Gone With the Wind
Yesterday I started at Webcare. Spent the day watching various people work to get a feel for the systems and the work. Today I actually got to do work. Since I’d done it before it was very well doable. I mostly did the stuff I knew and picked up questions about other departments as I went along. I don’t know as much about them as my “home” department, but that’ll come with time. I’m excited, it’s gonna be fun.
After work today, I met up with Ingrid for a night out. I’d bought tickets to a musical theater piece based on Gone With the Wind a month or two ago on a whim. I asked Ingrid if she wanted to come along, and she did. We ate at Satéhuis (yum!) and then headed for the theater.
The stage was fairly sparsely set. A piano on the left, cotton bales along the back and sides, and a sort pyramid-like thing with a giant metal horse on it on the right side. Since the film is rather long (I never read the book) I was expecting them to whirlwind through parts and that they did. The main narrator of the story was Mammy. She spoke about Scarlett and told her life’s story, where the key parts where then played out. The story is familiar I assume, Scarlett (played by Anna Drijver) is in love with Ashley Wilkes except he gets engaged to Melanie. Scarlett sees Rhett Butler (played by Nasrdin Dchar) at the engagement party and is intrigued by him. After being turned down by both men, she accepts a marriage proposal from Melanie’s younger brother Charles and so the trouble starts. The play then takes us through Scarlett’s life where she is privileged to all hell but never manages to be truly happy and inevitably loses everything including the man of her dreams, Rhett.
I really enjoyed the piece. The mix between the scenes, the songs, the set was really good. Plus Mammy’s narration brought the poignant points of that time’s culture and friction (civil war, slavery, the Klan) to attention and reformed them to something still very valid in the current day and age. The actors played well, but the supporting actors had a tad more life in their performances than the main couple did. Their chemistry was okay, but it felt a bit too stiff at times. Even taking into account the period it takes place in. In the end, though, it was definitely a show worth seeing and I’m glad I went with that whim to get the tickets.