"The Genteel Companion" concert at Longy's Baroque Institute

The full title of the program was "The Genteel Companion," an evening of vocal and instrumental music and dance by the students and faculty of the International Baroque Institute at Longy. It was Saturday night, July 26, at the Longy School.

And it was pleasant and genteel. In the first half of the concert, a number of small ensembles played the music of Henry Purcell, Peter Phillips, Handel, and other composers we didn't recognize. We liked it, but found it a little too much andante. Maybe I was still tired from my insane hour and fifteen minutes of running in the 90 degree sun in the middle of the day.

Hey, the food during the intermission was terrific. Marilyn had a memorable piece of pound cake. The strawberries were some of the best I'd eaten all summer.

The second half was livelier, with dancing, faster pieces, and comedy. One dance number (by Jean-Baptiste Lully) brought two "French Country Gentlemen" onto the stage to cavort with two ladies. The two country gentlemen, it turned out, were themselves women wearing breeches, and Three Musketeers-style hats with feathers. At first I thought this was a statement of some kind, based on someone's dissertation: "Gender Transactional Role-reversal in a French Medieval Village", or something like that. But then it seemed more likely that they just didn't have any male dancers enrolled this year. They all looked great in their costumes, and they danced beautifully.

A hilarious bit from Thomas Arne's "The Judgment of Paris" had us laughing. A flock of sopranos attempt to get the attention of guy reading a newspaper in a cafe ("Turn toMe Thy Gentle Youth"). One soprano did some very funny things with a roll of toilet paper.

We liked it all. But there could have been half an hour less.

And we found a parking ticket on our car. The only parking tickets I have ever gotten in my life have been in Cambridge.

Wall-e, can you save us all?

There's a lot to like in this movie. How can you not like it? Wall-e, an adorable, lonely, trash-compacting robot finds eternal love with Eve, a cute, tough, and curvy robot who can fly and blast her way through several feet of concrete and steel (or whatever materials they'll be using seven hundred years from now). Their victorious love is eternal as long as they can keep recharging their batteries. The two of them save humanity. They have plaintive, child-like voices. You practically sob when Wall-e thinks he has forever lost Eve. I like all that!

It's obvious that this is the old story about humanity letting technology and monopolistic capitalism run amok until it all finally controls us. A few brave and plucky souls manage to break free and wreck the inhuman, infernal machinery. (Surely the scriptwriters had read E.M. Forster's startling 1909 short story, The Machine Stops -- here's a link to a Wikipedia article about it.)

The innovation proposed by this film is that it is two robots, not humans, who rebel against the machinery and reclaim their world -- and humanity. The two robots are similar to the Disney animals we loved as children, and similarly, adults will have to suspend their sense of credulity as to whether animals and robots can talk, feel, and love.

It is not a particularly deep or resonant film. Ty Burr's review in The Boston Globe strangely overpraises the film. The characters are pretty thin, the plot has numerous detailed illogical tangents and sidetracks that don't tell us much, and the whole thing looks like an updated version of 60s animated TV comedy, The Jetsons.

But hey...what about all those children in the audience? They don't know Forster or The Jetsons or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or any of that stuff. This is news to them. (Or rather, it's fun to them, hopefully.) That's true.

Yet, watching the careening colorful pixels on the screen ricocheting from one end of the screen to the other, Wall-e and Eve flying at warp speed from one part of the intergalactic spaceship to the other, I thought, "Do children even know what's going on here?" I couldn't make out what was happening half the time. I just knew something was happening and we were moving toward something. Can children catch the details here? Those early Disney films were slow and simple, the little creatures talked, sang, and explained their way through what was happening there in the forests. In this film, can anyone explain the storyline, why the auto machines take over, why the corporate despot/president appears in ancient videos and warns the captain not to return to earth even though it's part of the original program for humanity to return?

Or doesn't it matter?