As the Green Bay Packers were not playing I had very little interest in watching "the game" last night and so, I didn't.      Instead I watched the 2006 movie "Stranger Than Fiction" staring Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell.  From IMBD: I.R.S. auditor Harold Crick suddenly finds his mundane Chicago life to be the subject of narration only he can hear: narration that begins to affect his entire existence, from his work to his love life to his death.
The narration is coming from prolific author, Karen Eiffel (Thompson), as she writes her current novel.  It was a very cute, easy to watch film; just what I needed on a Sunday night.  

I also made some progress reading "Persepolis Rising" book #7 in the Expanse series.  

I love All Creatures Great and Small, but since I donated to my local PBS station and got a Passport subscription last fall, the entire new season became available as soon as the first episode aired.  We tried not to binge the whole thing at once, but still ended up finishing S5 before the end of January.

Still, aside from being distilled from pure coziness, it also stands up to rewatching.  We'll probably go through this whole season again (and maybe even rewatch some past seasons for good measure) at some point before S6 drops next January, as we did this past year.

We also started rewatching the first season of Funny Woman tonight, not having seen it since last February, and will then continue through S2.  That should last us this coming week at least.

Or, since I didn't get explicit permission from the National Football League to use the term, it should probably be "Big Game Sunday." I am craving wings. I suppose I can go across the street and get chicken wings as an appetizer from the Chinese place.

I am most likely going to start by watching the game, and then switch to All Creatures Great and Small around halftime. As a Broncos supporter, I really dislike the Chiefs.

Some answers — sorta, maybe? — about HWA at the Lyttelton:

The Sondheim Hub (Substack):  A Conversation With David Zinn

So, basically the same as at the Shed, only different.   

One of the things I loved about Zinn's original design was how it "really formed itself around The Shed," as he says in this interview.  So I'm intrigued by his (tantalizingly spoiler-free) hints about "rejiggering it" for the Lyttelton; availing himself of its fly system; and especially the breadcrumb about wanting to find a way to defamiliarize the space.

While I've been a fan of Mr. Zinn for many years, like most designers there have been one or two instances where I thought he talked a better game than he played (or occasionally the reverse).  No shame in that; his ratio of hits to misses is still enviable, and when called upon to talk about what he does, he tends to do so more engagingly and with less blather than most.  But I've been especially tickled by his work on Here We Are: he's in thrilling top form with this design, and his thoughts about the process are a delight to read.

For instance, I love how he frames a note from Mantello — who wanted to avoid wrangling half a dozen chairs at each of three restaurants — as a problem-solving exercise that ended up yielding a nugget of design poetry: "there's a kind of absurdity in not furnishing the restaurants," just to add insult to the injury of their having no edible food.  (A restaurant reviewer might give these establishments points for consistency, if not much else: their ambience — right down to practical basics like where to sit — is as chimerical as their menus).

I hope and trust that Zinn's seldom-photographed or -mentioned miniature side-stages have made it over to the Lyttelton: two life-size slivers of a rolling field of real-looking wheat, against a cloudy sky, mirrored in infinite regress and encapsulated in a pair of audience-reflecting, floor-to-ceiling one-way-glass terraria flanking the main playing area and lit only during the "traveling" interludes.  Perhaps the Lyttelton will afford some way of making them feel bigger and more enveloping, or just more aggressively present, at times.  But even as a relatively peripheral "decorative" effect, these mirror-box dioramas were a design highlight for me at The Shed.  High-concept but pleasingly low-tech (plate-glass on this Apple-store scale isn't cheap, but it's not bleeding-edge technology, either) and brilliantly surreal, I felt as though SJS — and maybe Buñuel, too — would've gotten a big kick out of them.

Above all, I hope and trust that this entire production will make it onto NTLive for cinecast and/or NT at Home for streaming.  (Repetition of this wish will make it so).

No more sneaking in at intermission
To the plays you wish you could afford.
Or producers having you audition
Whenever they're bored —
And who say, right away
As you play the first chord:

I discovered this during the pandemic shutdown, but, as far as I can tell, never posted it anywhere on this forum.  The reordering of verses threw me a bit at first — I imagine it's meant to build a better emotional trajectory for a solo singer — but Jones's interpretation is achingly beautiful.

Captured in August 2009 at Joe's Pub.

Even more than the "rise"s (but there, too, for sure), I've always assumed the "IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'll drink to that" was attributable more to drunkenness than to any other single factor — or, perhaps more accurately: I assumed that was the point at which, if it hasn't already, Joanne's inebriation becomes as impossible to ignore as her bile.  (Donna's rendition, in remaining so apparently free of the latter for so long, recalibrates this in an intriguing way).

I've seen more- and less-drunk renditions, but from Stritch onward I've always seen alcohol as a significant ingredient in the song.  Even in the most "high-functioning" interpretation, something about the scotch-and-stingers references suggests someone whose drinking is not just notional and maybe not quite as controlled as she wants us to think — someone who's more-or-less-visibly under the influence as she's making those references, and knows her audience is aware of it, but thinks she's staying a step ahead of us by naming it as just another aspect of her self-contempt.  While I'm not partial to renditions where she seems really sloppy hammered, I do think it makes sense to let her intoxication play some perceptible role in this glimpse into Joanne's psyche; if you go back and re-watch Stritch, say, or LuPone, with that idea in mind, you'll see it.

I think her blood-alcohol level may be a factor in Joanne's propositioning Bobby/Bobbie.  And her drinking may also have something to do with Larry's claim that she's like an entirely different person when they're alone together.  I myself am a strictly-social drinker who's notably un-social in general, which is to say that I drink very rarely, a tiny handful of times a year at most, and then rarely to the point of getting drunk, let alone sloppy.  I wonder if perhaps Joanne (unlike, say, Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who one feels probably drinks a lot even when there aren't guests over) drinks, like me, mostly on social occasions — but, unlike me, has a life in which such occasions figure all too frequently for such "social drunkenness" to not pose a potential problem sooner or later.

Until this time watching Donna, I never thought Joanne might be drunk as she sings this.  I'm not sure why it never occurred to me.  It explains some of the mood swings and the repetition of "Rise" at the end of the song.  Maybe I've never seen played drunk.  Usually, Joanne is very reserved and although she drinks throughout the show she usually is shown to be a master at holding her liquor and keeping herself under control.  So much to ponder....

There are also a lot of "ships" in Pacific Overtures, and a bunch of "-ships" in too many other places to count.

And those who thought him a simple clod
Were soon reconsidering under the sod.
Consigned there with a friendly prod
From Sweeney Todd,
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.