a couple of years ago. Fagin is now Henry Higgins, Nancy is Eliza Doolittle, Mr Bumble is Eliza's father, and Mr Brownlow is Colonel Pickering. We also have an understudy Eliza, who is new to the club but has been the lead in the local high school's last few musicals, and has done well several years running in the drama section of the annual performing arts festival.

I knew the basic plot, and I've owned the Original Broadway Cast album for years, so the songs are very familiar, but I've never actually seen the musical all the way through before, so the context of some of the songs has come as something of a surprise. ("I Could Have Danced All Night", for instance, shows up much earlier than I was expecting it.) Actually, some of the songs are not quite as familiar as all that: Rex Harrison didn't have much of singing voice and was allowed to get away with reciting his lyrics in time with the music, so it has come of something of a novelty to discover that Higgins's solo numbers have actual tunes.

1. The pigeons have largely moved on since the owner hired somebody to leave pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place. (At least, the owner told the real estate agent that they would handle the pigeons, and then somebody started leaving pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place while I wasn't home. I haven't been able to get the agent to give me a straight answer, but I have to assume that the two events are connected, because the alternative is that there's a serial prowler in the neighbourhood with a grudge against pigeons.)

The current wildlife topic is now the family of stray cats that have decided to include my yard in their territory. There's three or four of them, young gingers of a similar age that I assume are siblings; an older ginger that I assume is their mother never comes any closer than next door's yard, possibly because she's old enough to remember the previous tenants' dog. After it became clear they weren't going to move on by themselves, I have been trying with some success to convey to the youngers that this territory already belongs to a much larger mammal than them; the trouble is that I left it long enough that they've found themselves a safe nook under the front porch and they tend to flee for that instead of, as I would prefer, out of the yard entirely.


2. I'm still regularly attending and enjoying the gaming group, but blogging about it has become one of those procrastination lint balls where the longer I fail to get around to it the larger the task becomes and the more likely I am to keep putting it off.


3. At the Rep Club, we're in rehearsals for our annual season of short plays. I'm doing sound and lighting design again, and part of my motivation for writing this blog post is that I'm procrastinating on assembling a complicated final sound effect.

Tonight the club is holding a quiz night to raise funds for the theatre renovation drive. Some of the rounds will have theatrical twists; the one I know about because I'm involved is the movie quotes round, where instead of playing clips from movies they're getting club members to act out brief scenes or monologues for the contestants to identify.

Tomorrow there are auditions for the big production for 2019, which will be the musical My Fair Lady. I have expectations about who will be most likely to get the main roles out of the people I know will be auditioning, but it's a popular enough show that we're likely to get people auditioning who wouldn't usually, and I may yet have my expectations confounded.


4. I am still doing Parkrun regularly, and recently passed my first official milestone, 50 Parkruns.


5. I never got around to mentioning that I was growing the muttonchops again, and now I'm not any more. I pruned the facial forest back to stubble for the hot part of summer, and then let it grow out as regular beard for a little while, and within the first week several people indepently told me how much of an improvement they thought it was. I quite liked the muttonchops look myself, but the beard is also not bad when it's this short, so I think I'll stick with the beard at least until I find out what the hairstyle requirements are for My Fair Lady.