Day #11: Your least favorite play

I have been sort of dreading this day because I have a very idiosyncratic answer. I mean, okay, yes, The Taming of the Shrew (for instance) is incredibly problematic, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, apart from The Bit With The Dog and "Who is Sylvia," is largely forgettable until the end, which is just fucking ( Read more... )

SHAKESPEARE:
I will this night,
In several hands, in at his windows throw,
As if they came from several citizens,
Writings all tending to the great opinion
That Rome holds of his name; wherein obscurely
Caesar's ambition shall be glanced at.

FANNISH:
I'll tell him the lurkers support me in e-mail.

PSA: Listening to Patrick Stewart doing Cassius' long speech griping about Caesar's rise to prominence is entirely too fabulous.

It makes my impending lecture prep much nicer, really. ;)

(John Wood as Brutus is pretty awesome too. But, you know, Patrick Stewart!It is a little disturbing, though, when your playlist follows it up with They Might ( Read more... )

I wonder why it is that Shakespeare festivals/theaters/whatever always do the same things within a few years of one another?

Witness, for instance, the Illinois Shakespeare Festival lineup this year: Caesar, Pericles, and Comedy of Errors. I saw an excellent Pericles in Chicago back in February, and the St. Louis festival is doing Caesar in a ( Read more... )

Because I feel like it, random Good Things:

I've been doing a bit of woodshedding for the Lord Nelson Mass (the first rehearsal where we're actually doing anything is tomorrow) and it is so cool. Granted, singing in the alto section in a mixed chorus entails sitting on Fs and Gs for a long time, but hey, who am I to think I'm the whole of the ( Read more... )

I'm watching the Shakespeare marathon on TCM, as mentioned a few posts back, and right now they're airing the 1953 Julius Caesar, aka The One With Marlon Brando. Who plays Antony and is not generally very good. Nor is the guy playing Brutus (I'm not sure who it is, but I think someone famousish. Okay, credits inform me it's James Mason), but I'll ( Read more... )

Last night I had a dream in which I was directing a really off-the-cuff low-budget student production of Othello in which for some reason I had been prevailed upon to do the title role. In all my Anglo-Saxon pastiness. It was really weird. And people kept interrupting the production because it was located in the middle of the student center, but ( Read more... )

The trouble with the appearance of practically every working actor in the UK in the Harry Potter movies is that occasionally it makes watching other things with the same actors rather weird. For instance: I've been watching the ABC broadcast of Chamber of Secrets this evening, and at one point, I looked up the film on IMDB to figure out how I ( Read more... )

So I'm studying for my Shakespeare midterm tomorrow (which strangely does not worry me, although the one I had to take last year was in the same form, viz., you go into the exam room and write on a question for two hours, and that one terrified me silly -- I think it's that this semester one of the plays we read was Richard II, and, I mean, come on ( Read more... )

Julius Caesar has, as I have mentioned to more than one of you on occasion, never been one of my favorite plays. After seeing St. Louis Shakespeare's production, though, I am better disposed to it as a text. Even a play I don't much care for deserves better treatment than Caesar got at the hands of SLS ( Read more... )