The Stagelights Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

This review is so old that I think I saw a cobweb.

The CreComms were tasked with reviewing "The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz," a romp through the unsexy sexy lives of Mennonite farmers.

The play, created by past CreComm CreWriting instructor Armin Wiebe, follows the drama of Obrum Kehler and his wife, Susch, as they bring a broken piano and the broken Beethoven Blatz into their home.

Things start getting a bit tricky, however, when Obrum leaves Susch and Blatz alone while he goes off to work. And Teen, Susch's best girl friend, makes things even trickier.

The play's low German inflected dialogue was engaging, funny and difficult. Blatz was irritatingly dreamy - quite the opposite of the down-to-business Teen.

Wiebe says that he had originally wrote the play to take place in periods of darkness, hence why Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" featured prominently throughout. The entire play, due to production decisions, was featured in the light. Makes good sense, but the audience is in for an eyeful.

Wiebe also noted that Beethoven originally wrote the sonata after overhearing a blind girl playing one of his pieces. When he went to see her, moonlight poured onto the piano as she played. The sonata writing, and Beethoven himself, are mirrored throughout the play through Blatz's manic episodes, composed sonata (written for Sonja, his true love, which is transferred onto Susch) and through the actual Moonlight Sonata, which plays throughout.

The play was successful and humorous, making biblical references, Mennonite cultural references (Brummtopp, anyone?) and musical references throughout. The only thing that bothered me was the ending, which I felt was cheery and ambiguous given the situation these characters find themselves in.

3.5 out of 5.

For more information on Armin Wiebe and his work, visit www.arminwiebe.com.

If I see another restaurant makeover show I will go on a hunger strike

So tonight was the Restaurant: Impossible premiere (although it's been airing in the US since January) and I have one word: yawn. The trend is half-baked and overdone. The British are coming! The British are coming!

I admit that I have had my months of Gordon Ramsay addiction issues, even enrolling in GRA (Gordon Ramsay Anonymous, something totally made up). He's like the guy who doesn't pat you on the back to find the best place to stick the knife, he stabs you first then goes out looking for a paramedic.

I get that entertainment is everyone's main priority and it gets the ratings and blah blah. Hell's Kitchen was fun, although he was too much of a prick at times. Then there's Kitchen Nightmares, basically a documentary on the atrocity that is British food.

Then Heston Blumenthal, the executive chef at Fat Duck in England, and my bald soulmate, took on Little Chef's menu (like revamping the British Smitty's).

Then Jamie Oliver started making over the British school system by revamping cafeterias (which is a fine thing to do, but who's going to trust that a millionaire is working in the country's best interests?)

Now Robert Irvine, our Canadian muscley friend from Dinner: Impossible, who is also British, is making restaurants over. We already have a slough of makeover shows plus the British ones, such as David Adjey's the Opener and Restaurant Makeover. Why not add another one for good measure?

The ultimate irony is that the problem with society isn't that there are too many bad restaurants; the problem is that there's too MANY restaurants. So instead of teaching us how to cook, you've replaced hours of valuable training time on the Food Network with gourmet chefs entering rookie territory.

If you want obesity rates to go down, quit replacing cooking shows with shows that showcase the industry. 80% of restaurants fail in the first 3 years of opening. Why? Because people rely on chains that make things 40% more fattening than if you had cooked it. Educate us on chains then, not some poor bastards trying to make a business out of something that wasn't their destiny to begin with.

I get that food is a necessity and that having lazy, untrained and uneducated locals in charge of your health is a nightmare in itself, because people put a certain blind faith into food that they don't into many other things. It's nice that Michelin star chefs want to pass along their success, but only 1-2% of chefs are at that level. Something that should be easy and fair trade and organic and local in theory (because they seem to think everyone has access to the freshest produce and proteins in the world at 4 am because they do) turns into a viscious expense for people who just aren't trained, educated or have the resources. French fries require little brain power and are cheap and reliable.

British invaders, I love you but start cooking again instead of showing off. It would be much more cheritable to drive the idea home that people should cook through cooking shows than to drive us to a revamped restaurant.

NYC

Last year in November I went to NYC by myself to meet someone I never met. He was from Jamaica. Everyone thought it was shady. I didn't.

I must be more brave than I give myself credit for. I booked the flight on a Thursday and was on the plane the following Friday. I went for 3 days, which seems like no time, but it's enough time to see things. There are people in NYC who have lived there all their lives and haven't seen everything.

People paint NYC as this glamorous place full of beautiful, artsy, rich people: like the rainier, colder, moodier L.A. But in all honesty, everything is so cramped and so many different messages are flying at you by the thousands that you miss things quite easily. There are just simply TOO many people and businesses to have one thing really stand out. Everything just starts to blur together. Everyone starts looking the same. But maybe after living there and seeing people, people and more people, certain people start standing out.

For those who have never been, NYC is basically millions of people living in tiny, cramped apartments that are built with weird angles. The kitchens are barely big enough to open the oven all the way. They are cramped together with a 2x2 rectangle of landscaping in the front, followed by a fence. You have to walk about 10 blocks to get to the subway station. The roads are like huge parking lots where you drive down the middle and cars are parked perpendicular to you rather than parallel. 90% of apartment buildings are walkups. It is NEVER ENDING apartment blocks. There are no houses that aren't duplexes. Everybody lives in an apartment. They take the subway or train to work in the morning and take it back home again, and that's really all there is to NYC. Get in, get out.

Manhattan is absolutely dead on Sundays because the city is built to ship people in to work and then ship them directly out again. When I say dead I mean streets were empty and I only saw a couple hundred people. But on weekdays it looks like a sea of heads and suits. Not sure what happened that Sunday: either they were in church, having brunch, or gone home. Maybe it was Thanksgiving around that time so nobody was out. The only people down there were the ones who were shopping or at the park. Manhattan is like an oasis after being in the other parts of the city, but people literally have to cut their limbs off and sell them to live there. There's no place to live. I didn't see any celebrities (obviously, because I barely saw any people in general).

Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are brick after brick after brick after brick after water tower after water tower after water tower after garage after garage after garage after bridge after bridge after bridge. Nobody talks to each other in New York. It's lonely. And then you drive out to Connecticut, and the roads are nicer and the leaves are beautiful and there are outlet malls.

Every place is marked by its culture. In the Caribbean centers you can only find rice and peas and jerk chicken for blocks and blocks. Then you start moving into the Italian parts, where every building is a deli, an auto repair shop or a nail salon. The streets run at weird angles. But everything is available to you in every way. I just never seemed to be able to find anything.

All you hear are trains running over your head and you habituate to the brakes screeching. There are so many pigeons that people have to wash their cars every day. The roads run at weird angles.

I got a different (and accurate) perception of New York because of who I was with. No one had a gun, there were no drug deals going down, nothing like that. It was just how millions of people every day there live their lives.

There are many beautiful things in New York. The fact that they built it up to what it has become completely blows my mind. The bridges are beautiful (The Brooklyn Bridge is cliche but amazing). Little things, like seeing food in windows and constantly looking up until you're dizzy trying to see the tops of skyscrapers and the constant glare of neon signs are just different experiences. The subway system is an experience in itself because it's so well organized and fast.

Anyway, I'm naive so maybe others have great experiences. But I just seen it as a gigantic jungle of bricks with a big oasis in the middle. Or like inception, you know, like a dream within a dream.

I really liked the parks in Manhattan, especially after seeing nothing but massive apartment blocks for 2 days. I started seeing people there. People were out skating on little ponds that were made.

Anyway, my point is that you can't take a massive city and think it's all like Manhattan, because it really really really isn't. People want to live and work there because they think it's like Sex and the City, but it's far from it. I'm scared that if I lived there my mind would turn into a mash of schedule. Subway, work, work, subway, sleep, subway, work, work, subway, sleep. People go and stay in Manhattan and that's it, and those people are narrow-minded. I highly encourage people to go there and see as much of the city as they can. It is fascinating, massive, and lonely.