pierreism

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Celos (Estudio Abierto, 09.10.1983)’ by Daniela Romo

via 3Disco

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The Frogs | West End LIVE 2025

Dan Buckley and Kevin Mchale perform Invocation & Instructions To The Audience and Hades from Sondheim's The Frogs at West End LIVE 2025.

via OfficialLondonTheatre

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Bonus The Frogs related Sondheim nightmare fuel.

Dated 19 Apr 1983, courtesy of Bloomsbury Theatre's cursed revival. The cameraperson is unknown. But likely missing. And presumed dead.

via Thames News

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The Frogs, Southwark Playhouse, June 17, 2025

Brek-kek-kek-kek! This week I leapfrogged over to Southwark Playhouse and pulled up a froggy chair to another ribbiting Sondheim production - first performed in a Yale University swimming pool in 1974 with a student cast that included a young Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. ("I thought it would be a lark" Sondheim later reflected. "The result was a calamity".) Now arriving off-West End with Glee's Kevin McHale.

Written by Burt Shevelove adapting Aristophanes' eponymous 405BC play, it follows Greek demigod Dionysus and his slave Xanthias as they travel to the underworld to meet Pluto. It's there that they hope to bring playwright George Bernard Shaw back from the dead, so he can - through his words - re-inspire humanity. It also involves, for some reason, protracted debates between Shaw and Shakespeare as they quote themselves to each other from podiums.

The book, which in this production includes Nathan Lane's 2004 expansions, is as gangly as its amphibian counterpart. You can sense why Sondheim was trepidatious about the whole endeavour in Finishing The Hat. ("In Aristophanes' and Burt's hands, it had been an hour and a half long; it should have stayed that way.")

But bringing it back to the Bard, he doth protest too much methinks. The reason this little seen show is getting revived at all was never about the book. Compositionally The Frogs is an indulgent return to A Funny Thing Happened...* levity and farce. Just about every tune is a winsome crowd pleaser. (* also written by Shevelove)

"Parodos: The Frogs" in particular is about as good as Sondheim gets, a restlessly inventive choral piece sprung from the imitation of a frog's 'ribbits'. (In Georgie Rankcom's production, neon green-costumed dancers introduce themselves as "Frogs, of the pond / And the fronds we never go beyond" while aloft in arch-legged ballet). Rediscoveries of hidden gems like these will always justify revivals of these lesser-travelled Sondheims. And snatches of music here and there clearly carry the DNA of later works like Into The Woods and even Assassins.

Also shout out Jessie Tyler Ferguson for taking a break from his own Sondheim gig to catch the matinee I was at. I really wanted to let him know how fun he is in Here We Are, how otherworldly it is to be experiencing and performing Sondheim in London in the Summertime, but for some reason I stopped myself. I must've had a frog in my throa-[I AM IMMEDIATELY STUNG TO DEATH BY A THOUSAND BEES]

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The new Adam Curtis is out! This time centred around the rise and fall, and fall, and fall, of social cohesion over the course of the past few decades. The Guardian writes:

The new entrant is a five-part series called Shifty. It is a rare purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy. Come on in, guys, the water’s lovely! Though we can’t even agree that it’s wet any more. In Curtis’s trademark telling – a vast, kaleidoscopic assemblage of archive clips from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, pop videos, home videos, celebrity and political profiles and whatever else he has found that serves his purpose, cleverly curated, wittily juxtapositioned and bouncily soundtracked – the decline began, as so many seem to have done, with Margaret Thatcher.

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'Anna, quel particolare piacere (Opening Titles)’ by Luciano Michelini

A brassy Italian riff on a Lalo Schifrin-type fanfare, from the motion picture Anna, quel particolare piacere (1973)

via Easy Library

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L'HEURE ESPAGNOLE Ravel / GIANNI SCHICCHI Puccini – Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía

Two comic operas. In one, a clockmaker’s wife takes advantage of her husband’s absence to let in her lovers. In the other, a seemingly devout family discovers that they have been disinherited; the moral façade collapses and now it is just about the money. All this could be the stuff of tragedy - marital woes and a family torn apart over an inheritance - but Ravel and Puccini highlight the comedy, and therein lies the full force of these early 20th century jewels.

120 minutes. via OperaVision

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Peter Deming on Lost Highway (via Film at Lincoln Center)

Director of Photography Peter Deming discusses Lost Highway at a special screening of the film in memory of David Lynch, moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. Most of Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to yield to another. In Lost Highway we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch, and the arrival of his more radical expressionism—alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of industrial metal bands, and the tactile sensation that everything is really happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought. A Janus Films release.

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Here We Are at The National Theatre, 2025

(The gift shop.)

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Here We Are at The National Theatre, 2025

A café that promises everything yet has nothing. A French “post-deconstructivist” eaterie that serves up nihilism on a plate. Another that serves nothing but illusions. At the centre of all this confusion, Here We Are. Sondheim’s Buñuelian swansong is currently playing at the National Theatre and, having finally seen it, it deserves so much more than our obligatory respect. It’s an enigma begging to be explored, overanalyzed and picked apart with the same vocabulary we reserve for the likes of Samuel Beckett or David Lynch. At the same time it’s a work that actively resists that, because surrealism explained ceases to be surrealism. We’re back in paradox land, back to fractured narratives and back to debating the virtues of adventurous, slippery, abstract material. I’m sure Steve would’ve loved it all.

I feel bad for those who can't engage with anything beyond whether it has enough songs. It does! Sure, some are light and fleeting, like the pleasant soft-rumba "Marianne", an almost-number which ends as soon as it really begins. Some characters are missing solos which could have been used to flesh out the frenetic subplots. But everything sparks with the kind of wit and wordplay other writers could only dream of having.

Speaking of, dream logic is the only thing Here We Are truly adheres to. The resistive kind, where every step forward is a step back, up is down, yes is no, Café Everything has zilch and the Bishop is going through a crisis of faith. It is the ceci n’est pas une pipe of musical theatre. Certainty is constantly undermined by negation. It’s that dream where you recognise someone but their facial features are all a blur, then you try to complete a simple task like standing up, but something is stopping you.

Throughout the show, Marianne tries to remember something she was supposed to do that day but can’t. Leo supposedly invited everyone for brunch, but no one can pinpoint if that even happened. We are, as Tracie Bennett’s old maid says in an early play on words, “in - complete mystery.”

After familiarising myself with Ives’ absurdist plays, you can tell he gifted Sondheim the thing he was always looking for with his book writers: a conceptual challenge to work with and a vast canvas of possibility within a theme. The theme? Class warfare? Societal collapse? The nature of existence itself?

Easily covered within 2.5 hours I guess, which in the logic of surrealism is as good as eternity, or a nanosecond, or no time at all.

The two acts, modelled on The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeouise and The Exterminating Angel respectively, roughly hinge on the concept of wanting something vs. getting what you want, and neither being spiritually fulfilling. Rich playboy Raffael’s central philosophy forms the refrain: "Life's a tit, suck it up." By Act 2, all has been sucked dry. Enter, existential despair. Exit, all hope (pursued by a bear*)

Is this, as commonly read with Buñuel, a cosmic punishment on the bourgeoisie manifested by the underclass, invisible yet omnipresent, like the duo who clean the stage before the show while patrons are being seated, obsessively wiping mirrors, maybe in the hopes that their unwitting guests will finally see their true reflection?

Never intended to be a capstone, there are still fingerprints of the Sondheim canon throughout, whether from the restauranteur parade of nations (Pacific Overtures); Fritz’s fairytale tryst that turns out to be a hollow bore (Into The Woods); the love-obsessive soldier being a funhouse mirror reflection of Fosca in Passion; or Marianne’s rudderless existence, which ultimately gains purpose through action (Company). You can draw a direct line from this to 1964’s Anyone Can Whistle, his infamous nine-performance flop of similar ambition, with its avant garde fourth-wall breaks and dadaist (non)sensibility.

I had doubts, but I can’t not love a show that dances to the tempo of the surreal, resists tidy conclusions, embraces loose ends and undone knots. This is a puzzle with a piece that will always be missing. But it's also an open invitation for us to keep looking, to try and fill in the blanks, fix things, because that's the human condition. A career full of miracles ends with a miraculous final turn: Sondheim's last work is a lasting one.

*about that bear. Marianne can’t remember what she is supposed to do today, but her unlikely encounter, real or not, dreamed or not, is something she says she will always remember. This is a perfect summation of the theatric effect of Here We Are, and the common thread linking the theatre of the absurd, Bunuel, Surrealism, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, et al. The everyday is what we cocoon ourselves in until something comes along to shock, challenge and liberate us.

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Here We Are at The National Theatre, 2025

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Spaceballs 2 | Announcement

Begun, The Search For More Money, has...

via Amazon MGM Studios

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‘Yek (Single Edit)‘ by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin

from Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin album "Ghosted III," out on LP and digital by Drag City on August 29, 2025.

via Drag City

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'W1CC7T SH17' by Ouija Macc

Featured on his new album CHLORINE. Now streaming. (via)

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'Everybody Laughs' by David Byrne

Taken from 'Who Is The Sky?', the new album from David Byrne out September 5th on Matador Records. Pre-save / pre-order the album here: https://davidbyrne.mat-r.co/whoisthesky

via

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'My Baby (Got Nothing At All)' by Japanese Breakfast

The 40 second loop they posted on socials was already my song of the year but now that I have the full thing I can confirm that, yes, this is indeed my song of the year. From the motion picture soundtrack to Celine Song's Materialists (2025)

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'ｉｌｌｕｓｔｒａｔｏｒ’ by ｂｏｄｙｌｉｎｅ

Featured on the EP STAR OF THE WINDS. via Ｓoｕnｄ Ｓtａtｉoｎ