Public Amenity #9
Although you might not think it, I don't really like musicals that much. Maybe it's that heterosexual thing.
There are always exceptions, and the exceptions are always the anti-musicals for me: W.S. Gilbert, for example, hated his all of his characters so much that he had them confessing hateful arrogant things throughout his operettas. Even his heroes and heroines.
So, when I heard that Urinetown was a musical for everyone who hates musicals, naturally we had to go. And the fact that it was a musical in the first place meant that Mer was very, very interested as well. Its tagline even got me: "An appalling idea, fully realized."
It's actually cheerful, in spite of the fact that the hero dies, the main narrator is a brutal cop (who happens to be very funny), and the ending emphasizes the fact that natural resources are being wasted away by our unsustainable way of life. The cop even shouts this fact at the audience.
The fact that there are bits in the performance that send up almost every annoying musical convention -- while borrowing heavily from the heavyweights, such as Les Miserables, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof -- is almost incidental at the end. You've just seen a musical where the characters have to save meager pennies to pee, and urinating in the bushes carries a death sentence. Something I think Gilbert and Sullivan would've enjoyed.
And after we saw the show yesterday, we poked around SOMA looking at furniture. We've finally found a furniture store that miraculously agrees with both of us -- Mer and I have had bitter disagreements over preferences in design (she goes for colonial, I go for euro modern... I love my clean lines) -- that's not IKEA, charges reasonable prices, and has pieces we love. Evolution, on 9th.
Already, we're fantasizing about spending lots of money we don't have about furnishing our new place to our tastes. I just hope it doesn't end up being fantastically cluttered like our old place.
Hope springs eternal.