And I got a little love for the offering

[sovay]

I am seriously considering setting up a Patreon, mostly to see if people will give me money to write about film with the same frequency I have been doing for the last several years, i.e., at least twice a month I talk about something that really interests me (and more often if I have regular access to TCM and/or arthouse theaters). Advice from people with Patreons of their own would be greatly appreciated. I have never run anything of this nature before. I don't even have a PayPal account.

In other news—

For the third year in a row, Strange Horizons has been nominated for a Hugo Award. Editor-in-Chief Niall Harrison talks about the ways in which the honor is complicated this year.

I did not know that anyone had, in poetry, called T.S. Eliot on his anti-Semitism while he was alive, much less to his face at a conference in 1951. That's where Emanuel Litvinoff comes in: "To T. S. Eliot."

I have just discovered there is a Takarazuka musical about the Mayerling affair. Given that a very distant relative of mine figures as the antagonist in at least five retellings of the story I've been able to verify, I'd love to know if anyone has information about this one. The whole phenomenon really entertains me. (Especially the Frank Wildhorn musical.) I am very invested in someday tracking down the TV film where Eduard Graf von Taaffe is played by Raymond Massey.

I have three books and an actor I really want to talk about. It's one of the reasons I need time.

Comments

[wakanomori.livejournal.com]

Took me a while to get to this, and some of this probably this won't be news to you, sovay, but: the 1983 Takarazuka performance was based on the telling by Jean Schopfer (writing as Claude Anet), via the Japanese translation Utakata no koi ["a short-lived love"]. Anet's work was just called Mayerling and first appeared in 1930 (Paris : Bernard Grasset).
The Japanese translation was the work of Okada Shinkichi (1903-64), a Tōdai educated movie critic and translator of French literature. His translation appeared first in 1954; it was republished in 1957 and 1969, each time w/ a different publisher.
The Takarazuka script was written by Shibata Yukihiro, a prolific playwright who's worked at Takarazuka since 1958 and is still active, apparently. The piece is considered quite popular, hence the several repeats (in 1993, 1999, 2000, 2006, and 2013, according to the wikipedia piece on it).
Neither PGutenberg nor the Internet Archive have the Anet novel, but there is a link to the 1936 film based on it.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ooh, the whole movie--cool!

And here's a song from the Takarazuka production. wakanomori, does it remind you of Itsuwa Mayumi's style? I think we have to get to see this!

[wakanomori.livejournal.com]

Nice find -- and the comment is telling:
「ベルサイユ」よりも「うたかたの恋」のはうが宝塚らしくて好き。
Something about the plot, maybe? I really don't know enough about Takarazuka!

[sovay]

Took me a while to get to this, and some of this probably this won't be news to you, sovay, but: the 1983 Takarazuka performance was based on the telling by Jean Schopfer (writing as Claude Anet), via the Japanese translation Utakata no koi ["a short-lived love"].

I knew about the 1936 film, but not most of the other information. Thank you very much! I wonder how closely the two resemble one another.