We all know the plays I’m talking about, right? The characters are usually family or very close friends and they enter the play facing hardship or strife. Conflicts may be aired but the True Meaning of Christmas finally gets through and everyone remembers the Reason for the Season and makes up in time to unwrap presents. Cue the Figgy Pudding and Curtain, we’re finished. Well, those don’t do it for me. I watched “Father Knows Best” episodes when I was a kid and those happy families on the stage only added to my confusion and neurosis. I’ll take the dysfunctional Plantagenet family in “The Lion in Winter” for Christmas instead. They show me I’m not insane. James Goldman’s”The Lion in Winter” is a fictional take on the real life Plantagenet family and their problems in 1183. The patriarch, Henry had been King of England nearly thirty years by then and time was catching up to him. It was time to reflect on his accomplishments, (he reigns over England and controls a good bit of France) think about retirement and (to quote Lear) ” shake all cares and business from our age, conferring them on younger strengths.” At least that’s…
Years ago, when my sister and I were first getting acquainted as adults (a process quite different than growing up together) we discussed a book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Barb and I agreed it was very good but my sister added, “It doesn’t compare to the author’s first book, The Silver Crown.” I had missed that kid’s book and couldn’t imagine how anything could approach the charm of NIMH. “Try The Silver Crown and see” Barb said. “You’ll like it, it’s scary as all get out.” As usual, my sister was right. The Silver Crown is, I suppose, a modern fairy-tale. A young girl, Ellen Carroll, wakes on her birthday to find a crown made of dense silver material beside her bed. She takes the crown outdoors to enjoy some solitude and returns to find her home afire and her family gone. As the day goes on it becomes very clear that the fire was the first step in someone’s campaign to capture Ellen and her crown. Ellen has to run and stay one step ahead of her enemies in order to survive. It isn’t easy. The thing is, while The Silver Crown has some very…
I’m not an aeronautic groupie or a science nerd. As a kid, I resented the moon-shot flights of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo for preempting my Saturday Morning Cartoons and although I appreciate their accomplishments, I still prefer reruns of Underdog. Engineering advancements just aren’t my thing. Nevertheless, I get hot under the collar every time I re-read Greig Stewart’s Shutting Down the National Dream: A. V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow and I’m not even Canadian. It’s a little known story that should be memorized by everyone in the fields of science, business and government and kept in a folder marked, “Don’t Let this Happen to You.” The Avro Arrow is a tragedy of waste. It’s post World War II and most of Canada is getting used to the idea of the Cold War and their unenviable image as USA’s dull neighbor to the north. A few Canadians don’t agree. The most important of these is C. D. Howe, an engineer and businessman who became Canada’s “Minister of Everything” during World War II. (Look up his biography in Wikipedia, the man was amazing.) He talked Crawford Gordon Jr. into becoming the general manager of Avro Canada,…
Now many books take on a life of their own. Any reader of note can cite a half a dozen books that catch the heart and imagination of the public (Make that fifty books. Harry Potter turned the reading world on its ear more times than I can count on one hand) and a play or a film will sometimes add up to more than the sum of its parts. We’re all glad when these moments occur. It isn’t often, though that the production of a play makes that big a stir. If a play is memorable it’s revived often, people start putting new interpretations on it and pretty soon the initial production is a faint and lovely memory. It’s late and my brain may not be working but I can only think of one time where the book, the play and the production of the play all became moments that people discuss later. And the all three are named The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I talked about the book yesterday and mentioned how Dickens indulged his love of the theatre by incorporating a sub-plot about an acting troupe. Well the theatre has always returned the author’s affections…
It’s almost winter again and I keep thinking the books of Dickens. For many of us, Dickens is an immutable part of this season although I don’t think he reached that place just because of his famous Christmas tale. Winter is a melodramatic mix of beauty, fear and hope, just like his stories and the first one that comes to mind is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Nickleby is Dickens’s third novel and by that time he had his formula down pat. There’s the hero, young Nicholas, impetuously ready to take up arms against every unjust cause he meets; there’s his impossibly good and patient sister Kate who is just a little too close to her brother for twenty-first century sensibilities and their addle-pated mother. There’s a rogue’s gallary of baddies to threaten them including the sneering, high-born, louse, Sir Mulberry Hawk (whose picture should be in the dictionary by the term “sexual predator.”) For those who favor the emotionally crippled-bad guy, Uncle Ralph Nickleby spends his life and reason plotting for money and vengeance on our hero since people like Nicholas but they don’t like him! (Seriously, this guy needed therapy!) There are other not-so-nice guys but…