deponti

I went to see the opening play of the 2008 Theatre Festival at Ranga Shankara , and did not expect to be transported back to my childhood days....but nostalgia took hold of me as I revisited the days when I used to watch various Bengali plays at the famous Star Theatre ....

The play was about Binodini, the star of the theatre scene in 19th century Kolkata, who wrote an honest autobiography, "Aamaar Kothaa"...about ambition,love, betrayal and talent....and this has been adapted by Amal Allana and brought to the stage in a very powerful, intense production.


The costumes, as replicated from that era, were lavish and colourful...and since I want to do a proper review, I will just post some of the scenes from this production.


The stage properties were lavish:





( a few more scenes from the play )

I will do a more detailed review later, off to Ranga Shankara to see some great theatre-related screenings for now...



*

This is a clear illustration of what a photograph means to different people.

I wanted to post a message for Deepavali on my blog, and decided to try out online editing on Photobucket and I chose a (yes, I admit it) somewhat random photograph for the trial, and since I was running out of time, posted the pic with the message added.

Comments as usual were few, but when I met a friend over the weekend, I asked why s/he had not commented. "Why did you choose THAT photograph?" this person asked.

To this person, the quality of the photograph is more important than the message, so the feeling was that the less-than-desired quality of the photograph did not merit a reciprocal comment.

To me, the documentation of the message ("Happy Deepavali") is more important than whether the flowers are in focus and crisp and clear and the photo is well-composed.

Different strokes for different folks! Now, when I see no comments, I don't know if it's the bad photograph that people are refraining from criticising, or the message itself is not important enough for them to respond to...

Hm. Something to be mulled over!


So meanwhile, here's a less-than-perfect, but to me, lovely photograph of the very pretty girl who played the part of the heroine of "Choon Hyang", a Korean musical by 20 children from Theatre Seoul, the review of which I will be putting up on Citizen Matters shortly.... it was a wonderful way to spend a birthday, with friends, watching children from a land far away, dance, and sing, and entertain us.....





A thing (or a human being) of beauty IS a joy forever!




*

I was feeling very sick the entire day, and in the evening I was overcome (that's the only word to describe the craving that came over me...overcame me!) by a longing for chocolate, so I went and got a bar from the friendly neighbourhood calorie store.




Having done that, I put half the bar down and decided I would have it only as an after-dinner treat; so I put it down and went off to see a play (Common Man, by Yours Truly theatre, the improvisation by the cast was excellent, though I have seen the play earlier, too). I resolutely did NOT look at it before dinner.

But now....ah...I sat down here, and it's such a warm, inviting smell. I savour the aroma deeply. Bangalore is cool enough that when I pick it up with my fingers, the bar doesn't go gooey all over them, and force me to eat it immediately. I can nibble the edges and feel the deliciousness of the chocolate in my mouth. I am afraid, glutton that I am, that my being is concentrated in my mouth and taste buds for a few seconds. The chocolate quite literally melts in the mouth (and this is the common-or-garden chocolate by Cadbury's, not any gourmet stuff.) I know that it's going to grin at me from various points on my body when I look in the mirror in a few days, but I care not a whit.

I am not fond of white chocolate, and would prefer dark chocolate, but today, any chocolate would do...and did. No woman wailed for her demon lover with the determination that I went off with, to buy that single bar!



I love chocolate from Cadbury's to Godiva to those fancy liqueur-filled chocs; I would be hard put to decide if I liked Ferrero Rocher better than Tobler One; I would probably ask for several samples of each to help me decide....

And a strange thing...I love having chocolate with sips of water in between, I can never figure out why. I will drink more than half a litre of water with the amount of chocolate in this pic.

I still remember with regret that we were driving from the US into Canada, and at the duty-free I saw a large bottle of Cadbury's chocolate liqueur. I was persuaded to buy it on the way back..and that never happened, becuase the bottle was gone when we returned a few days later.

Oooh...chocolate...when I die, I hope that if I have a tombstone, instead of being inscribed as the late Deponti, I will be entered as the choco-late Deponti....

beast666...this post is dedicated to you!

Tags: chocolate, love, photography, ranga shankara, theatre

Went to a great play (well, a series of narrative dramatizations actually) at Ranga Shankara this evening, it was very enjoyable and the review is at


http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/06/06/retell-at-ranga-shankara/




and meanwhile, here, in MUO (My Umble Opinion, hah, gotcha there, you thought I would say IMHO, didn't you?), is the most beautiful Hollywood actress I have seen.....this poster is up at Ranga Shankara, and I could not resist this beauty....





I could look at her forever....

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/06/01/lilies-and-the-stronger-at-ranga-shankara/

I enjoyed writing these reviews...!

I realize that I hardly ever give my Metblog posts URL's here...well, here's a review *I* think I wrote well...


http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/04/02/common-man-at-ranga-shankara/#more-1580

Yesterday, A was down again, and decided that the best way to cheer herself up was to go to a play; so she chose the Kirkwood Theater Guild , where there was a production of The Fourth Wall by A R Gurney , an American playwright.


The play was very much in the style of Ibsen and Shaw, both of whom were extensively quoted in the course of the action...and though I felt that the cast were rather self-conscious (well,it was a self-referential, deconstructionist play to begin with) about their being actors on a stage, they warmed up as the play went on , and it became very enjoyable. Much of the political humour, though, it topical, and the playwright would have to keep updating it or changing it if the play is not to become dated or stale. Steve Callahan was Roger, Ken Lopinot as Floyd (an excellent comic assay), Colleen Malone was Julia, and Janet Roby Schwartz was Peggy. Jan Meyer directed the play, and Danny Austin was the asst. director.


( more details that won't be of interest to anyone else but me )

As part of the ongoing struggle to prevent our esteemed government from razing trees to make broader roads, four of us went down Kasturba Road, that abuts Cubbon Park, today. It was a wonderful walk in one sense, because starting from the Karunashraya at the corner,








( for some more pictures of Kasturba Road, click here )




Tomorrow we take our huntin'-shootin'-fishin' guest to Galibore, to show him a forest and a river where huntin', shootin' and fishin' (except for catch-and-release) are NOT permitted!

However, because of his interests, our guest is excellent at spotting birds...so he's going to be a great help in whatever photography KM and I do tomorrow!

Have a great Sunday, everyone...I love my life and I wish everyone were as happy as I am...

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/10/the_ranga_shankara_theatre_fes.phtml


95% enjoyable,and the 5% is the unfriendly way they have organized the sales to the limited-audience plays at 10pm and 11pm...it is an illogical, user-unfriendly method.

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/10/lack_of_transparency_in_ranga.phtml

I don't like such things happening...

It has been a busy few days; several plays to attend, a friend to help with her boutique setting-up, two weddings today...I am never very comfortable when I don't have spare time, I like to be a person of leisure!

But one thing I do nowadays is cart along my beloved S3 wherever, and whenever...when I went to see what festivities were happening for the 1000th performance of Ranga Shankara, I was able to make this photo-post for Metroblogs:


http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/09/1000th_performance_at_ranga_sh.phtml


and this morning, when we returning from Wedding no.2, this caught my eye:






The blue,green,brown and yellow, and the rounded, ripe shape of the fruit..don't they make a lovely picture! aaskie...don't look! ;-)


We have such a wide variety of bananas and plantains in our country, from the cheap to the *rather* expensive (not very, because bananas are always at the cheap end of the spectrum for fruit...it's those New Zealand apples and kiwi fruits that make you feel like locking them up carefully after you buy them!)...my favourites are the green banana, and the elakki, a tiny banana that has the faint, elusive flavour of cardamom which gives it the name.

Banana....as the little girl said, "I *know* how to spell 'banana'...I just don't know when to stop!"

Review of Shakuntala Remembered at Ranga Shankara (today) for Metroblogs:

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/08/shakuntala_remembered_at_ranga.phtml


All of us (we went in a group of 4) were also annoyed at the rates of admission being 150 rupees, surely, quite expensive for a play which seems to have so much financial support...


What a contrast with the play, "To the Death of my own family" which I watched two Saturdays ago....Farah Bala gripped us from the word go, with a superb play by David Meth! She played several characters of an Afghan family which goes back to Afghanistan from the US, is decimated, and of which only one daughter comes back alive to the US, where she has been born and brought up, only to be treated with suspicion by the Immigration Department...the direction of the play by Peter Ratray was superb, too...what started as a 10 minute play evolved into an hour's presentation, and had us coming home with Farah's wonderful acting and deep sincerity to her craft etched in our minds.

You can find out more about "To The Death Of My Own Family" at

http://web.mac.com/dlm67

(that's the URL the simply designed, but excellent, brochure, gives.)

After the play there was a 15 minute interactive session which was also very good.

Well...fair play or foul, I go to everything I can at Ranga Shankara...!

...

Yes, it's pretty late, I have dinner to clear away and stuff to keep ready (torch, birdbook, those oranges I bought for the journey)...but I want to post about the play I saw today.

Rafiki is one of my favourite theatre groups. They have been around for more than ten years now. They address, through theatre,  various forms of discrimination, and I have seen them stage some superb productions of Athol Fougard, the South African playwright, whose plays are about apartheid. Today's play was more a series of vignettes, about what would happen if Jesus (Morena) were to come back and see what South Africa is today.

The actors...Sunil and Anish...were just superb, as always. The intensity, the integrity and the honesty which Rafiki's actors bring to the stage is just amazing. And today, the production values were excellent too. Lights went on and off at precisely the right times.

But...the play ("Woza" means, "Rise!") didn't quite woza up to my expectations. The situations fell between comedy and seriousness and it was uncomfortable to titter while being seriously addressed. And I did feel the play went on a tad too long.

But that said, Rafiki lived up to their own high standards of theatre...a great pity that the elderly couple I was with had to go home and I could not stay for the post-play discussion that is a feature of Rafiki productions.

My favourite theatre group is still doing great work .All the best to them in the years ahead!

....

Two good names in the area of theatre...I went to see "Flowers" yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Impressive, with Rajit Kapoor doing a great job of remembering, word-perfect, a monologue of more than 70 minutes....But I do have some reservations about having too-simple props and no relief at all.....it would have been better if the intensity had had some relief.

Also, I took the front row very happily, only to have the actor tower over me in the set and I had to crane my neck for all that time....nitpicking, I know, but the nit is there to be picked.

What do you think, usha123? You were there too..and deepsan...were you there?

Will be going to see the Bengali plays, probably....

....

A couple of weeks ago, watched a Monty Python spoof and a Hamlet spoof by a local theatre group, which made a foul play of it...yesterday, watched Evam of Chennai do the same thing...it had me laughing uncontrollably! Evam is a very professional group, their comic timing is excellent, and they ad lib superbly too. What a difference the production makes! We had a great evening, and came home with our spirits lifted...nice to laugh like this once in a while!

Saw a play today at Ranga Shankara by that name. The play was very good, the two actors (of course it was an actor and an actress, but now that word "actress" is not a good one to use for some reason) were excellent, and we enjoyed ourselves even though every four letter word imaginable and some not-used-even-today-in-daily-conversation six-letter words were strung through the script. It was extremely funny and sometimes also moving.

But there was NO brochure about the play or the troupe, no introduction to the cast, the crew, the director..That part of it was HUGELY unsatisfying.

If you can...go see the play tomorrow at the same venue...and let me know what you thought.