Drama Desks on now

• The Drama Desk awards are on now; you can watch the live webcast from Theatermania. Windows Media Player is required. See BroadwayWorld forumers' predictions. Coast of Utopia has ten nominations.

• On Nandita Das' site, there are some photos proving the existence of Before the Rains (formerly named Kerala or Road to the Sky). We've had our doubts. Ms Das' assistant says that the film might be released at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is running from September 6 to 15, but this isn't confirmed yet.

• There's an amusing quote in the New Zealand Herald's interview with Mary Wesley's son, Toby Eady, about costume anachronisms in The Camomile Lawn. So to speak.

• The Tonys polling continues at Off-Off Blogway; again les soeurs Bakounine are neck and neck.
  

• If you're feeling bereft at the closing of Coast of Utopia, think how it must be from the other side of the stage. Martha Plimpton sums up the experience in a moving post (publicly viewable, yay). Hope she doesn't mind me sharing this beautiful passage from Shipwreck that she quotes in conclusion:

  We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but we think there is something wrong with this picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfullness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected. But there is no such place. That's why it's called Utopia.