Stratford
I just realized that this has been sitting on my hard drive since I got back on Sunday. Since we're moving tomorrow and likely to be internet-less until Tuesday, I figure I should probably post it now, even though I think I'd originally been planning on saying a little more...
Last weekend, we went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with my family. We saw:
Thursday afternoon: Two Gentlemen of Verona
This was a fun, fluffy version of a fun, fluffy play, set as a vaudeville-era backstage romance. As such, there were a bunch of interpolations of bits of other plays, seen from the back and played to recorded applause. My favorite of these was probably a ridiculously melodramatic version of the last scene of Othello.
The two lower-class clowns were extremely funny, though I had trouble remembering which of them was which. They did a great job of bringing out the wordplay in their roles, which I don't remember noticing in my one previous experience with the play.
If I have any complaint about it, it's that it didn't really try to make the ending of the play make sense. Then again, I'm not sure how you could.
Friday afternoon: The Winter's Tale
I loved everything about this, and don't have much more to say about it than "things X, Y, and Z were awesome".
Leontes was fantastic, and had an excellent character arc despite only really having half of a play to get through it all. There was a very clear and chilling moment when he slipped from friend mode into absolute monarch mode. During the play I thought they'd found it in the text as the point where he starts using the royal we, but I looked at a copy of the play in the gift shop afterward and he actually uses it throughout, so it must have been all in the acting.
Paulina owned the stage whenever she was allowed onto it. (Incidentally, the actress who played her apparently gets to be Richard III next year, which I expect to be really neat -- she definitely has the required stage presence.)
The bear was impressively scary if not particularly bear-like (if I had to describe it in two words, they would probably be "killer robot", even though the play was mostly Renaissance-y in concept other than that). I don't have any problem believing that bears look like that on the coast of Bohemia, though...
In the second half of the play, Father Time was really goofy (they literally flew him in on some sort of see-saw contraption which also had the ability to spin him head-over-heels, and exploited this ability shamelessly throughout). This worked really well -- after all, having Father Time come out to apologize to your audience is really goofy, and it definitively established the shift from tragedy to comedy.
Autolycus was totally shameless and very funny, especially in a couple excellent audience-interaction gags.
I also really liked the shepherds, especially the younger one. The whole extended joke about him being a gentlemen born, and having been for at least four hours, was really well done.
And I cried at the ending.
Friday evening: The Tempest
This was the flagship production, with the big-name star (Christopher Plummer playing Prospero), incredibly flashy effects, and rave reviews; it's apparently entirely sold out for the rest of the season. Everyone who wasn't me seemed to love it. I liked it a lot, and respected it, but had a few minor niggles that kept me from going quite that far.
First, while Plummer's Prospero was an interesting, very well played, and entirely believable character, he didn't quite make sense to me as Prospero -- I wasn't entirely convinced in him being as much of a manipulator as Prospero has to be. Second, while a lot of the magic worked really well, there were a few parts of it that I found distracting; in particular there was a set of strobe-ish lights that flashed over the audience and worked really well for the storm scene at the beginning of the play, but then kept recurring to signify that magic was happening in ways I found distracting.
Everything else about the play was great. Ariel in particular was incredible; she was simultaneously otherworldly and very approachable.
Saturday afternoon: As You Like It
The acting was really good (except that Rosalind made one or two questionable choices of line reading). The sets were gorgeous. The concept was... spotty.
The forest was sometimes spooky and sometimes the Magical Land of Jazz, and didn't really meld the two ideas very effectively. I think I would have liked it better if they'd gone further with the jazz concept; the music was really fun, possibly the best part of the show. The court was a very scary military dictatorship with lots of goose-stepping. This sometimes worked -- Oliver's redemption made a lot more sense than I think it usually does, as he was very obviously frightened into it -- but it made the ending fall flat to me as Duke Frederick was just too weighty a villain for the random one-line offscreen redemption he gets.
Touchstone was quite dapper and Jaques kind of peculiar, which I thought was a nice reversal. Jaques was the only member of the banished court who bothered to bring an umbrella, which seemed entirely appropriate.
The Rosalind-Celia interactions were also very well done; I liked watching Celia get more and more exasperated with Rosalind's flirting with Orlando, only to have the roles reversed when Oliver showed up. I didn't see the Rosalind-as-artist thing going anywhere interesting, though.
Overall this falls into the category of plays that I probably would have liked better in rehearsal than in performance.
Last weekend, we went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with my family. We saw:
Thursday afternoon: Two Gentlemen of Verona
This was a fun, fluffy version of a fun, fluffy play, set as a vaudeville-era backstage romance. As such, there were a bunch of interpolations of bits of other plays, seen from the back and played to recorded applause. My favorite of these was probably a ridiculously melodramatic version of the last scene of Othello.
The two lower-class clowns were extremely funny, though I had trouble remembering which of them was which. They did a great job of bringing out the wordplay in their roles, which I don't remember noticing in my one previous experience with the play.
If I have any complaint about it, it's that it didn't really try to make the ending of the play make sense. Then again, I'm not sure how you could.
Friday afternoon: The Winter's Tale
I loved everything about this, and don't have much more to say about it than "things X, Y, and Z were awesome".
Leontes was fantastic, and had an excellent character arc despite only really having half of a play to get through it all. There was a very clear and chilling moment when he slipped from friend mode into absolute monarch mode. During the play I thought they'd found it in the text as the point where he starts using the royal we, but I looked at a copy of the play in the gift shop afterward and he actually uses it throughout, so it must have been all in the acting.
Paulina owned the stage whenever she was allowed onto it. (Incidentally, the actress who played her apparently gets to be Richard III next year, which I expect to be really neat -- she definitely has the required stage presence.)
The bear was impressively scary if not particularly bear-like (if I had to describe it in two words, they would probably be "killer robot", even though the play was mostly Renaissance-y in concept other than that). I don't have any problem believing that bears look like that on the coast of Bohemia, though...
In the second half of the play, Father Time was really goofy (they literally flew him in on some sort of see-saw contraption which also had the ability to spin him head-over-heels, and exploited this ability shamelessly throughout). This worked really well -- after all, having Father Time come out to apologize to your audience is really goofy, and it definitively established the shift from tragedy to comedy.
Autolycus was totally shameless and very funny, especially in a couple excellent audience-interaction gags.
I also really liked the shepherds, especially the younger one. The whole extended joke about him being a gentlemen born, and having been for at least four hours, was really well done.
And I cried at the ending.
Friday evening: The Tempest
This was the flagship production, with the big-name star (Christopher Plummer playing Prospero), incredibly flashy effects, and rave reviews; it's apparently entirely sold out for the rest of the season. Everyone who wasn't me seemed to love it. I liked it a lot, and respected it, but had a few minor niggles that kept me from going quite that far.
First, while Plummer's Prospero was an interesting, very well played, and entirely believable character, he didn't quite make sense to me as Prospero -- I wasn't entirely convinced in him being as much of a manipulator as Prospero has to be. Second, while a lot of the magic worked really well, there were a few parts of it that I found distracting; in particular there was a set of strobe-ish lights that flashed over the audience and worked really well for the storm scene at the beginning of the play, but then kept recurring to signify that magic was happening in ways I found distracting.
Everything else about the play was great. Ariel in particular was incredible; she was simultaneously otherworldly and very approachable.
Saturday afternoon: As You Like It
The acting was really good (except that Rosalind made one or two questionable choices of line reading). The sets were gorgeous. The concept was... spotty.
The forest was sometimes spooky and sometimes the Magical Land of Jazz, and didn't really meld the two ideas very effectively. I think I would have liked it better if they'd gone further with the jazz concept; the music was really fun, possibly the best part of the show. The court was a very scary military dictatorship with lots of goose-stepping. This sometimes worked -- Oliver's redemption made a lot more sense than I think it usually does, as he was very obviously frightened into it -- but it made the ending fall flat to me as Duke Frederick was just too weighty a villain for the random one-line offscreen redemption he gets.
Touchstone was quite dapper and Jaques kind of peculiar, which I thought was a nice reversal. Jaques was the only member of the banished court who bothered to bring an umbrella, which seemed entirely appropriate.
The Rosalind-Celia interactions were also very well done; I liked watching Celia get more and more exasperated with Rosalind's flirting with Orlando, only to have the roles reversed when Oliver showed up. I didn't see the Rosalind-as-artist thing going anywhere interesting, though.
Overall this falls into the category of plays that I probably would have liked better in rehearsal than in performance.