Phew!

[bookzombie]

That's auditions over for another show! I think mine went pretty well, as did pennski's.

I must admit to feeling a bit odd about this one. It's The Pajama Game, I show I wasn't familiar with. The music is quite fun but the show itself is pretty rubbish. All 1950 sexism (patriarchal male lead pats the little woman on the head and single-handedly solves everyone's problems). Still, we've got a director who finds some of the show as problematical as we do, so is intending to send it up more than a little bit.
Anyway, I'll be happy if I get the part I auditioned for (Hines, the factory time study man, a fairly comic, song-and-dance character role, which is the sort of part I like) but I'll be entirely happy to be in the chorus if not.

Other than that the last couple of weeks has been spent working, watching tv and playing computer games (excellent parties aside!).

I've got two games on the go at the moment. I'm playing through Lego Indiana Jones which is fun (basically if you like Lego Star Wars you'll like this - it's pretty much more of the same) and giving the MMORPG Tabula Rasa a go. I'm still in two minds about this one. It's pretty much a 3rd person shooter and has fun stuff going on, but it's not very friendly to new players. Most missions so far seem to be non-instanced 'kill and fetch' types and it has a rather cluttered interface, is sometimes unclear about relative difficult of creatures and thus far seems to have absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever. I'm enjoying it enough to be going on with it, but I don't think it's going to be something that I'm going to come back to often.

Comments

Games

[themis1.livejournal.com]

I've been playing the alpha of adventurequest worlds - MMORPG that plays in Flash! It's worth a look :-)

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

After we talked about the Pajama Game post-WisCon, I had a niggling feeling that there was some piece of music in it that I ought to be more familiar with, so I looked it up.

I had quite forgotten "Steam Heat."

When I was about 12 or 13 years old and taking jazz dance, our teacher came up with a fiendishly difficult choreo to Steam Heat. Oh, it had its cute bits... on the chorus, where the song goes, I got (cling clang fissss)... steam heat, we did ball-change (knee-knocks, releve in plie)... heels-down plus a two-handed hat raise. We were wearing black unitards with a foot-wide strip of magenta, orange, and gold sequins that ran down our left side, and hot pink sequined bowler hats. Very much all "el Fosse".

Only problem... after the exciting bridge (coal in the boiler... do no good...) parts of the chorus and verse repeated... only parts of them. At our recital we got 80% of the way through the dance and then we all fell apart because we couldn't remember how the choreo changed to match the shortened repeat. Dear god, it was terrifying. I still remember my teacher hissing "Fake it!" from the wings!

Anyway, for real style, go watch Fosse's version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0szHqIXQ2R8

[wrdnrd]

LEGO "Star Wars" had Storm Troopers lounging in a hot tub wearing thongs, so i'm kind of expecting there to be some similar scene with Nazis in "Indiana Jones," otherwise it's SO not worth it.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

From a passing comment made by our director I gather that 'Steam Heat' is frequently used in dance training. They showed the show Fosse on tv at Christmas, so we saw his version. It was one of the more fun parts of a technically brilliant but emotionally uninvolving show.

The other two songs that people might know from the show are 'Hernando's Hideaway' and 'Hey There'. The former I've known since I was a kid (though I was convinced it was 'Fernando's Hideaway'!) and the second was vaguely familiar.

Re: Games

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a real renaissance of browser and flash-based games at the moment, which I think is a good thing (though the sellers of graphics cards might disagree!). Many of them are free to play as well.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

I have to say that Lego Indiana Jones has its moments but is not as funny as Lego Star Wars.

Incidentally, for reasons that are not terribly clear (though I suspect it is something to do with making it easier to sell the game in Germany) the villains are not clearly identified as Nazis at any point. Not quite sure what I think of that...

[wrdnrd]

I guess i can understand that from a marketing perspective (Germany: "Guuuuyyyssss, why does it always have to be about the NAZIS??"), but it does make me feel a little ... yeah, i guess i'm not sure what i think about it either.

On the other hand, i guess i'm not sure what i think about Indiana Jones overall anymore. When i saw the trailer for the new movie my 1st impression was, "Ack! So full of horrible attitudes toward the people of color!!" And then i realized that's all the Indy movies really *are*. Don't get me wrong, i loved them a lot when i was younger. But looking at them now kinda makes me squirm.

Hmm, and now that i look at it in this perspective, there's probably something to be said about the game neutralizing the villainy of the Nazis/Germans but the horrible attitudes toward people of color doesn't seem to be anything to worry about. But i'm not sure what exactly to say/think about that.

Now i'm overthinking things and will go.