My Way Late Review of Wicked

So while in Italy I had the pleasure (displeasure?) of spending part of my fall break in one of the capitals of the world, London! Kristen and I went together and we stayed at her friend's dorm/apartment thing. One of the highlights of our sojourn to London was London's theatre! We spent the better part of our second day there frantically and confusedly searching for theatre's and making up our mind on what we were going to see. Apparently, while we were there, the London Universities were on Fall Break so the theatres chose that week to stop giving Student Rush Tickets which sucked and jacked up the prices for all the shows.

We eventually decided to see Wicked. Kristen had already seen it but graciously saw it a second time. We got cheaper tickets because we were literally in the back corner, but the show was still good and we didn't have to spend much at all! It was a "wonderful little piece of spectacle" as I began referring to it later. The show itself is kinda lame, but there were some really cool special effects, like when Elphaba chooses her path as the wicked witch and is lifted to the middle of the stage while she is belting and her cape encases the enter proscenium! Pretty cool!

It also had Edina Menzel in it, who was the original Elphaba from the NYC Broadway one. (she was also in original Rent) whatev. It was pretty sweet.

Here are some pics!

Pisa was LAME...

We were all so excited to be visiting the leaning tower of Pisa! I mean, how cool!! We had all only been in Italy for about 2 and 1/2 weeks and were totally in sight seeing mode. When we arrived, we realized that we would have to walk about a mile to get to the place where the tower was. And quickly into the walk, it became evident that this city use to be great! There were old universities, libraries, government halls, etc. There were incredible ancient fountains and ornate arches into parks and the like. But it was also evident that no one has cared about these things in a long time. The entire city was run down and it was a boring a gray walk all the way to the one bustling center of town where the Leaning Tower and the Duomo were located.

And the Tower was not all that big! Only like six stories.

Not all that cool...

And what made it worse, everyone was doing that stupid, "Look! I can hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa!" thing. Which is not to say we didn't do the same thing since we were there, but I mean, come'on! The city had a really cool river running through it and lots of cool old churches. I would have liked to have seen something of more interest. And unlike the Tower, not spent $11 to walk up six flights of stairs.

I'm Really Lame...

LibreAccademia Performance

Right before Fall break, we got our first opportunity for performance. It was at the local theatre/school (la Libre Accademia) that we had been affiliating ourselves with. We were broken into three groups and we performed five people scenes based on the Commedia conventions of Carlos Garcia and Katrien van Beurden and whose style I am currently teaching to produce my senior project at Rhodes College. Our topics and groups were:

War:
KK
Andy
Sprance
Ryan
Noelle

Immigrants:
Jim
Becca
Kevin
Elizabeth
Alyssa

Christopher Columbus
Chris
Aysha
Jesse
Tyler
Claire

The performance went great and it was so nice to have an audience for the first time that entire semester. The performance space was really cool too. It had a dome ceiling so the acoustics were great, and it was really nice that some of the music kids came to support. And of course, afterwards, there was wine, and thats all she wrote!