The Week in Entertainment

Live: Peter and the Starcatcher at the Hippodrome. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but this wasn't it ... which isn't to say I didn't love it, because I did. It was marvelous - funny as all get out and extremely well acted. Nabucco at the Lyric. This opera is a bit problematic if you think about it too much, but omg was this a fabulous cast. The young tenor Ta'u Pupu'a (who used to play football for the Ravens, in fact) was splendid - give him a couple more years to get his voice really in shape and he'll be dominating bel canto roles. But Francesca Mondanaro doesn't need any more time to be brilliant; her Abigaille ran this production, even more than Michael Chiolde's title role. The projections were ... iffy; showing us the Holocaust during Va pensiero didn't work (for me, anyway - one woman afterward said she'd cried). But overall it was a strongly sung production, and that's all Verdi ever needs.

Read: My Complete Cul de Sac came and I started in on that. (I never saw the earliest years in the papers.) The Cecy and Kate trilogy by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Regency + magic in epistolary format, lots of fun. The Chronicles of Joe Muller, an odd but engaging collection of short stories about a detective in the Austro-Hungarian Empire's police force. Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, a novella by John Scalzi that accompanies his upcoming new novel Lock In. And then because it was there, I reread Agent to the Stars, the very first Scalzi book I ever read. He's made a few little tweaks for the Kindle version, but it's the same story that hooked me in. Good thing the next I read was The Android's Dream, because that's when I knew this guy's books were going to be different.