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Merrily We Roll Along won several Tony awards in 2024. It also was filmed and is being released theatrically on December 5. If you like Daniel Radcliffe or Jonathan Groff or the music of Stephen Sondheim, then go see it. It's 2 hours and 25 minutes long, so use the restroom before you find your seats.

I didn't like some of the choices made. One thing I love about theater is that you get to choose where to look. The first scene of this production didn't allow that. There sounds like there's a lot going on in the background, but all we see is a close up on Jonathan Groff. Sometimes another person is in the frame with him, but the bulk of the opening section is him in medium close up responding to what's being sung or occasionally singing himself. It just didn't work for me.

Daniel Radcliffe's patter song "Franklin Shepherd, Inc." is really well done. You can tell that the character is just letting out a whole bunch of stuff that's been building and he didn't intend to do it publicly and he can't stop. It's painful, well sung, and the entire scene becomes devastating.

The years 1960, 1958, and 1957 pay off a lot of what we saw earlier in the play and later in their lives.

Hedda starring Tessa Thompson is excellent. It's not really Ibsen's play; it's more of a fanfic update of the play. Thompson's performance is amazingly good. The character is definitely chaotic, but whether the alignment is neutral or evil is up to the watcher. I don't think anyone could seriously argue for neutral good. Everything is well cast. They made one change toward the end that I think diminished the impact of the movie, but it's also been years since I read the play (on a trip to Norway when I was 20), so I may be misremembering the impact from the play. There are Ibsen plays I've seen performed, but Hedda Gabler isn't one of them.

I don't know if Hedda will have a theatrical release. I hope so because there are potential Oscar nominations if it is. I do know that it was paid for by Amazon Prime Streaming, so at some point we'll be able to see it there.

The last one we saw was a documentary called Natchez. It's an interesting one to compare the southern attitudes of the past to the way the history should be taught now. It was thoughtfully put together. It's supposed to have a theatrical release in February and will show on PBS next May.

There was also a short film shown before it called Beyond Silence. One of the lead actresses is Deaf. I was also very shocked at how much I understood. I didn't think my Dutch was that good, but from the beginning I was following the spoken parts in real time and rarely needed the subtitles. I don't know where this might be seen, but it was very well done.

The Savannah Film Festival started yesterday. So far, I've seen two films.

The first was Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke and directed by Richard Linklater. I knew enough about the lyrist Lorenz Hart to want to see it. It would be a better movie if it were between 10 and 20 minutes shorter. At the risk of sounding somewhat bitchy, I don't get Margaret Qualley's appeal. The supporting cast is excellent, including Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White. Hart comes across, possibly correctly, as someone completely charming and completely frustrating at the same time.

The second was Nuremberg. I keep going back and forth in my head about whether Rami Malek was really good or just OK as Douglas Kelley, the first psychiatrist to work with the first 22 men on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes. Michael Shannon as Justice Jackson was a standout as was Richard E. Grant as Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecutor.

The outstanding performance is Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring. The man is charming. He is also a drug addicted egomaniac who is aware of how his manipulations come across. It's thoroughly creepy and yet a very warm, disarming performance.

I would have liked more about Hess or Speer -- two of the seven not sentenced to death -- as a contrast to why some were and others weren't. I know Speer admitted wrong doing and even shame -- whether he actually felt it is anyone's guess.

I highly recommend Nuremberg even as I recognize that I'll probably never watch it again. It shows documentary footage of the concentration camps, so be prepared for it.

As a side note to Hess, by 1987 he was the last prisoner in Spandau. I didn't realize until today that he committed suicide, though I'd known he died, at the age of 93 on May 12, 1987.

From 1983-1987, my parents spent four months of the year in West Berlin while Dad taught at the local American military base. In 1987, Dad was due to start teaching in Boston in August, but he had to complete his last courses in Berlin. My 26th birthday was May 29 that year, and I discovered that Modern Jazz Quartet would be playing in Berlin on my birthday. Dad invited me to join him to celebrate my birthday.

On the two previous years when Sis and I joined our folks for Christmas in West Berlin, we had, at least once each trip, had a reason to go by Spandau. This time when Dad drove us by Spandau, around a quarter of the building was gone. As soon as Hess's death had been confirmed, the Soviet Union began taking the prison apart brick by brick. The prison no longer existed by the end of August that year. It was a disturbing site.