Yesterday – more posing around Brick Lane for Phoebe A’s photographic project. This time I’m in a change of clothes, including a rare airing of my black Ben Sherman shirt. The forensic mannequins in Hoxton Square have gone.
Also: I meet Rob Cowan for a coffee in the Edgware Road. He’s working on Radio 3’s forthcoming ‘Chock-Full Of Chopin’ weekend. Well, that’s not the official title, but that’s what it is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/04_april/14/chopin.shtml
I ask him if he’s seen the romantic comedy Impromptu, starring a pre-Richard Curtis Hugh Grant as the consumptive composer:
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0102103/
It’s one of my favourite movies that people haven’t heard of. The director is James Lapine, better known for the original stagings of Sondheim musicals like Sunday In The Park With George and Into The Woods, and it has the same sense of anachronistic wit in a period setting, not least Judy Davis’s constant exclamation of ‘Balls!’
In fact, it ties in with my theme of the other day – a romance between a butch woman (Ms Davis as the cross-dressing novelist George Sand) and a fragile, stuttering man with floppy hair (guess who). Add Emma Thompson as a dim aristocrat, and Mandy Patinkin in funny, swaggering Princess Bride mode, and it’s something of a gem. How much of the Chopin history is correct I have no idea, but I’d say the film could be compared with Moulin Rouge and the BBC version of Casanova (the one with David Tennant), in eschewing period accuracy in favour of unabashed fun.
Two other favourite Chopin things:
– Take That’s ‘Could It Be Magic’ (Mr Manilow’s melody taken from whichever Prelude it is)
– Monty Python’s silly, yet impressively educational, Oliver Cromwell song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObI4eaK_GIA
