I'd forgotten that I put together a "year in review" post about things I loved in 2011, and then never posted it because the list seemed so short, and I wanted to see if anything else came to mind. It wasn't a fantastic year for falling in love with new things, I guess. I read 38 books, which I know is barely a sneeze to some of you speed-readers ( Read more... )

I was away this weekend, so when I called my mother for our usual chat, she'd made a list of things she wanted to remember to say to me. Two of them were fairly typical things, but the third was, "Was that your Doctor Who in the commercials for Fright Night?" I laughed and said, yes, that was David ( Read more... )

Right. So. Here are my notes on Much Ado. I've left out one or two of the more rambling asides that had nothing to do with the production, and I've moved a paragraph or two so that elements are grouped more naturally (as opposed to falling wherever I happened to remember them and write them down), but basically this is just transcribed from what I ( Read more... )

I'm sure you all already know about this announcement, but just in case: David Tennant and Catherine Tate are going to be in a production of Much Ado About Nothing together ( Read more... )

Thinking, as one does, about Hamlet. I still haven't had a chance to think through the NT Live broadcast beyond the scribbles I took during intermission and when I got home (and probably won't, now). I thought Rory Kinnear was quite good, but--weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly)--he tended to lose me, just a tiny bit, on the soliloquies. I don't want ( Read more... )

While I was watching bits and pieces of all those Hamlets, my mind snagged on a bit of Ophelia's description of Hamlet when he bursts in on her as she's sewing in her closet:

And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors,--he comes before me ( Read more... )

I've been seeing (and hearing) a lot of comments like, "I wish they'd chosen someone really different to play Eleven/chosen to make Eleven really different; Matt Smith (or Eleven) is just David Tennant (or Ten) lite." I find these comments fairly baffling, in part because I've been reading season 5 as an extended meditation on the fact that Eleven ( Read more... )

Because in my brain, listening to DVD commentary of Greg Doran's Hamlet is relaxing, I listened to the commentary over a few days, mostly when I was eating dinner. For those of you who followed the whole "Andre Tchaikovsky's skull" saga* when the production was on in Stratford, the skull has also been immortalized (heh) in the film as well ( Read more... )

Hamlet: worst audience member ever, Y/Y? It always amuses me when productions don't even try to pretend that we can hear him but the players can't: the perils of performing for royalty. (Also, because I am a caricature of myself, I totally dug the Player Queen.)

There may be a proper update about Hamlet at some point, but: let it be known that I ( Read more... )

The Great Performances website has been updated for Hamlet, finally. (It's possible that they did this earlier in the month; I got tired of checking in late March or so ( Read more... )