wow, what great juicy delecious stuff. I'm full and couldn't finish the course all in one sitting. Thanks for those Cal and Grieg!
"Damn you dirty apes!"--Charelton Heston
Got 'Gull? My New York, Natalie-sponsored journal.
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 jedijetboy |
Re: WOW!! | |||
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Posts: 1166 (08/20/01 13:24:45) |
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Je Laime |
I'm not dead. | |||
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Posts: 837 (08/20/01 15:04:20) |
I'm not dead. There was someone shot and killed in the line/at the park the other night. I don't have too many details yet. I had planned to stay that night -- I even got my place in line, but then I just didn't feel like staying and went home.
Anyhow, my lack of posts and continuation of my story is due to that my internet server is up for the month, and I have to use the library's computer. Damn, my time's up. More later. g |
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Cal |
Re: Got 'Gull? My New York, Natalie-sponsored journal. | |||
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Posts: 5265 (08/20/01 23:03:06) iceskater |
Thanks for the sweet words, choconat. I was thinking of you when we were at the play and I wanted you to feel like you were there, too. I really have a good memory of the Seagull and Natalie as Nina. She was as good as in her other roles and this character was more complex. And I agree that Natalie is tough and strong and she will better herself in life through acting in this play and accepting any reviews, good or bad.
Glad you're okay, Greg. AJR at np2k said a "bum" had been shot during the night, right near where the line forms. He claims to have photos and interviews (of the corpse?? let's hope not). I can understand your uneasy feeling about being around there. I also heard the line up time was earlier, like 8pm or you don't get a ticket. Is it true? Good luck with your internet access. Can't wait to hear more Seagull news. Cal |
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Northernboy |
Re: Spotlight on Natalie Portman | |||
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Posts: 3164 (08/20/01 23:59:21)
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Oh man, what a great review!
 Thank-you so much Cal! Your description of the play was so vivid, I could imagine myself watching it. Some of my favorite quotes from your review: Quote:-Cal ***drool*** Quote: -CAL I'll bet he's the one who suggested that they make the scene a little hotter! Quote: I'm going to be dreaming about this tonight!  Quote:- Euripides trousers Kevin Kline..... BASTARD! To Cal, Greg, JC,and Floothe, I'm loving these reviews and insights, so keep em coming!
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Bluejay |
Re: Spotlight on Natalie Portman | |||
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Posts: 4695 (08/21/01 00:19:38) |
Wow ... Mr. Floothe, Mr. JC, Mr. G, and Ms. Cal ... thank you all for your comments and reports!
Mr. G ... I am pleased that you are still with us in this world! Ms. Cal, your writing is superb. Have you ever considered writing romance novels?  Here's hoping that a Broadway run is in the works. Bluejay 
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floothe |
Re: Spotlight on Natalie Portman-The Great Deliciousness | |||
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Posts: 7201 (08/21/01 01:54:38) Namaste (Admin) |
(dropping my jaw) That was magnificent Cal!!
Holy details!! There are a lot of subtle physical things that you describe that I could not see as detailed as you described them. Thank you!! Ya know, as you were transcribing the last emotional scene there, I could feel myself start to become teary again. tee hee. I'm sure it was a combination of your vivid descriptions, my rememberance of witnessing that scene and the concept of her releasing all that emotion(acting or in real life) that gets me. Your play by play of the play really takes me back to the theatre to see it again. thank you so much!! Natalie was SO GOOD!! She was "That's NOT FAIR" GOOD. She was "that was not supposed to be possible but there she goes and does it" GOOD. But that's just me. Cripes!!! Je Laime, I'm massively glad you are OK. What the hammer was that all about? I gotta say that I'm enjoying reading all the comments and the replies to all the reviews as well!!! What a great bunch that exists here at the board!! Beautiful!! it's a dream and she's got stamina, floothe "As a boy, I dreamed of being a baseball. But today I say we must move forwards not backwards, upwards not forwards and always twirling, twirling, TWIRLING TOWARDS FREEDOM!'-Kang or Kodos
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JCar0801 |
YAY..AUSSIE NEWSPAPER HAILS NAT!! | |||
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Posts: 1177 (08/21/01 03:31:15) |
"Brigantia tell us that the Sydney newspaper The Sunday Telegraph had a brief Natalie Portman mention:
Nat Treads The Boards Star Wars royal Natalie Portman has proved a hit on stage. The beautiful girl from Beautiful Girls performed in Chekhov's play The Seagull, performed outdoors in New York's Central Park last week. Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Marcia Gay Harden are the major scene stealers in the Mike Nichols production. But Natalie Portman, who plays aspiring actor Nina, has won over the audiences. This article was accompanied with a photo of Natalie in her white Queen Amidala costume with the caption "Stage Presence: Natalie Portman as Star Wars fans know her."" http://www.theforce.net/holonet/index.html#11982 |
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choconat |
Cal... | |||
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Posts: 392 (08/21/01 07:53:46) |
Hey Cal you remember me during you watched the Seagull??
 OMG!!! She remember me!!!  *if u want to make me feel better, I really appreciate it!!* Thank you Cal!!  This board has given me so much. thx..... Lots of nice ppl, superb writers or reviewers and true Portmanians here. Once a champ, forever a champ. No one will remember loser. Go and beat 'em all! Keep your faith alive.
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Cal |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 5265 (08/21/01 10:20:47) iceskater |
Thanks for the compliments, all. I enjoyed writing about the Natalie scenes and I will have a stronger memory of the play now that I wrote it down. Greg and I were wishing all of you could have been there with us. Yes -- I did think of you especially, choconat. I put the emphasis on the sexy parts and Natalie's appearance for northernboy, bluejay, and euripides trousers (and for all the other fans -- Natalie was truly beautiful and looked like a mature woman on stage, and she was sweet and beautiful in person, too). I couldn't quite remember who had what fetish, but I thought the romancy description of Natalie in her Victorian gear (the little boots were cute) would win over a lot of hearts. I purposely tried not to get too raunchy in my language and physical descriptions, but it was tempting.... Sorry I couldn't be more detailed about her nostrils, Bluejay. I think they were flaring quite a bit, especially in the yummy, tension filled scenes with Kline. And I'm thinking Natalie is smaller than 5'2" -- the boots probably had a 2 to 3 inch heel. She looks very petite especially in comparison to the other actors in the posed cast photos.
There is a nice review of Natalie's performance at natalieportman.com Cal |
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choconat |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 392 (08/21/01 10:48:26) |
Once a champ, forever a champ. No one will remember loser. Go and beat 'em all! Keep your faith alive.
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Je Laime |
More chapters on its way in the near future. | |||
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Posts: 837 (08/21/01 14:23:56) |
I wish I had more time to read and comment on everything here right now, but with only 30-minutes at the library, I hardly have enough time to check my mail. I'll have to plan out what sections to cut and paste the night before I come here, that way I actually have time to do it. Unlike right now, I only have 6-minutes left.
Gosh, September 1 seems to far away. I spend way too much time online, that's for sure. g |
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Bluejay |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 4695 (08/21/01 20:38:36) |
[Sorry I couldn't be more detailed about her nostrils, Bluejay. I think they were flaring quite a bit ....]- Ms. Cal
Thanks, Ms. Cal! It's ok, I'm imagining ... the scenes ... right ... about ... now. Bluejay
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Unregistered(d) |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 0 (08/22/01 07:47:41) |
Thanks again, Cal
I couldn't quite remember who had what fetish,-Cal Fetishes Bluejay=nostrils, bisexual women, ears(?) nb=i'm not sure me=feet, high heels, boots, legs, corsets, narrow waists ... um, I'll stop there.  PortmanRules=(I'm frightened to think) To quote PortmanRules, "I'm not abnormal, am I?" "The only deadly sin I know is cynicism" - Henry Lewis Stimson
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Northernboy |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 3164 (08/22/01 22:38:57)
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euripides trousers, I'm not sure if this qualifies as a fetish, but I've always been a little fixated on Natalie's delicious pink gums.
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Radish |
Re: Got 'Gull? My New York, Natalie-sponsored journal. | |||
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Posts: 1142 (08/22/01 22:51:32) |
"Natalie's delicious pink gums"
Yep, NB, I think that is a fetish..But remember, there are very sharp, shiny white teeth potruding from those erotic gums Radish
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Unregistered(d) |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 0 (08/23/01 08:19:53) |
nb
Yes, Natalie does have a great set of healthy gums which she shows when she smiles ... like in the last shot of Episode I. Sorry to drag this thread off on a tangent but here is a good illustration of Nat's beautiful hip/waist ratio. (This is my new favourite Natalie picture, thanks Natalie Portman, Naturally Queen) Imagine that waist nipped in a few more inches  "The only deadly sin I know is cynicism" - Henry Lewis Stimson
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Spyder49ers |
Re: Cal... | |||
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Posts: 1162 (08/23/01 14:05:18) |
Well I finally found time to read all your reviews Greg and Cal.
foothe are you going to do a review too? I laugh, I cried, I had to force myself to stop reading to go to the bathroom. Greg My faorite qoute was from one of yours first review: "I mean, I guess its quite possibly that they could have been laced with PCP or spiked with any number of things I wouldnt want to imagine, but the chances were slim, and had that happened Im sure we would have had a great time running nude through the Park before being escorted to some detox unit. Well, at least it would have made for an interesting and authentic extra few chapters!" I think that would be very entertaining. Thanks for the great reviews, do tell more. Cal Glad to hear you love the play. To bad I was not there to enjoy it with you both. There is nothing better then laying on a pee stinking sidewalk, in 100 degrees weather for a long time with a bunch of strangers. (kidding) Love both of yours and Greg reviews, as I said before, I just couldn't stop reading. Thanks Spyder-man (Thanks) Web Master Of "The True Professional"
The major religions of the world will never fade away because faith will not allow that to happen. -Raisin |
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Ex Death3000 |
Re: Got 'Gull? My New York, Natalie-sponsored journal. | |||
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Posts: 3 (08/23/01 15:27:09) |
I bet most of you guys go see the "seagull" cuz ya like nat
that's pathetic!!!  |
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Socguy |
Re: Got 'Gull? My New York, Natalie-sponsored journal. | |||
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Posts: 238 (08/23/01 18:24:29) |
Well I bet most of us have not seen "The Seagull" because we dont live in New York.
EX, ???????? -Socguy
I can be found at Soccer and Entertainment Boards |
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JCar0801 |
Bravo to Mimi Kramer.. | |||
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Posts: 1177 (08/24/01 03:04:11) |
Theater
Mimi Kramer The Seagull Everyone remembers two things about The Seagull, the first lines and the last. "Why do you always wear black?" the dull schoolmaster, Medvedenko, asks Masha at the top of the show. "Im in mourning for my life," she replies. Even people who have never seen or read the play seem to know this exchange, just as they seem to remember that The Seagull is the Chekhov play that ends with the words "Konstantins shot himself." What Dorn says sotto voce to Trigorin at the end of Tom Stoppards version of the playthe one being used in the Mike Nichols production currently running in Central Parkis "The fact is hes shot himself." Konstantin has already tried to commit suicide once before in the play. Still, it struck me for the first time during a recent performance as a curiously prosaic way to announce deaththe fact isas though the doctor were correcting someone on a minor point of bureaucratic procedure. I later checked all the translations I could get my hands on and found that, while each chose a different permutation of Treplevs name (which Stoppard leaves out entirely), all included that strange little phrase. It made me wonder what the Russian was. Why "the fact is" rather than a more stately "the truth is," say, or even "actually," which though mundane would get to the point faster? Stoppard, in an introduction to the published edition of his version, is briefly witty on the subject of such niceties. Hes amusing on the subject of Mashas famous line, for instance. Quoting the translation by George Calderon ("Im in mourning for my life. I am unhappy") used in the plays first-ever English performance, at Glasgows Royal Theater in 1909, Stoppard writes: "Im" and "I am:" the translators mill grinds exceeding small... But such things are important. I once heard an actor in the UK argue that you could pretty much gauge the caliber of a production of The Seagull on how the actress playing Masha had been directed to play this very line. "Everyone always thinks Masha is being serious and Chekhovian when shes being flippant," he said and illustratedsnapping out, "Im in mourning for my life!" so that she meant only, "Go away and leave me alone, you tiresome fool!" The text bears him out, I think. No one would follow up such a pronouncement with "I am unhappy" unless they were relenting, apologizing for a moment of shrewishness. Theres a third thing that people who have seen The Seagull at one time or another could be expected to remember, and that is all the title-related imagery. Its relentless, unbearable, the only time Chekhov ever seems to have descended into Ibsenity. First Nina spells it out for us: in an early love scene with Konstantin, confiding her feelings of identification with the bird. Then Konstantin makes it concrete: midway through Act II he lays the body of a gull he has just shot at her feet. Not long after, seeing it there, Trigorin begins making notes for a plot that prefigures the callous relationship he is about to embark on with Nina: Idea for a storyyoung girl, like you, brought up on the shores of a lake. She loves the lake like a seagull and is happy and free just like a seagull. Then a man happens to come along, he sees her, and having nothing much to do, destroys her, like this seagull. (Stoppards version) Still later, when Ninas ruin is completejust after weve heard from Konstantin the trajectory of her fate and shortly before the end of the playwe learn that Trigorin had asked Mashas father to have the gull Konstantin shot stuffed and mounted, like a trophy. Trigorin doesnt remember a thing about it. One of the lovely things about Nichols production is the painless way all this bird business seems to flit by without drama or fuss. So light and quick is the directors touch that we scarcely notice the avoirdupois of the symbolism. Since the play went up last month, it has inspired two antithetical reactions, loathing and bliss, representative, I think, of opposing notions on how Chekhov should be performed. Ben Brantley, in the Times, gave the production a "mixed" review, but really this was just the Times critic being polite. (Ordinary folk who experienced the production as a travesty seem to feel Brantley had got it right.) Brantley likes his Chekhov gloomy. Hes indicated as much, faulting other productions for mining the material for comedy. I happen to think this view wrong-headed, and that it derives more from history and the circumstances under which Chekhovs work arrived in America than it does from either stage-sense or literary sensibility. American views of Chekhov are largely informed by a misconception formed on the occasion of the Moscow Art Theaters first visit to America in 1923 (and handed down from one generation of professional intellectuals to another), that the way the MAT did Chekhov was the right way to do it. The MAT, after all, was Chekhovs own company and Stanislavskys. In fact, by 1923 the Moscow Art Theater was on its last legs, a petrified Soviet version of itself, desperate for money and without any artistic leadership at all. In reality, the American tour was part of a huge and aggressively hyped p.r. stunt; the companys brilliant heydaywhich was never all that brilliant to begin withhad ended more than 10 years before the revolution. Nevertheless, at that time a link was forged in the American mind between Chekhov and the version of Stanislavsky that some of his ambitious would-be disciples began to teach and in lectures that toute influential New York flocked to. It was a style that saw Chekhovs characters as they view each other, or as they say they do. Typically, therefore, in American productions of The Seagull Nina has been cast and played as Konstantin sees herlovely and nubile, a fairy princess locked away in her towerwhile Konstantin has been played as a loser and self-involved crybaby because that is his mothers perception. This doesnt make for a very interesting or textured theatrical experience. Nor is it really in keeping with the literary concerns of the play, which, inasmuch as its a play about theater and how theater should be made, revolve around the discrepancies between human perceptions of reality and human depictions of it. Practically everyone in the play is either a commentator on life (like Sorin, Masha, Medvedenko) or on art (like the doctor and Sorins estate manager Shamaev) or someone who (like Arkadina, Trigorin, Konstantin and Nina) tries to make a living depicting it. The current production presents these characters as weve rarely seen them. Natalie Portmans Nina is breathtakingly ordinary, a plain little thing with no visible soul or passion and a tendency to belch nervous laughter. Meryl Streeps Arkadina is neither overbearing nor monstrously flamboyant but charmingly so, and Kevin Klines Trigorin is utterly enchantingwere fairly bombarded with the charm Konstantin claims to be unable to detect. As Shamrayev, the estate manager, and his wife Polina, John Goodman and Debra Monk seem underused, but everyone else is achieving the very kind of transcendence that The Seagull, more than any other of Chekhovs plays, is fundamentally about. As Masha and Sorin, on the face of it the plays two unhappiest characters, Marcia Gay Harden and Christopher Walken are funny enough to be drawing exit ovations. Its a chance to see in full flower the wit thats always lurked beneath Walkens performances. Popular opinion has it that Streep and Kline are giving the take-home performances, but what blew me away was Philip Seymour Hoffmans restrained and studiously untiresome Konstantin. Not only is he most assuredly not an asshole, but up until the end he seems like the most stable character in the piece, and even when he begins to teeter its without any whisper of whining. This is Treplev-as-Chekhov more than Treplev-as-Hamlet. Of course, Konstantin-the-experimental-playwright-turned-fiction-writer is only one of three portraits of himself that Chekhov was drawing. Theres also Dorn who, like Chekhov, is a doctor, and Trigorin who, after all, writes the kinds of short stories that Chekhov wrote. (Stoppard notes in his introduction that at one point Trigorin speaksinexplicablylike a playwright.) One of the things this production acknowledges so beautifully is the plays relation to realitywhich is essentially contrarian. Bob Crowleys Act I set is both a symphony of non-realism and an ostentatious refusal to use reality itself. Rather than capitalize on the productions outdoor setting at the Delacorte, he has constructed a breathtaking vista of artificial trees and landscaping with an ivy-covered structure that draws attention to its very fakery. Which is precisely what Chekhov was trying to do. The playwhich was famously a flop in its first production, before the MAT got its hands on itwas Chekhovs demonstration that you could take all the conventional elements of melodrama, from youth defiled and too-full-figured imagery to the final offstage gunshotand make of it something that wasnt melodrama but wasnt realism either. For Chekhov that stuffed bird isnt Nina, its art itself, made into a lifeless trophy through the very sort of misguided attempt to portray life exactly as it is that has made so much Chekhovand in a previous era, so much American actingso boring for so many years. http://www.nypress.com/14/34/news&columns/theater.cfm |
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