Some desultory cultural notes

My wife and I have just returned from a performance of Joe DiPietro’s Over the River & Through the Woods at the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley City.  It was a good performance of a light, funny, and sad play.  Much recommended for a good evening out.

The other night, we attended Utah Opera’s performance of The Rake’s Progress, conducted by Thierry Fischer, with music by Igor Stravinski and a sometimes striking and quotable libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman.  Very strange.   This production used David Hockney’s 1975 set and costume designs, which are equally strange and well suited to it.  Thematically, The Rake’s Progress is so straightforwardly moralizing that it could almost have been an LDS Church movie.  (Laziness and licentiousness don’t pay.)  Musically and visually, though, not so much.

While traveling in Israel, I read Gottfried Keller’s 1860s novella Kleider machen Leute (“Clothes Make the Man,” or, more literally, “Clothes Make People”).  Keller is — or, at least, still was when I lived there — beloved in his native Switzerland, but I had never seriously read anything by him.  This was a really funny story, though, and would make a good and entertaining movie.

Otherwise, when I was stuck on airplanes during our recent travels, I watched several films and read Jack Reacher novels.  For years, I’ve had high ambitions to read lots of serious stuff while immobilized and uncomfortable on a plane.  But it’s never really worked out very well, because I’m typically too tired on long flights to read heavy books.  So, this time, I just had fun.  Didn’t even try to read ponderous stuff.  And it worked out really well.

Incidentally, the two Jack Reacher novels that I read, Personal and Tripwire, were well and cleverly written, and (especially the first one, which is downright chaste) reasonably clean.  (My wife tells me that at least one other one, The Affair, is very much not clean.)