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Ludus Danielis
Feb. 8th, 2020 10:40 pmToday I went to see a medieval play based on the Book of Daniel and performed by people from the Boston Camarata and our own university. The Central Lutheran church was packed - around 200 people in the audience.
My review is a bit mixed. Overall I found the performance exciting and cool; the music was fine; the singing voices lovely. The lighting was really neat and made me see that familiar church space in a new way.
On the other hand, first, there was incense. I had to rush home afterwards and wash my hair and clothes. On the other hand, I already had a scratchy and gummy throat when I woke up today, and this incense was quite mild and didn't make me feel any worse, so if one must have incense for authenticity, they chose a good one. Second, they gave us two elaborate programs, one with the synopsis and performance details, and the other with the full text and translation. This was great, but... the very darkness that made the lighting so interesting made it impossible to follow along with the text. And I'm not qualified to follow a play that's in Latin! Whenever the lights came up even a bit, I could see people scrambling to figure out where we were in the text.
Overall, I'm glad I went (and it only lasted 80 minutes!), but I'm also glad that J. didn't decide to come, because I'm sure he would have been bored.
My review is a bit mixed. Overall I found the performance exciting and cool; the music was fine; the singing voices lovely. The lighting was really neat and made me see that familiar church space in a new way.
On the other hand, first, there was incense. I had to rush home afterwards and wash my hair and clothes. On the other hand, I already had a scratchy and gummy throat when I woke up today, and this incense was quite mild and didn't make me feel any worse, so if one must have incense for authenticity, they chose a good one. Second, they gave us two elaborate programs, one with the synopsis and performance details, and the other with the full text and translation. This was great, but... the very darkness that made the lighting so interesting made it impossible to follow along with the text. And I'm not qualified to follow a play that's in Latin! Whenever the lights came up even a bit, I could see people scrambling to figure out where we were in the text.
Overall, I'm glad I went (and it only lasted 80 minutes!), but I'm also glad that J. didn't decide to come, because I'm sure he would have been bored.