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Wednesday, July 26, 2006
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The sea is calm tonight... Really, very Dover Beach out there at the moment, with a generous helping of mist over the water to make it eerie. A cat crept through the dune grasses as I gazed at the coast from the balcony. Everyone else is deeply asleep after the exhausting Sound of Music Singalong at the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center. It's a long movie, and you're singing and yelling and waving edelweiss and blowing into a noise-maker a great deal of the time, so by the last third or so of the film you're in a stupor, dutifully booing each appearance of a Nazi, but without your heart in it. UD's first Sound of Music Singalong, at GW's Lisner Auditorium, was even more physically demanding than this one. You got out of your seat and bowed obsessively along with the third-prize-winner at the Salzburg Music Festival, and you waved not just a bit of edelweiss, but also a swatch of fabric (for when Maria looks at or talks about the curtains from which she makes play clothes), and a popper to set off whenever Maria and the Captain kiss. This was a good Singalong, though -- pretty well-attended (I'd hoped for drag queens, however, and there weren't any), lustily sung, amusingly costumed. The tension (intrinsic to Sound of Music Singalongs) between rock-serious SoMites and (probably slightly drunk) wisecracking ironists in the audience erupted at one point, when a woman in the row ahead of us shouted "Shut up" to a woman across the aisle who kept calling out lame, satirical things. But other than that, the crowd was friendly and happy and in its element. Nicest of all, the Baroness was indeed the star of the show. Audience fury at her every appearance made the room feel like one of Orwell's Two-Minute Hates. |