OSCON report at NewsForge

To fill in the OSCON picture a little, here is Joe Brockmeier's report at NewsForge:

1. Day one at OSCON
2. OSCON day 2
3. OSCON kicks into full gear
4. OSCON day four: Zen and tomatoes

A fine day out

Went to the Lamplighters production of Ruddygore, taking jilara along instead of our stick-in-the-mud Younger Daughter. Her loss. The Lamplighters did an excellent job, as usual, though the sets were a little too minimalistic for my taste. Basically sketch-like, two-dimensional flats; the scenes where the pictures step out of their frames was done by pulling up the flats, to reveal a distant backdrop of clouds in a night sky. I really preferred the old sets, where the picture frames held a painted scrim that was pulled away to allow the ancestors to step through.

The music, however, was completely up to Lamplighter standards. Ruddygore (that's the original name, btw, before it was changed to Ruddigore so as not to offend tender Victorian sensibilities) has some of the finest music of any G&S -- the silly songs are appropriately silly, the tender love songs are among their prettiest, and the overture and "The Dead of the Night's High Noon" are just plain awesome.

I realized sometime during the second act that the right way for me to do "I Have a Song to Sing, Oh" (from Yeomen of the Guard -- it's one I've been wanting work on for quite some time) in concert would be to open with the verses from the first act, and close with the two verses from the finale. Duh.

Driving home, we saw a curtain of slanted dark streaks coming down from a cloud, which I identified as rain that was probably evaporating before it hit the ground. Further evidence was provided about 10 minutes later as a little patch of rainbow appeared in front of the streaks. Total confirmation came as we were on our way to dinner after picking up the Y D at home -- a sprinkling of large raindrops.