this is a terrible entry. please skip it.
I was whining to faded-lilac earlier today about my early childhood disease (which I got last summer, so it was clearly not "early") (ditto "childhood") and how it made my hands hurt. I then checked my folders from today, and realized that I had taken twenty pages of handwritten notes. Honestly, you'd think the irony of getting arthritis-like symptoms from an early childhood disease would be funny enough, but I compounded it by being...fairly idiotic.
Ow. This is pretty slow going, this partial-hand typing. I think that I will be working on this entry for a while. ALRIGHT. Sick people do not have to follow though on some of their promises, this is my new (and totally arbitrary, subject to change as soon as I feel better, probably quite unfairly) rule. Mostly, it means I do not have to code for a real post! I like this plan. Although I do not so much like the way that I ignore my friends. Well. When we started being friends, you probably knew that I sucked at things! This is just another one.
Anyway, this sort of a review, and sort of an opportunity to say terrible things generally. That sentence has parallelism, see, because the production was pretty terrible, specifically! Go grammar!
It started out pretty awfully, so at least I wasn't disappointed when it was bad. King Cambyses' style was not a good thing, production team, and now you know all the problems I actually had. The actor playing Othello is clearly the big star of the company, and he's usually relatively inoffensive, but this was quite damning. If you start with Othello as a crazypants, the whole "descent into madness" angle falls right over. And I don't care that Iago's agency has, logistically, been at work for many years, and so Othello ought to be hanging on by a shred already. That is a crap place to start a play, especially one predicated on the notion of external constancy. Or, you know, one with any visions of an actual character for Othello outside of storming around.
This brings me to my second major problem in performance: Iago did no storming around! He was mostly just a mensch, and yes I mean that. Director, there's something called mutability, look it up. Or even directing. Look that up too, because letting Iago aimlessly wander the stage and sort of haphazardly address wherever he happened to be looking in his asides does not seem a very winsome manifestation of your vision. Or perhaps it is, if your vision is making everyone seem completely stupid! Iago just sort of seemed a happy guy who lacked motivation to do anything other than absently meddle in his coworkers' lives.
Dear Director,
If you would like to produce an office comedy in fancy dress, go ahead. I hear that Stargate: Universe is hiring. This, however, is Othello.
p.s. maybe also fire your sound designer? "Greensleeves" covered by a percussion ensemble is still not a clever idea, nor is it edgy.
p.p.s the lighting designer can stay, though. There's someone who understands the value of her orange gels and this is a compliment, okay.
kisses,
Me
I did like some bits! Cassio and Desdemona were both very likable, although as they were so much more naturalistic than all the other actors, it really looked as though they were having it off, if only because they could actually have pillowtalk, rather than pillowYELLLING A LOT, DO YOU SEE MY PAIN YET. Hey, this is a good time for a fic rec! She’ll Keep Saying “It Was An Accident” Until It Becomes The Truth (Or Gets Her Killed) by paperclipbitch. If Desdemona actually took Cassio as a lover! It's short, and fairly single-minded, but who knows. After this production, I am all for it! Perhaps that's a reason for everyone else shouting? Ohmy, something that might actually have been determined! Actually, Desdemona was really terrific here. She did a great, just elegant and real, rendition of the Willow Song, and I may have cried a little. I noticed at interval that the actress' name was Juliet Rylance. It's not a very common name, I thought, and indeed, she is Mark Rylance's daughter. I mention this because I am proud that I noticed it.
Cassio was lovely. This particular company is very fond of casting indeterminate antagonists as Gumby figures; Octavian in Antony and Cleopatra had more nervous tics than the head of a preschooler with a nervous mother. That was an awful pun, wow. Anyway! Cassio was really pleasant, and actually seemed to enjoy Bianca's company, which is not how I read the text, but is not outside of the realm of possibility. Plus he was actually very cute, and let's not even pretend that I am not the most shallow person maybe ever.
After it was done, I asked "hey, you know what would be great? If there were a sixth act, featuring Cassio who does MATH and Bianca, his hooker girlfriend! They could buy a dog, too!"
It will tell you a fair bit about my family if I follow this up by saying that we then had a shouty argument* about conservative political settlements in Shakespeare's tragedies, and then went home and drank more beer. We actually did this, if my sentence structure had deluded you up there.
*No, really shouty. We turned heads in Times Square, if you would like a subjective rendering of the volume.
And then I thought about the Hamlet of DOOOM! Perhaps, I said to myself, it would be fun to make Othello a workplace drama. I know what workplace has lots of office politics and all sorts of arbitrary status concerns! They will all work at a university together! The original plan was for it to just be the Venice campus, after a disastrous conference at the Cyprus campus, and mostly have Othello be snitty and make bad jokes, but whatever, I would like something more sweeping!
No really. See, the University has been going through a reorganization process lately, so everyone is always worried, and the administration doesn't seem to have any more answers than anyone else. The president gets this message, and so calls in the heads of the various schools, to see if there's anything he can help out with, although with the state's budget how it is, he gestures broadly, I am not sure if I can help.
Professor Othello, who is the head of the Business school, starts out. There are so many layers to the administration, and while he's sure that there are good reasons for them all, it seems like they're not able to get anything done, despite all this reorganization, and really, he's meant to be teaching students about good leadership and their own institution can't even do it! Othello is an impressive personality, though, and he really gets his point across with a clever battle metaphor. It's a hit with the president, who already really likes Othello.
And I think other plays come in here, so Reverend Lancaster-Anjou has something to say from the Divinity School, and Doctor Alonso, is there, with regrets from the actual dean of Biological Sciences, Doctor Prospero. This section is subject to revision; I think I will play around with it this weekend. So Professor Othello heads back over to his spacious office, and looks out his window and feels kinda bummed, because usually he would call his wife right now, but they're in the process of divorcing, and he just really wants something stable right now. Not even his best friend, Antony, can cheer him up these days, and he's remarked a few too many times for Othello's liking how it was a bad idea to marry one of the university trustees' daughters, and man, sometimes you just gotta roll with these things. Antony is theoretically subordinate to Othello, but it's not like you could tell. They coach the rugby team together! It's pretty great.
That sound you just heard? That was me ironing out all the conflict in this play. Whoops. I really want Desdemona to survive, though! And also Cassio works in the math department, and sometimes drops by the Business School to tell MBAs about not cheating on graphs, but mostly so he can flirt with Bianca, the marketing professor. Iago is over in psychology, and he periodically freaks everyone out, but he's mostly been exiled from the business school for shady reasons to do with the reorganization, and also the Chair of the Psych Department, Doctor "call me Tamora" Gotha is a hardass, and mostly takes the freaks from other departments for a few semesters and forges them into semi-functional members of society. (It's distinctly shady, and her connections in the Athletic Department seem to have something to do with it.) And then I decided to stop cheapening great works of literature. Well, no, that's not true. I decided to go cheapen a different great work.
I don't believe in transitions!
Cameron's 'beautiful boy' dies I feel terrible, and wretched about that, because, oh, Cameron is really excellent and his family are just rock solid, and really quite inspirational, in their own way. I am a tool, though, here, so I'll only comment on the last paragraph here:
A Number 10 dinner later to mark the unveiling of a portrait of Baroness Thatcher which Mr Cameron had been scheduled to attend has also been cancelled.
Which, HELL YES. Okay, so there are some sneaky (crappy? bad idea things?) that Thatcher did, and if we wanted to, we could probably sit here all day and enumerate the faults of 1980s Conservative ideology, as there are rather a lot of them. However, I would like to imagine that this type of thing happens fairly routinely, that Cameron has to go over and visit with Brown, and they don't really mind it so much, because, hey, free wine! Also an opportunity to make fun of Nick Clegg, who I presume is not invited to these things, as he is so awfully bitter and has to stay home drinking seawater. Or, alternately, he doesn't wanna go, because, ugh, Gordon and David just spend the whole time talking about how other MPs look, and they're so mean, and I don't wanna go, I don't wanna.
Ahem. I'll taking whatever prize one gets for the fastest cheapening of a politician's personal tragedy into a terrible moralistic teen sitcom scene.
Ow. This is pretty slow going, this partial-hand typing. I think that I will be working on this entry for a while. ALRIGHT. Sick people do not have to follow though on some of their promises, this is my new (and totally arbitrary, subject to change as soon as I feel better, probably quite unfairly) rule. Mostly, it means I do not have to code for a real post! I like this plan. Although I do not so much like the way that I ignore my friends. Well. When we started being friends, you probably knew that I sucked at things! This is just another one.
Anyway, this sort of a review, and sort of an opportunity to say terrible things generally. That sentence has parallelism, see, because the production was pretty terrible, specifically! Go grammar!
It started out pretty awfully, so at least I wasn't disappointed when it was bad. King Cambyses' style was not a good thing, production team, and now you know all the problems I actually had. The actor playing Othello is clearly the big star of the company, and he's usually relatively inoffensive, but this was quite damning. If you start with Othello as a crazypants, the whole "descent into madness" angle falls right over. And I don't care that Iago's agency has, logistically, been at work for many years, and so Othello ought to be hanging on by a shred already. That is a crap place to start a play, especially one predicated on the notion of external constancy. Or, you know, one with any visions of an actual character for Othello outside of storming around.
This brings me to my second major problem in performance: Iago did no storming around! He was mostly just a mensch, and yes I mean that. Director, there's something called mutability, look it up. Or even directing. Look that up too, because letting Iago aimlessly wander the stage and sort of haphazardly address wherever he happened to be looking in his asides does not seem a very winsome manifestation of your vision. Or perhaps it is, if your vision is making everyone seem completely stupid! Iago just sort of seemed a happy guy who lacked motivation to do anything other than absently meddle in his coworkers' lives.
Dear Director,
If you would like to produce an office comedy in fancy dress, go ahead. I hear that Stargate: Universe is hiring. This, however, is Othello.
p.s. maybe also fire your sound designer? "Greensleeves" covered by a percussion ensemble is still not a clever idea, nor is it edgy.
p.p.s the lighting designer can stay, though. There's someone who understands the value of her orange gels and this is a compliment, okay.
kisses,
Me
I did like some bits! Cassio and Desdemona were both very likable, although as they were so much more naturalistic than all the other actors, it really looked as though they were having it off, if only because they could actually have pillowtalk, rather than pillowYELLLING A LOT, DO YOU SEE MY PAIN YET. Hey, this is a good time for a fic rec! She’ll Keep Saying “It Was An Accident” Until It Becomes The Truth (Or Gets Her Killed) by paperclipbitch. If Desdemona actually took Cassio as a lover! It's short, and fairly single-minded, but who knows. After this production, I am all for it! Perhaps that's a reason for everyone else shouting? Ohmy, something that might actually have been determined! Actually, Desdemona was really terrific here. She did a great, just elegant and real, rendition of the Willow Song, and I may have cried a little. I noticed at interval that the actress' name was Juliet Rylance. It's not a very common name, I thought, and indeed, she is Mark Rylance's daughter. I mention this because I am proud that I noticed it.
Cassio was lovely. This particular company is very fond of casting indeterminate antagonists as Gumby figures; Octavian in Antony and Cleopatra had more nervous tics than the head of a preschooler with a nervous mother. That was an awful pun, wow. Anyway! Cassio was really pleasant, and actually seemed to enjoy Bianca's company, which is not how I read the text, but is not outside of the realm of possibility. Plus he was actually very cute, and let's not even pretend that I am not the most shallow person maybe ever.
After it was done, I asked "hey, you know what would be great? If there were a sixth act, featuring Cassio who does MATH and Bianca, his hooker girlfriend! They could buy a dog, too!"
It will tell you a fair bit about my family if I follow this up by saying that we then had a shouty argument* about conservative political settlements in Shakespeare's tragedies, and then went home and drank more beer. We actually did this, if my sentence structure had deluded you up there.
*No, really shouty. We turned heads in Times Square, if you would like a subjective rendering of the volume.
And then I thought about the Hamlet of DOOOM! Perhaps, I said to myself, it would be fun to make Othello a workplace drama. I know what workplace has lots of office politics and all sorts of arbitrary status concerns! They will all work at a university together! The original plan was for it to just be the Venice campus, after a disastrous conference at the Cyprus campus, and mostly have Othello be snitty and make bad jokes, but whatever, I would like something more sweeping!
No really. See, the University has been going through a reorganization process lately, so everyone is always worried, and the administration doesn't seem to have any more answers than anyone else. The president gets this message, and so calls in the heads of the various schools, to see if there's anything he can help out with, although with the state's budget how it is, he gestures broadly, I am not sure if I can help.
Professor Othello, who is the head of the Business school, starts out. There are so many layers to the administration, and while he's sure that there are good reasons for them all, it seems like they're not able to get anything done, despite all this reorganization, and really, he's meant to be teaching students about good leadership and their own institution can't even do it! Othello is an impressive personality, though, and he really gets his point across with a clever battle metaphor. It's a hit with the president, who already really likes Othello.
And I think other plays come in here, so Reverend Lancaster-Anjou has something to say from the Divinity School, and Doctor Alonso, is there, with regrets from the actual dean of Biological Sciences, Doctor Prospero. This section is subject to revision; I think I will play around with it this weekend. So Professor Othello heads back over to his spacious office, and looks out his window and feels kinda bummed, because usually he would call his wife right now, but they're in the process of divorcing, and he just really wants something stable right now. Not even his best friend, Antony, can cheer him up these days, and he's remarked a few too many times for Othello's liking how it was a bad idea to marry one of the university trustees' daughters, and man, sometimes you just gotta roll with these things. Antony is theoretically subordinate to Othello, but it's not like you could tell. They coach the rugby team together! It's pretty great.
That sound you just heard? That was me ironing out all the conflict in this play. Whoops. I really want Desdemona to survive, though! And also Cassio works in the math department, and sometimes drops by the Business School to tell MBAs about not cheating on graphs, but mostly so he can flirt with Bianca, the marketing professor. Iago is over in psychology, and he periodically freaks everyone out, but he's mostly been exiled from the business school for shady reasons to do with the reorganization, and also the Chair of the Psych Department, Doctor "call me Tamora" Gotha is a hardass, and mostly takes the freaks from other departments for a few semesters and forges them into semi-functional members of society. (It's distinctly shady, and her connections in the Athletic Department seem to have something to do with it.) And then I decided to stop cheapening great works of literature. Well, no, that's not true. I decided to go cheapen a different great work.
I don't believe in transitions!
Cameron's 'beautiful boy' dies I feel terrible, and wretched about that, because, oh, Cameron is really excellent and his family are just rock solid, and really quite inspirational, in their own way. I am a tool, though, here, so I'll only comment on the last paragraph here:
A Number 10 dinner later to mark the unveiling of a portrait of Baroness Thatcher which Mr Cameron had been scheduled to attend has also been cancelled.
Which, HELL YES. Okay, so there are some sneaky (crappy? bad idea things?) that Thatcher did, and if we wanted to, we could probably sit here all day and enumerate the faults of 1980s Conservative ideology, as there are rather a lot of them. However, I would like to imagine that this type of thing happens fairly routinely, that Cameron has to go over and visit with Brown, and they don't really mind it so much, because, hey, free wine! Also an opportunity to make fun of Nick Clegg, who I presume is not invited to these things, as he is so awfully bitter and has to stay home drinking seawater. Or, alternately, he doesn't wanna go, because, ugh, Gordon and David just spend the whole time talking about how other MPs look, and they're so mean, and I don't wanna go, I don't wanna.
Ahem. I'll taking whatever prize one gets for the fastest cheapening of a politician's personal tragedy into a terrible moralistic teen sitcom scene.