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With actual shepherd on top
Today has involved a great amount of cleaning. Tonight will involve a substantial amount of cooking. Planned dishes are less complicated than last year: mushroom and leek shepherd's pie, zucchini stuffed with ricotta basil, a curried lentil, squash, and apple stew; red cabbage slaw with oranges and carrots. It would also help if I thought I were awake.
One very pleasant discovery, made last night in the course of talking theater with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teenybuffalo: in 1980, someone smuggled a camcorder into the Uris Theatre in New York City.
That's the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. With Len Cariou, whose performance I hadn't realized had been preserved in any form outside the original cast recording—and he's in beautiful voice. Having heard him previously in A Little Night Music (1973), I had always assumed that darkened, slightly hoarse tone on the album of Sweeney Todd (1979) was a stylistic choice; then I heard that Cariou had hurt his voice in the role and figured that explained it. Apparently neither of these things is true: he had laryngitis for the recording session. Now I'm doubly glad the bootleg survives. Foreshortened and fuzzy and sometimes skippy as it is, it's absolutely amazing, and so is listening to the opening night audience as they encountered "A Little Priest" for the very first time. (They have no idea what they're getting into.)
I should go chop things up.
One very pleasant discovery, made last night in the course of talking theater with
teenybuffalo: in 1980, someone smuggled a camcorder into the Uris Theatre in New York City.That's the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. With Len Cariou, whose performance I hadn't realized had been preserved in any form outside the original cast recording—and he's in beautiful voice. Having heard him previously in A Little Night Music (1973), I had always assumed that darkened, slightly hoarse tone on the album of Sweeney Todd (1979) was a stylistic choice; then I heard that Cariou had hurt his voice in the role and figured that explained it. Apparently neither of these things is true: he had laryngitis for the recording session. Now I'm doubly glad the bootleg survives. Foreshortened and fuzzy and sometimes skippy as it is, it's absolutely amazing, and so is listening to the opening night audience as they encountered "A Little Priest" for the very first time. (They have no idea what they're getting into.)
I should go chop things up.
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Ah, that's good. We're being fairly conventional--turkey, stuffing/dressing, sweet potatoes in coconut cream, brussels sprouts done in walnut oil, and cranberry-orange sauce. The first two are in the oven, the last got made yesterday, and the middle two will be done somewhere towards the end of the turkey cooking and during the resting period.
The stuffing and the cranberry sauce have already been made; tomorrow there will be potatoes.
Do you make your stuffing the day before and then stuff the bird? I'd never thought of doing it that way. We make ours as the oven is pre-heating--it's not very complex, sautéed celery and onion, stale bread, dried cranberries, and pecans, and then a bit of stock in the skillet to hold it together.
Hope the potatoes come out well, and everything else besides, of course.
I've never seen a production except the PBS tape and now this bootleg; I don't count the movie. It is a show I love very much.
I hope you can see it on stage sometime. Wish I could show you my memories of the production I saw, although I suspect those would be fairly burnished compared to the reality.
Happy Thanksgiving!