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My mostly unplugged weekend
Mar. 4th, 2024 10:46 amIt was a good weekend.
Saturday evening was spent at Knox Church, where the Ottawa Bach Choir was performing an all-Monteverdi programme of Easter-themed pieces and secular madrigals. The trip home was a little harrowing, however, as the night was quite foggy and many of the streetlights along the Driveway were out.
Sunday afternoon was fun too. We attended a performance of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express at the Ottawa Little Theatre. I thought the actors were all very good and I liked how they created the illusion of the train moving along the tracks... or not, as the unfolding of the play required. Dave Demirkan made a credible Hercule Poirot, possibly better than Kenneth Branagh though certainly not up to David Suchet standards. Agatha Christie never wrote the work as a play and this was an adaptation by Ken Ludwig, a highly competent playwright in his own right. As with most adaptations, some of the characters were either eliminated or merged with each other into composite characters. Not ideal, perhaps, but it was done quite smoothly, I thought. And kudos to Ottawa Little Theatre: they actually provide real printed, illustrated programmes complete with director's notes and cast and crew bios.
As we had time to kill (pun definitely intended) before the show, we naturally gravitated towards All Books, the nearby second-hand bookshop on Rideau Street next door to the Bytowne Cinema. They have an excellent selection of philosophy and world religions books, likely due to their proximity to Ottawa U, where undergrad Arts students used to (and possibly still do) have to take a first-year course in philosophy or religion, as well as English and French. Their literature section is very good too. I bought a second-hand but near mint-condition paperback copy of Murder on the Orient Express (issued around the time of the Kenneth Branagh movie) and I look forward to reading it soon.
Walking along King Edward Avenue, now infamous as a congested truck route connecting Ontario and Quebec, we reflected on what we had learned recently about how it used to look:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/king-edward-was-once-ottawa-s-champs-élysées-can-it-be-again-1.7078647
So the weekend was mostly devoted to analogue pursuits, which is how I like it and how I stay (relatively) grounded. But there are a few ironies here which have not escaped me.
First of all, I learned about the play through an e-mail. I ordered and paid for the tickets online and printed them off. If I hadn't been able to do this for whatever reason, I'm not at all sure that our theatre outing would have happened at all.
Secondly, our Internet went out yesterday evening, soon after we got back home. So we couldn't look up all those little details that we'd started wondering about over the course of the afternoon.
Internet was still out first thing this morning. Monday morning, the one weekday that the Ottawa Citizen does not issue a printed newspaper. Luckily it's back now, which is the reason I can post this.
Perhaps all the world is indeed a stage... but we now have all manner of cyberstages that I don't think Shakespeare could ever have foreseen!
Saturday evening was spent at Knox Church, where the Ottawa Bach Choir was performing an all-Monteverdi programme of Easter-themed pieces and secular madrigals. The trip home was a little harrowing, however, as the night was quite foggy and many of the streetlights along the Driveway were out.
Sunday afternoon was fun too. We attended a performance of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express at the Ottawa Little Theatre. I thought the actors were all very good and I liked how they created the illusion of the train moving along the tracks... or not, as the unfolding of the play required. Dave Demirkan made a credible Hercule Poirot, possibly better than Kenneth Branagh though certainly not up to David Suchet standards. Agatha Christie never wrote the work as a play and this was an adaptation by Ken Ludwig, a highly competent playwright in his own right. As with most adaptations, some of the characters were either eliminated or merged with each other into composite characters. Not ideal, perhaps, but it was done quite smoothly, I thought. And kudos to Ottawa Little Theatre: they actually provide real printed, illustrated programmes complete with director's notes and cast and crew bios.
As we had time to kill (pun definitely intended) before the show, we naturally gravitated towards All Books, the nearby second-hand bookshop on Rideau Street next door to the Bytowne Cinema. They have an excellent selection of philosophy and world religions books, likely due to their proximity to Ottawa U, where undergrad Arts students used to (and possibly still do) have to take a first-year course in philosophy or religion, as well as English and French. Their literature section is very good too. I bought a second-hand but near mint-condition paperback copy of Murder on the Orient Express (issued around the time of the Kenneth Branagh movie) and I look forward to reading it soon.
Walking along King Edward Avenue, now infamous as a congested truck route connecting Ontario and Quebec, we reflected on what we had learned recently about how it used to look:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/king-edward-was-once-ottawa-s-champs-élysées-can-it-be-again-1.7078647
So the weekend was mostly devoted to analogue pursuits, which is how I like it and how I stay (relatively) grounded. But there are a few ironies here which have not escaped me.
First of all, I learned about the play through an e-mail. I ordered and paid for the tickets online and printed them off. If I hadn't been able to do this for whatever reason, I'm not at all sure that our theatre outing would have happened at all.
Secondly, our Internet went out yesterday evening, soon after we got back home. So we couldn't look up all those little details that we'd started wondering about over the course of the afternoon.
Internet was still out first thing this morning. Monday morning, the one weekday that the Ottawa Citizen does not issue a printed newspaper. Luckily it's back now, which is the reason I can post this.
Perhaps all the world is indeed a stage... but we now have all manner of cyberstages that I don't think Shakespeare could ever have foreseen!
