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As some of you may know, last weekend I went with 4 other friends to a mid-US trip traveling across 3 states – Nevada, Utah and Arizona. It was mainly a sightseeing and photography trip, so I ended up with lots and lots of photos which I will slowly process. But meanwhile I figured I’ll write up on my experiences and post a few photos here and there.

The trip starts on Day 0 because nothing much happened for me on Friday (no photos either). The 4 of them went on to Vegas earlier in the day to enjoy some buffets and “working” at the poolside, while I labored here in Seattle until it was 4:30pm and I left for the airport. I arrived to LAS 40 minutes earlier than expected because of strong tailwinds (which made for a bumpy flight), and found out my friends just got into the buffet at Rio and couldn’t pick me up, so I ended up finding my way to the strip to join them.

Being a cheapskate :P, I asked the info desk at the airport for the cheapest way to get to the strip – turns out a cab will run me close to $17, while a shuttle bus will only cost $7. So I hopped onto the first shuttle bus I can find to Rio. Big mistake! Lesson learned here: there are multiple shuttle bus companies, so go find the bus that is nearly full before hopping on! When I got onto the bus there was only 1 other person, and it turns out the bus doesn’t leave until it is full (or has a substantial amount of people). So I ended up waiting on the bus for almost 30 minutes before it finally started heading towards the strip. By the time I got to Rio, my friends were done dinner and we ended up meeting at the garage where I loaded my luggage into the rental car.

The rental car was a Jeep Patriot; the “trunk” space was smaller than I expected, (later found out it is significantly smaller than a Rav4) and with my luggage, the entire back is stacked to the top and you can’t look out through the back anymore. Anyhow, we went to Bellagio to watch the 10pm showing of “O” – my 3rd Cirque du Soleil show, and the one that has been most raved about. My short review is it is quite artistic and pretty, but thin on “plot” compared to the other cirque shows, which I prefer more.

After “O” we went back to our hotel suite – we had a suite at The Venetian 🙂 I was super hungry so I went with 3 other people to the casino where I got food and they played some Pai Gow poker and Roulette (the 5th guy was too sleepy so he went to bed). On our way back to the suite we came across this ‘Star Trek’ penny slot machine which appealed to the geeky side of all of us and we ended up spending over an hour on that machine – it played like a video game where you can login, gather medals (achievements) and even had bonus minigames! It was actually the bonus minigame that we initially saw that got us attracted to the machine. Basically to get to play the minigame, 3 “bonus” icons has to show up on the screen (doesn’t matter where, it doesn’t even have to lineup), so the 4 of us gathered in front of the slot machine and tried to use our fingers to manipulate the outcome to get 3 bonuses (the slot machine had a touch sensitive screen and touching it will “stop” the spin for that column – it is a legit feature, we aren’t breaking the machine :P). The bonuses had really good payout (one bonus we did paid out $35.00+ on a 35c bet).

Anyhow, after spending some money there, we went back to our suite and slept for the real start of our adventure tomorrow!

Went to see ALW’s Tell me on a Sunday last night. Strictly speaking, “Tell Me on a Sunday” is a song cycle and not so much a musical – there was barely any acting involved. It primarily is an English girl singing about her experiences in New York, and so it was 1 singer + 1 pianist/conductor + 1 violin, viola, cello. The entire thing was quite short – lasted around 75 minutes with no intermission, and consists of 4 scenes, with 4-5 songs per scene.

I think this piece was written in the early ’80s by ALW and it has all his classical music goodness. (I heard Phantom 2: Love Never Dies is bizarre and not that great). The music is superb with a lot of revolving themes. With one actor portraying one role, the acting is quite limited, and at times it was bizarre because she sings to an imaginary person on stage (e.g. she may open a door and invite her boyfriend in and start singing to him – but nobody actually comes in through the door). For once I think this was a “story driven” plot that had minimal character development (usually in plays and musicals, I complain about too much character development and not enough plot movement), and on the other end of this spectrum it felt rather strange (in the last scene the girl sings “What have I become?” and it didn’t touch me at all since I didn’t know who she was in the first place). Otherwise for a small production (only filled 4 rows of around 12 people each on a Wed night) it was perfect.

I went home and wiki-ed it to find out that this song cycle apparently is the “song” part (act 1) of ALW’s work “Song and Dance”. One more checkmark on ALW quest! I rate “Tell Me on a Sunday”:

It is “Seattle Celebrates Bernstein” season in Seattle (which strikes me as a little strange since Bernstein isn’t from nor really resided in Seattle, I don’t believe), so the theater I have season subscription to is putting on 2 classic Bernstein musicals, the first of which is “On the Town”.

I’ve only studied West Side Story (what Bernstein is most famous for) before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The musical definitely had a more classic feel to it, and it ended up being quite a funny comedy (A mixture of slapstick and witty humour). The songs felt classical with a slight touch of modernism, which really fits my taste in that it was easy to digest (not like Sunday in a Park with George) yet a little adventurous (e.g. the major 7th (I think) motive for “Oh well” in Act 2’s “Some Other Time” is quite angular and not classical). There were a few memorable songs as well (at least memorable enough that I can hum parts of it leaving the theater), such as “Carried Away”.

What is special about On the Town (and I suspect this is common for Bernstein’s musicals) is his heavy use of dance (probably because of Jerome Robbins) – it was pretty and at times felt like a ballet, and the genius in it is the dance sequences (nothing is sung) is used to advance the plot as well. So I thought that was quite fresh and clever.

The only downside was the plot was a little thin (although that’s somewhat expected for a slapstick-ish comedy). But overall the music, choreography and stage directing is quite well done, so:

I sang with my a capella group in concert last Saturday, and here’s the video.
Very glad that my face is overexposed (totally unintentional) so you can’t see who the soloist is for the first song :P.

My friend told me about this “little” Starfield concert that is happening up north, 20 minutes from Seattle. Tickets were $10 and since Starfield just released a new CD that I like, I figure I’d go and check it out. It ends up the concert is held at this semi-big Korean church in their gym – and there were a lot of Korean youngsters (high school or college, I can’t tell) attending, so it felt a little bit like… high school :P.

Anyhow, Starfield is stellar (har har) in their performance, although I have a feeling since it is a smaller venue they were taking it a little easy. I think they opened some of their new songs in a much lower key than their album version, and there were definitely some wrong notes here and there (hehe that’s how well I know their material). It was a shame that their projector wasn’t working out so they couldn’t display the lyrics and get more people to sing along with them (which might have been why they dropped the key in the first place), but they did manage to do a bunch of older material and other worship songs so everyone could participate.

I haven’t taken much photos with my SLR lately, so this was a good chance to practice; but I didn’t want to spend too much time editing and processing (and I wanted to enjoy the concert), so I only took a selected few. They seem to turn out quite nicely still with minimal processing – I’m quite happy with them (minus some mic stand focusing challenges, and expected graininess from high ISO). Here are some highlights:

Oh and as a bonus! We saw a local band called “New Heights” that opened for Starfield, and I noticed their guitarist looks a bit like sadd3j – maybe young sadd3j 😛 so I took a quick snapshot: