We were eager to love Fresh & Easy, but now we’ve gone and all the enthusiasm seems embarrassing. We were expecting a paradise of prepared food, but in fact there was only a limited selection. The rest of the Eagle Rock Blvd. store was filled with whatever the marketing research had told them to fill it with: Crest toothpaste, Fat Tire beer, birthday cards, etc. Nothing was there because a person liked it, but because the program told them to put it there. And then there is the design. I appreciate them bucking the trend towards more and more glitz, but it went too far in the other direction. All the merchandise was presented in uninflected, undifferentiated rows, separated by wide aisles. It had the air of a mid-1970s conceptual art project. There wasn’t any music, which sounds great but in fact was unnerving. DB: "It feels dead," and that was all there was to be said.
L.A. Opera’s visuals have been so good lately that Don Giovanni came as a shock--a big step back to the bad old days. In 1891 Bernard Shaw wrote "Ever since I was a boy I have been in search of a satisfactory performance of Don Giovanni; and I have at last come to see that Mozart’s turn will hardly be in my time." At least he was spared sets by Boris Kudlicka and costumes by Arkadius. The production was like a bad movie marathon, beginning in The Matrix, proceeding to Tron, pausing at Night of the Living Dead and ending up with Elvis tumbling into Hell. There was also a giant egg-timer leaking silver glitter on the stage. And a new character was introduced; we called her The Spinning Dead Infanta. This makes it sound more fun than it was. It was especially exasperating because the singers were heroic: a good Don, a funny Leporello, and Charles Castronovo, the Don Ottavio, frequently triumphing over a bad environment. Shaw called the music "summer lightning made audible" and sometimes it was.
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