Seeing Ragtime on stage is a vastly different experience from listening to it, and not just because it’s live theater. There’s so much context, so many connections, so much subtext that you don’t get from the songs alone. It’s very much a go-home-and-hug-your-kids kind of show.

I’ve been a fan of the music ever since we did a few songs from it in a revue back in college, but I’d never actually seen it until this month, when I caught 3D Theatricals’ production in Redondo Beach.

It’s a big show — forty-six people on stage, according to the director — and they turned in a great performance. The vocal standout, I thought, was the actress playing Mother. The actor playing Coalhouse had a very different voice than the one on the album, but he had physical presence and was able to really convey both his optimism in act one and his rage in act two. The character needs both to work.

Speaking of differences between the production and the cast album, I should note: when you just have the highlights, Father comes off as just kind of clueless. When you have the full songs and the book, he’s a bit of an obstinate jerk.

I found myself struck by the layers of historical interpretation: It’s a modern production of a 15-year-old adaptation of a 40-year-old novel about life in America 100 years ago. And we’re still dealing with the same problems: Institutionalized racism and sexism, exploitation of the working poor, conflict over how to handle immigration. It really hit at the moment when authorities kill a young African-American because they think (wrongly) that she has a gun. You can argue that any historical fiction is as much about the present day as it is about the period it’s set in, and maybe it’s a matter of each era distilling the common themes from the older work, but it was telling (and disheartening) how topical the story still is.

I was reading at lunch today, mostly ignoring the music playing in the background, until my brain latched onto a familiar sequence of notes and started trying to place it. Wait… That couldn’t be a dance/pop version of “Popular” from “Wicked,” could it?

But I’d heard dance mixes of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” and the Smurfs theme, and a Techno version of “Phantom of the Opera.” So it might be…

There was too much noise to Shazam it, but a search for “Popular Wicked dance mix” found it on the first try: “Popular Song” by Mika and Ariana Grande.

Inside Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

I’m a bit late to the Shakespeare love floating around online today, but I did track down a few pictures from a 1999 trip to London. I had a few days at the end of a tour to wander around, and having just graduated with a drama degree, I had to visit the reconstructed Globe Theatre. I mean, seriously: Shakespeare.

I also stopped by the Criterion Theatre, where the RSC was presenting — no, the other RSC: The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

One of these days I’ll track down the negatives and get a better scan.

We saw Cirque du Soleil’s resident Los Angeles show last weekend. Cirque is always impressive, and IRIS has the usual collection of trapeze artists, contortionists, tumblers, ribbon flyers, and elaborate costumes you’d expect from one of their shows. This one stands out for several reasons:

  1. I like the history of movies, so all the thematic references to early cinema and classic movies were fun. The Dolby Theater is a great match for this look.
  2. They did a great job of mixing live performances with live and time-delayed video, giving it a very different look from most shows. (And as the program pointed out, the video effects react to the performers, not the other way around.)
  3. This is the first Cirque show I’ve seen in a long time where I enjoyed the clown performances as much as the acrobatics.

Some highlights:

  • The filmstrip act, where the performers walk through a series of identical rooms, each performing an action for a camera that plays back on a short delay, and each interacting with the previous performer’s recorded action.
  • The soundstage number at the opening of act two. I think the entire cast was onstage, all doing something different, all at the same time. An incredible illusion of chaos.
  • A film noir-style fistfight turned into a tumbling trampoline act.

The only disappointment was that act two felt a bit short, probably because the individual numbers were so long.

One more thing: this stretch of Hollywood Blvd is a bit odd if you’re not used to it: It’s sort of like walking around Comic-Con, except the people dressed as Jack Sparrow, Spider-Man and Hello Kitty are there for money instead of fun.