Anchors Away

I love musicals, so when I learned that this cruise ship puts on an original musical production, I was excited. It’s a one act show entitled The Gift, which left me with questions. 

In the first scene, we meet the protagonist, whose name I can’t quite decipher but he’s lost the love of his life sometime ago. He’s taken to the drink but is visited by a magical clock, which encourages him to love again. It’s hard to understand all of the words but a few are clear — this musical is set in Victorian England.

Scene 2, opens with, confusingly, a cover of Van Halen’s Right Now. The role of Sammy Hagar is hovering above the stage, strapped to the prow of a ship, and playing, I must admit, an excellent air guitar. When he’s done singing, I’m too confused to join others in the audience in the standing ovation. 

When the ship reaches shore, the protagonist heads to a park, that reminds me of Seurat’s Sundays in the Park with George. The protagonist encounters a coquette and attempts to seduce her. She’s playing hard to get. They picnic and share a chaste kiss. She tosses her wine glass and starts to dance, he joins. While the sun shines in the background, a pop song implores us feel the rain on our skin. They dance off stage. 

Scene three opens with the protagonist in a different part of London — still in the Victorian era. We meet a young man, on a BMX bike. He’s doing tricks. Not sure why he’s not riding a penny farthing, which would have been both more impressive and accurate to the period. Techno music blasts. 

But who is this kid on the bike? It’s the protagonist’s son! They sing of his deceased mother. The coquette re-appears. Ah, I see I was wrong, that’s the protagonists daughter!  Oops, I was way off in scene one.  I give myself partial credit for at least reading her body language correctly. 

Father, son, and daughter hug while We are Family plays. Another standing ovation, while my confusion deepens. 

mizmaze

• the way lies through … an intricate mizmaze of tracks —S. P. B. Mais
•  dialectal, England  : a state of confusion or bewilderment : whirlso surprised he was all of a mizmazeThe Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, often shortened to Vatican II, was announced by Pope John XXXIII in January 1959 more than 100 years since the last ecumenical council and the announcement stunned the world. The main reason for the surprise was that the First Vatican Council had strenuously reaffirmed the doctrine of papal infallibility, which stands for the idea that the pope, “when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.” Rather than one man defining the doctrine for the whole Church, however, Pope John XXXIII had invited 2,908 other men, and exactly zero women, to decide the Church’s teachings.