Classic update

The three little maids of Hot Mikado. Photos by Andrew Brilliant.

In one of the most famous songs in the The Mikado, Ko-Ko, the executioner who doesn't really want to kill anybody, sings about the "little list" he keeps of those who "never would be missed" if he ever did pull together the courage to exercise his professional prerogatives.

And in the middle of some of W.S. Gilbert's wittiest lyrics comes the following:

"The nigger serenader and the others of his race . . . I've got them on the list! They never would be missed!"

As many commentators say today: these lines are dropped in contemporary productions. And needless to say, they're never missed. No, they're never, ever missed.

Still, it's worth remembering that once the n-word was in The Mikado. And shocking as that racist smear seems in a such a charming confection (and it's all the more shocking because it's so offhand and unthinking), imagine the irony that must have weighed on the stars of Hot Mikado, the jazzy update with an African-American cast that Mike Todd produced for the New York World's Fair in 1939 (silent movie below; a similar update, Swing Mikado, had already played on Broadway). We have to imagine their feelings, because no record of their outrage - or resignation - exists; all we know is that they changed the line to "banjo serenader" and soldiered on. Which is really much better than W.S. Gilbert deserved.


The great Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the 1939 production of Hot Mikado.

Then again, how could we (or they) ever give up on The Mikado, one of the most sweetly silly works of art ever produced, and certainly a legacy for the ages? It's a sad fact that even the greatest art comes with the racist and sexist baggage of its era attached - always. (Always.) To shun that art based on its reflection of its prejudiced milieu would be a mistake that - well, let's just hope a similar judgment is never passed on us, because rest assured, even the most progressive among us is harboring assumptions that will horrify future generations. Civilization is, in the end, a long effort to salvage our best selves from the worst that lurks within us.

Still, what's striking about Hot Mikado - at least in the version pulled together by David H. Bell and Rob Bowman in 1986, which the New Rep has on tap through May 22, is how warm and sweet-spirited it is toward its source. We just saw G&S violated (rather than "plundered") in the Huntington's crass extravaganza Pirates! last year, so the dangers of updating these operettas is understandably top-of-mind for many of us. Never fear, however: Hot Mikado trims material here and there (it's only two hours long) - some of which, I admit, I missed (particularly the thrilling choruses at the close of Act 1). But most of its jazz and swing versions of the original songs are wonderful - and sometimes exquisite, as in the delicate keyboard line that guides what may be Sullivan's most beautiful aria, "The sun whose rays are all ablaze." And if the show's tone is a bit broader than that of the original, it's just as cleverly sentimental, and that's the real trick.


The Mikado makes his big entrance.

And fortunately, the New Rep has done the show up right, with a crack ensemble that sings and dances its talented heart out, a tight back-up band, and brightly rendered (if perhaps slightly Disneyfied) design. Alas, there's no real chorus, which is too bad, but the cast is so energetic and talented that newcomers to G&S may not even notice the gap. Perhaps first among this cast of equals was McCaela Donovan as a pitch-perfect Yum-Yum, who was romanced by a dashingly intelligent (and beautifully voiced) Nanki-Poo in the person of Cheo Bourne, while receiving top-notch back-up from Michele A. DeLuca and Aimee Doherty (who really unleashed her pipes in "He's Gonna Marry Yum-Yum"). What these two white chicks were doing in Hot Mikado, I've no idea, but I didn't really mind - I'm all about the color-blind casting, donchaknow! Then again, I guess the New Rep didn't want us to think about this as the "black" Mikado or something - instead, I guess it's supposed to be just multi-culturally hot. (You can see how self-conscious this kind of thing quickly gets.) One eyebrow did go up, however, when the piece's villainess, Katisha, turned out to be the cast's only Asian. What was up with that? Again - who knows, but it was good to have the talented Lisa Yuen onboard, who triumphed not only over her odd casting but a wayward microphone, too.

There was more strong singing and smart comic work from Edward M. Barker as Poo-Bah (so it was too bad the part was so trimmed down), and a bemusedly imperious (and delightfully self-amused) turn from Kennedy Reilly-Pugh as the Mikado himself. The one gap I felt in the cast was Calvin Braxton's Ko-Ko; Mr. Braxton's musical and movement skills were clear, but he didn't give us the knowing sophistication we usually expect of Ko-Ko, and didn't really replace it with anything else. Still, if Braxton was a bit blank, he nevertheless knew how to play amusingly nervous riffs on his jokes.

The physical production was sharp and stylish - Francis Nelson McSherry's clever costumes mixed and matched kimonos and zoot suits on Janie Howland's brightly colored, slightly toy-like set; yet somehow the design didn't feel as adult or sophisticated as the music. Meanwhile director Kate Warner's production notes went on in a predictably politically correct manner about how she hoped the production would expand the multicultural context of the operetta, blah blah blah, but luckily once the curtain rose she let us forget all the Huntington-development-department-We-Are-The-World crap and have a good time (and at any rate, as I mentioned, the racial casting felt kind of scrambled, anyway). Alas, her direction proved at times nearly frantic (we were grateful for the relative calm of "The sun whose rays"), but Warner did keep things moving, and no one ever wished for a slow summer show, did they. Still, I couldn't help feeling that the production never really tapped into the relaxed sauciness you can feel even in that silent clip from 1939 - and without that unforced freedom, the show may be fun, but will it ever be "hot"? I'm not sure. Then again, sometimes fun is enough.

Alone in the dark with Thomas Quasthoff

I'm late with my review of Thomas Quastoff (at left); can it really be that the great bass-baritone sang for Celebrity Series a whole week ago? (Yes, it can.) I think I've been dragging my feet about this one, however, because for once I'm not really sure what to make of it. There was little to fault in Quasthoff's program, which only occasionally delved into chestnuts like Schubert's “Erlkönig." Indeed, Quasthoff devoted the central portion of the concert to Swiss composer Frank Martin's dense, challenging “Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann," and closed with several somber songs from Brahms (from the late Op. 94 and the very late Op. 121, written as the great composer succumbed to cancer).

You couldn't ask for a more serious program - in fact, that last Brahms opus is named "Four Serious Songs" - and Mr. Quasthoff's selections, which dwelt on isolation, suffering, and the question of spiritual salvation, seemed to resonate with his own personal circumstances. The singer, of course, has triumphed over intense physical challenges, and it was hard not to hear an echo of that struggle in the first song of his set, Schubert's roiling "Prometheus," in which the fallen hero proclaims:

Who helped me
Against the pride of the titans?
Who rescued me from death,
From slavery?
Did you not accomplish it all yourself,
My sacred, glowing heart? . . .

Here I will sit, forming men
After my own image,
It will be a race like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and to rejoice,
And to pay no attention to you,
As I do!

Details of the singer's biography were unmistakable here (Quasthoff even sings sitting down), which poses an interesting problem for a reviewer (or at least a sensitive reviewer). Quasthoff's career depends, of course, on the civilizing truth that in music, the physical is transcended, and I feel uncomfortable even discussing his personal challenges - except insofar as they touch on a theme of isolated struggle that ran relentlessly through the concert, along with a certain attitude of defiance. It was hard to shake the impression that, while many of the singer's fans may find in their very enthusiasm for him a comforting balm to their own beneficent egos, the man himself was there to shake them out of that happy impression. To be blunt, while most singers attempt to connect with the audience across the proscenium, you could feel Quasthoff holding back - and for thematic reasons. We are all alone, he essentially sang over and over, and each of us is in a separate, private hell.

Applause somehow seems ridiculous before this kind of grave statement, and yet it's impossible not to applaud Quasthoff's singing. He does have one of the great bass-baritones of our age, with a clarion, burnished top and a bottom that's clear even at oceanic depths. The singer also has considerable power; he can both rumble and blast at will. What's more, Quasthoff's intellect is obviously far more formidable than many a vocal star's; his selections, as I said, were almost prickly in their brooding braininess, and his approach was thoughtful to the point of being over-considered.

Still, it must be said that Quasthoff occasionally seems to not so much hit his pitches as find them (although this tendency may have been exacerbated by his consistently deliberate pacing). Likewise pianist Justus Zeyen, though certainly a sympathetic accompanist, seemed to fudge his playing here and there (the demonic rippling of “Erlkönig," for instance, was a dramatic, but staccato, blur). And then there was the banter - a lot of it, and some of it amusing, but a little rude ("Shit happens!"), some of it tinged with a hint of sourness, and some of it directly peremptory (Quasthoff demanded the audience not cough even between songs). The eventual impression was of a self-serious profundity unaware of its own slips into vulgarity.

But in my book, if you've got the goods, the rest is forgotten, and Quasthoff certainly has the goods. And the whole concert was hardly doom and gloom: Quasthoff essayed a gentle melancholy in Schubert's “Im Frühling,” and his Erl-king had a truly scary intensity. And I was grateful to be introduced to Martin's troubling “Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann," (that's "Six monologues from Everyman" - I hope everyone in the audience knew what "Jedermann" means), which made the frightening most of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's brilliant text; rarely in music has the terrible moral meaning of the approach of death been so unsparingly portrayed. And though Quasthoff had a few problems with the high end of the final set from Brahms, over all his handling of these heartbreaking, yet subtle, pieces was exquisite. The three encores - “Auf dem Kirchhofe’’ (the cemetery) and “Unüberwindlich’’ (the bottle) by Brahms, and “Seligkeit’’ by Schubert (the afterlife) - were a maybe little lighter than what had come before, but not much. Then again, in a world of singers almost too eager to please their audiences, perhaps Thomas Quasthoff's dark vision counts as something of a tonic.

Loves of a blonde

There are four more where these came from: Karen MacDonald in The Blonde, The Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead. Photo(s) by Meghan Moore.

Whatever else I may say about the A.R.T., I must admit they made one great artistic contribution to the city's theatre scene.

They fired Karen MacDonald.

And freed from her avant-garde shackles, MacDonald took the town by storm, triumphing at Gloucester Stage, the Huntington, the New Rep, and now the Merrimack Rep. I feel for Ms. McDonald, of course - I'm sure she misses that regular paycheck from Harvard. But we're all so much better off since they let her go. The tragedy is that there's no company in town who can offer her a steady job - or rather will offer her a steady job; both the Huntington and the A.R.T., the two organizations with the financial heft to field a repertory company, refuse to do so for pseudo-intellectual reasons. Which isn't so much a tragedy as a scandal. Another scandal, while I'm on the topic, is the number of great performances we might have had from Ms. MacDonald while her light was hidden beneath the pretentious basket of the A.R.T. In the past year alone we've had at least three terrific turns from her - and prior to that? How many artistic poseurs have obscured her true talent by now? Hmmm . . .

But let's not dwell on the A.R.T. - that way madness lies! Ms. MacDonald is currently lighting up the boards in Robert Hewett's The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, a one-woman show that originated in Australia but has all but taken the global stage by storm. And it's not hard to see why: the script offers a virtuoso actress an opportunity to essay seven utterly different characters (and jump the gender line twice). Better still, it goes somewhere interesting. I don't want to overrate the play - its language is rudely vital but not remarkable, and it has at least one scene (involving a victimized little boy) that pushes the bounds of taste - but it holds you, in the manner that a good story always does. Be warned, however - this is not the broad sex comedy its title seems to promise, although there is some sex (and plenty of comedy). The story revolves around an inadvertent murder, and takes several dark, hair-pin turns; it leads toward what looks like redemption, it's true, and Mr. Hewett's tone is hardly cold; but it's always hard-boiled in something like the manner of an old-fashioned noir.

Some have complained that the author's episodic structure is a mere theatrical gimmick, but they couldn't be more wrong. In fact, Hewett's varying monologues actually put over persuasively his underlying point, that no single perspective can ever serve as an accurate representation of reality. Indeed, the play operates a bit like Kurosawa's famous Rashomon, only in reverse - in that classic movie, we slowly realized, as we listened to its characters, that we would never understand what actually happened at the scene of their crime. In The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, however, we begin to grasp the "truth" of the matter at hand; but we simultaneously realize the people we're listening to - the people who were there - never can understand what actually happened to them. Indeed, as the script develops, we perceive that its "story" is steadily evaporating; almost all its action, it turns out, has been based on misperception. So the play has been about a blonde leading the blind - all the characters' moral decisions, good and bad, have been made in various levels of ignorance. As that eponymous blonde announces near the finale (as she reveals that she's not even a blonde at all): "Nothing is what it seems." Only in the play's last moments, in fact, do its truly good characters recognize each other and begin to grope their way closer in the dark.

For a moral philosopher, of course, this represents a crushing kind of quandary (and who knows how Saint Peter puzzles it out). But for a theatre audience, it's pretty much business as usual - we know that what we're watching onstage isn't what it seems; it's "the lie that tells the truth." Indeed, at the Merrimack, we slowly realize even the scene changes - which at first seem to reveal Ms. MacDonald changing costume from one character to another - are illusions, too. I'm not sure if this meta-theatrical detail was the idea of director Melia Bensussen, but it's in keeping with the general thoughtfulness of the production (for once this director has left her identity politics at the door). And of course Ms. MacDonald is superb throughout - I heard she had some line trouble on opening night, but that was gone by last weekend, and we could simply luxuriate in a long demonstration of the actor's art; as she did in last summer's Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Ms. MacDonald has devised subtly different voices, looks, attitudes, and body languages for every personage she inhabits; she even makes a convincing dude. My favorites among her characterizations were probably the dotty lady down the street, the trashy, double-timing neighbor, and especially the knowing, not-really-a-blonde Tanya. But any student of acting could take any of these seven performances as a master class in how the thing is done. The only question as the curtain fell, in fact, was: where will Karen MacDonald do it next time?

Everything opera should be

Time is short today, but I had to put in a quick note about Opera Boston's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, which I caught at its final performance last night. It's been a rough year for Opera Boston - Ewa Podleś phoned in Tancredi, and Madame Whitesnake turned out to be a bust - so it was wonderful to see their season end on a note higher than anyone could have anticipated. La Grande-Duchesse, Offenbach's lightly sardonic operetta on the intersection of love and war, turned out to be not only one of the best productions of the year, but one of the best opera productions seen in Boston in many a year, and certainly the best thing I've ever seen Opera Boston do.

It wasn't hard to see why. Stephanie Blythe, a mainstay at the Met and on opera stages around the world, was essaying for Opera Boston one of her signature roles, and it was apparent that not only had the company put its best foot forward for the biggest star it had ever entertained, but that much of the production had been styled directly for her (by director David Kneuss of the Met). Which was all to the good. For not only was Ms. Blythe in fine vocal form, in a role which matches her range and (gorgeously rich) timbre perfectly, but theatrically (and comedically) she was also at a peak that most professional actresses would envy. Her performance was, simply put, perfection in every way - it was everything opera should be.

What's more, for once Opera Boston left its taste for intellectualism and ascetic sets at the door - the sets and costumes for La Grande-Duchesse were beautifully rendered and nearly opulent, and often cohered (as at the top of the second act) into glorious stage pictures. More, please! And Ms. Blythe was not the only thing worth listening to, either - although there was some vocal variability in the cast. Scott Ramsay's tenor was far too thin to stand up to Ms. Blythe's redolent glories, and James Maddalena sounded a bit rough, at least on the last night. But there was lovely singing from soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer and baritone Lee Gregory (above left, with Blythe), and both proved to be gifted comics as well. Although actually everyone in the cast - including the hard-working chorus - was irresistibly funny and seemingly up for any kind of hijinx.

It's true that at three hours, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, despite all this onstage inspiration (and lively playing down in the pit), is almost too much of a good thing. But you also couldn't blame everyone for soldiering on with the fluff, as they were having so much fun doing it. By the time the curtain fell, it was hard not to feel that some new standard had been set for local opera production.

Looking forward and back, with Bach

Daniel Stepner in action.

Last weekend's "Bach Portrait" concert at Handel and Haydn felt like the last step in what has been a year of transition for the venerable Society. New Artistic Director Harry Christophers was at the podium, conducting (in his inimitable style) an evening's worth of music from a composer not often heard at H&H of late. And at the same time, the widely-admired Daniel Stepner took his last bow as concertmaster (after 24 years in the role) with performances of the Brandenburg No. 5 and the Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins (BWV 1043).

In a way, therefore, the concert was somehow Janus-like in its profile, as it offered a perspective on the Society's past as well as its future. For many H&H subscribers, I imagine Stepner's farewell stole focus from the rest of the program; certainly his appearances brought the most sustained and affectionate applause. But the best music-making of the night actually came when Christophers was front and center, conducting two Bach cantatas with a brilliance and precision that reminded me once again why, exactly, he got the job.

I should add, of course, that for this listener, the Bach cantatas (No. 50 and No. 29) benefitted from the fact that they're unfamiliar (or at least No. 50 was, I was acquainted with the first movement of No. 29), and there's really nothing like encountering fantastic pieces of music for the first time in performances this damn good. It occurred to me that the cantata may be the form in which Christophers shines the brightest; he's a superb early music conductor who is also a former professional singer, so in this kind of music he's a double threat, and seems to attend to every detail in both orchestra and chorus.

Cantata No. 50, "Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft," is almost amusingly short - a beautiful blast of triumph (the title translates as "Now is come salvation and strength") that H&H brought off with both power and delicacy. The larger, more ambitious No. 29 ("Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir") opened with a glittering sinfonia (with chorusmaster John Finney tearing through a dazzling obliggato organ line) which led into a gorgeous set of arias and recitatives. The chorus sounded superb in its contributions, but the soloists drawn from its ranks were a bit variable; best were soprano Lydia Brotherton, who sang with light but pure tone, and especially bass-baritone Bradford Gleim, whom I haven't heard showcased at H&H before, but who is definitely someone to watch. Or rather hear.

The two motets on offer made solid, but less striking, impressions. The opening No. 1, "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" seemed not quite as crisp as its intricacy required, while No. 2, "Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf," was simply appropriately poignant (it was written for the funeral of the rector of Bach's place of employment, the famous Thomasschule in Liepzig).

The Stepner "half" of the program was likewise lovely - but the respectives beauties of Brandenburg No. 5 and the Concerto for Two Violins are both very familiar, of course, and Stepner and company didn't really have any interpretive surprises up their sleeves; this was intended as a last night of music-making among friends, and it charmed in that context. Keyboardist Finney actually stole the show in the Brandenburg, by once again catching fire in the concerto's famously difficult (and surprisingly chromatic) harpsichord solo; but to tell true, spaces the size of Symphony Hall weren't built with the harpsichord in mind, and I almost wished I might have heard Finney's virtuosity in closer quarters.

Sentiment ran highest during the Concerto for Two Violins, in which Stepner led the ensemble with violinist Linda Quan, with whom he has long shared a beautiful musical partnership on the H&H stage. The high point of their performance was the concerto's haunting second movement, in which the two violins intertwine in something easily construed as mutual sympathy and admiration. A feeling obviously shared by Stepner's many fans in the audience, who rose to their feet at the concerto's close in a heartfelt standing "o."

It's actually nice being proven wrong sometimes

Nobody's right 100% of the time, a fact which people like to remind me of, as I probably put forth my opinion about more things on more occasions than just about anyone else in Boston. And for the record, no, I don't think I'm always right; I just think I'm right more often than anyone else! ;-)

But sometimes I am wrong. Just two weeks ago, I wrote of Boston Ballet that the company "doesn't really have any danseur who can nail double tours reliably - it's their last technical gap."

And then yesterday, during a rehearsal for "Theme and Variations" (part of the upcoming Ultimate Balanchine evening), principal dancer James Whiteside nailed three in a row. (With a glance in my general direction.) So point taken. And I'm glad to be proven wrong! Stay thin and dizzy, James!

Drag avatar

I had trouble staying awake during Theatre on Fire's production of Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady (at left, which I took in just before it closed), because it was quite apparent to me that I was watching something more like a graduate thesis than a play. True, it was a funny graduate thesis; we were all invited to chuckle along with jokes and tropes with which we knew, going in, we were sure to agree. And there was a cozy buzz to the show that derived from the fact that you had to have gone to college to understand what said thesis was even about. You had to know that gender is constructed, which means that in a way it's a form of literature, and that of course repression of that awareness is based on fear, and - oh, who the hell cares, really.

It would be one thing if playwright Jordan Harrison had attempted to reveal these trendy academic ideas - actually, they were trendy a decade or more ago, but again, who the hell cares - through something like dramatic construction. Or even a passing semblance of naturalism. Or ironic post-naturalism. Or something, anything, remotely connected to what used to quaintly be called "real life."

But nooooooo. Sure, there's a gesture toward a plausible frame-story at the top of the show: three average guys in some dustbowl town in the 20's agree to put on a Hasty-Pudding-style drag show for charity, and they all seem a bit too eager to raid the ladies' "delicates" drawer for their roles. So far, so good. One is obviously a repressed gay man, one is trying to escape his constricting role as husband, and one is a horn dog willing to do anything to get close to a gal backstage. Again, so far, so good - if you're into clichés (I'm not, but anyway). These various conflicts aren't so much conveyed by the action as telegraphed, however, and the drag pantomime turns out to be not nearly as much clever fun as what we're used to from Ryan Landry, or, yes, the Hasty Pudding.

Alas, the playwright also has his sights on "experiment" and "exploration," so like Sarah Ruhl, that other famed alumna of his drama school (Brown), Harrison soon has his dramatic finger paints out, and the "play" - or rather the long-form skit masquerading as a play - heads south. Harrison begins to deconstruct the sexual personae of his three big lugs by having the women in their lives step into their shoes, literally - in some scenes, while the men are playing "women" up on "stage," they themselves are being played by "women" in "real life." Gosh - isn't that interesting? Right - it's not; in fact, it's like replacing a characterization with a Power Point bullet. OMG, I tried to tell myself as I watched these drag queens face off with their inner drag "kings," this is fascinating, it's like a hall of mirrors, it's like what's real and what's not, and is "gender" "real" or "constructed" - or is even its "construction" "real"? Zzzzzzz . . . .

Oh, man. I'm not sure how many times I pinched myself, but I did manage to hang on to consciousness somehow. That's how I know that before the finish, Harrison had even un-tethered the drag show from its actors - so its "characters" could run around like avatars, independent of the actors playing them, not to mention the actors playing the actors playing them. To be honest, it struck me, briefly, that this set-up had possibilities as a kind of stage-bound Purple Drag of Cairo. But Harrison simply doesn't have the dramatic chops to pull that off; this final development doesn't go anywhere at all, it's just stated. As we realize everything in the play has been. He hasn't been writing a play - he's been checking off little boxes on some sort of chart of the post-graduate zeitgeist. And then waiting to be patted on the head by Paula Vogel.

Ah, yes - Paula Vogel, the woman who unleashed both Ruhl and Harrison on the world from her position as head of the Brown playwriting program (she's now at Yale). I've suffered through three plays by Ruhl and two by Harrison (the other, Kid-Simple, was like listening to nails on a chalkboard for two hours). After that experience, I told the little fringe company that had put it on that I had hated it so much I wasn't going to review it. I just didn't want to drag them through such a pan.

Should I have done the same with Theatre on Fire? Maybe so. The show definitely kept moving, and the troupe got their laughs from the audience, even though generally they were doing what's known as "indicating" rather than acting. There was smart, lively work from Craig Houk (even though his character doesn't make much sense) and broader-than-broad, but still effective, playing from Greg Maraio. Crystal Lisbon threw herself into the role of the gender-bending directress of the play-within-a-play, and like her male cohorts, definitely got her share of laughs. The only person doing any internal work, however, was Lisa Caron Driscoll, as the stick-in-the-mud wife who just can't see what "art" there is to be found in a drag show. (By the finale, we kind of saw her point.) The script's failure was certainly none of these people's fault.

But of course it is Jordan Harrison's fault, as well as the fault of a whole cult within the theatrical world today that encourages this kind of thing. It seems strange to say, but once academic theories were constructed to explain the latest drama; now, the latest drama is constructed to explain academic theories. And I do want to say to Paula Vogel: I know you mean well, but you're killing our theatre, so please stop. I'm sure you loved mothering these immature talents, and that was fine as long as everything stayed within the classroom walls at Brown. But what you have done by propelling your protégées onto the professional stage is create an entire genre of juvenilia in American theatre. The juvenile is now a state to be aspired to - one in which 'closure,' and even development, is scorned; one in which the rules of time and space are pointlessly bent, and characters appear and disappear at will, and babble about "a philosophy of hats." And we are expected to be just pleased as punch that little Sarah and Jordan actually finished another play! Please, please, please stop.