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Death becomes her: A Brief List Of Everyone Who Died @finborough

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For a natural process, death is not a topic that comes up naturally for people. We ask how people are doing but expect the response to be “I’m great”, not “I’m not dead yet”. And so for the main character in A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Graciela has a death issue. Starting with when she was five and found out only after the matter that her parents had her beloved dog euthanised. So Graciela decides that nobody she loves will die from then on. And so this piece becomes a fruitless attempt at how she spends her life trying to avoid death while it is all around her. It’s currently having its world premiere  at the Finborough Theatre . As the play title suggests, it is a brief list of life moments where death and life intervene for the main character, from the passing of relatives, cancer, suicides, accidents and the loss of parents. Playwright Jacob Marx Rice plots the critical moments of the lives of these characters through their passing or the passing of those around them. Howeve

Music: Dreamgirls (revisited)

As a sometime fan of Dreamgirls since discovering it after the concert recording that was made in 2001 featuring Audra McDonald, I was chuffed to find out that the original Broadway cast recording has been remastered with a few additional tracks included ahead of the movie release (in February in the UK). It arrived today and I have been giving my colleagues a drip-feed on the musical brilliance of this show. This special edition also includes orchestral versions that could become... Karaoke versions... I can just see after a few work drinks me trying to lead everyone in a version of "And I'm telling you, I'm not going".

As for the movie soundtrack... That's out December 11, but thanks to the wonders of YouTube you can see just what Beyonce is like in the movie with the song "Listen" (below). Beyonce performed this last week on Oprah and the copyright lawyers haven't spotted this infringement yet... This movie is going to be huge... It's release is being covered by dreamgirlsfans.blogspot.com...

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