Grimhilda!

The musical, Grimhilda!, has been a prime subject of this blog for some months now.   Here's a brief synopsis of the story.

The hero is a little boy called Toby, whose parents are always too busy to spend time with him, and leave him to be looked after by babysitters.  

A new babysitter arrives just as the story begins, and there seems to be something different about her.  Toby enjoyed his previous babysitters because they were prepared to do things like telling him stories before he went to sleep, but this newest babysitter makes him nervous.  As usual, his parents are too busy getting ready to go out to notice anything strange about her.

And Toby's qualms prove to be on the button: the babysitter rushes him off to bed, and even seems to have control over what she looks like.

Toby goes to sleep but is woken in the night by some of his toys who tell him the babysitter is far worse than he thought: a Grimhilda Red Alert has been posted. Because of her something nasty has happened to his parents.  Toby must get up in the night and go and rescue them, or else he'll never see them again.   With some reluctance he sets off to the Grimhilderness Mountains, with a rag doll for support, and a large, live Map to guide him.

After some serious setbacks he finds himself confronting not only Grimhilda, but a life and death situation affecting not only his parents but Toby himself.

Grimhilda! has a cast of over twenty singers and actors.  The script has been written by two Dunedinites, Mike Crowl and Cherianne Parks, with the music composed by Mike Crowl.   The production company is Stageworks, which presented a very successful season of The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie, last year.


The director is Bert Nisbet, and the musical director is Jonathan Drummond.


Helen Wilson will play Grimhilda.  The part of Toby is being shared on alternate nights by Max Beal and Kelland O'Neil.   Polly, the rag doll, will be shared by Emily Kerr-Bell and Emily Hill.


Toby's parents will be played by Kathryn Gardner and Tim McGuire.


The production opens on the 27th April at the Mayfair Theatre.  There will be three performances from the 27th -29th April, and then another four from the 3rd - 6th May.  All evening performances will start at 7 pm, and the two Sunday matinees will be at 2 pm.

Transformers

I had the movie, Transformers, thrust in front of me last night when my younger son got it out of the video shop. My initial reaction was: shall I go and do something else? In fact, Transformers turned out to be a sharp and funny movie, with some off-the-wall characters, and an ability to make an action movie interesting as well as spectacular.
I must admit I lost track of which Transformer was which much of the time, and to have the nastiest of them all, Megatron, frozen for most of the movie was a bit of a mistake I think, but I enjoyed the vocal characterizations (the transformers learned to speak off the World Wide Web) and the visuals were splendid.
But it was more of a surprise to have a bunch of actors in amongst all the technology who were interesting people. Shia LeBeouf (whom I’d forgotten until I checked I’d seen in Holes several years ago) was full of energy, wit, and verve; Megan Fox transformed a role that could have been nothing but a sex figure into something human; Rachael Taylor’s wonderful Tasmanian accent grated against all the US ones, and Kevin Dunn and Julie White as LeBeouf’s parents were superbly cast. John Turturro makes the most of a wonderfully obsessive Sector 7 agent.
And the minor characters are often unexpectedly interesting, such as the Indian telephone operator who’s more interested in the right way to make the phone call than in contacting the Pentagon for an emergency; or the crazy Black computer geek and his family.
There are times when the action’s over the top, but in the middle of it all there’s this wonderful humour, which gives the film life. It’s as if the writers decided that straight action wasn’t get this movie into the A-stream, and they were probably right. So they put some scenes in that will give the adults something interesting, and this balances the whole thing out admirably.
I should have gone to see it on the big screen – huge things cease to be huge on the small – but not having done so, I’ll have to watch it again and try and work what’s actually happening in some of the grunty fight scenes.
By the way, I watched it with comments from my son and son-in-law about who all the Transformers were, what their histories were, whether they'd actually ever had any of them as children and so on. I was rather astonished at the detailed remembering of this curious craze.

Touchy-feely giraffe

When we went to the Royal Norfolk Show early in our stay in England, we saw children everywhere carrying large stuffed toys, many of them as big as the children themselves. It was only when we went for lunch that was discovered that the tent was right opposite the lunch place.
Apparently they call stuffed animals plush animals in the US, and there’s a site called The Jungle Store where you can get plush animals of every kind. Being a giraffe fan, I checked out the choices for giraffes. There are some 178 possibilities, but far less when it comes to the plush kind. Some of these look rather like short-neck giraffes, if there such a thing, but there are a couple of delightful characters that have a proper long neck, or at least an attempt to make the animal appear that way. Their names are Orson Jnr and Orson Snr - the latter is the better of the two in neck length. He retails on the site at US$20.95, but I’m not sure that spending that amount of money on a stuffed toy is quite what my wife would consider to be an essential purchase.
It strikes me that plush is a rather odd word to use instead of stuffed, since it’s normally associated with the feel of the material something is made of (softer than velvet but feeling like it), or else (according to the One Look Dictionary) means characterised by extravagance and profusion, something that stuffed toys are really not usually characterised by. Perhaps plush toys are made of something softer to the touch than velvet.
Maybe I should buy that giraffe after all, to check it out.

Enthusiasms

My wife used to have a thing about GPS – it was one of those patches of enthusiasm she went through. She craved to have a GPS thingee of some sort. Any sort, as long as it was one. She’s gone past that craving now, and in fact we sold a book on Trade Me the other day dealing with the subject that she’d acquired somewhere. Such is the case with fads in our house.

A friend of ours has a little computer in his car that tells him where to go – in a polite sense. He taps in his current location and then his destination, and his little lady friend in the computer tells him street by street and metre by metre where to drive. It’s a fad too – but like my wife, he’s rather addicted to techno-toys.

My wife also used to fish – another enthusiasm that seems to have gone by the board – but if she still did fish, and if she still had an enthusiasm for GPS, she could combine it by looking out for fishfinders. Nope, they’re not people who prowl the sea looking down through the waves for fish: they’re marvellous little techno-toys that help hobby fishermen find fish – and catch ‘em, presumably….although that may be up to the fish.
I don’t think I’ll let her see this post – it might encourage her to go back to these two enthusiasms in some combo-format!