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.