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neadodsI love that the Tula communications center always has a monitor free, so no waiting and no time limits, and apparently no closing. I DON'T love their netnanny, which not only attempts to keep me away from reading my email, it has blocked me from reading political cartoons. I thought I'd catch up on Cagle's collected reactions to Robertson's fatwa, but I can't get through without a supervisor's password.
I'm over 40, I shouldn't have to say "Mother may I" to access anything!!!
*huff* Okay, on with the show. This is gonna be a long one, so lots of cuts below.
It was EDWARD II for yesterday's matinee. I wasn't sure what to expect; I'd been told that the play wasn't coherent, that it was dumb, that it wasn't really something for the Stratford stage, that I wouldn't miss it if I went to see something else. I found it to be interesting, exciting, well-acted, perfectly coherent... in that Tudor sex, swords, and gore sort of way. Edward III, a 14-year-old boy making his Stratford debut, was quite good; Harry Thomas may well be a man to watch. And it had loads of Scott; he was second only to Edward II in terms of character importance, and I think beat him in stage time. Red leather doublets suit him, and he might be greying, but he can still swing a sword well. (They did all the battles as slow motion bits, once with action down in the voms with their shadows projected on the walls.)
I do hope, though, that David Snelgrove and Jamie Robinson are either gay or bi, because they were seriously macking on each other as Edward II and Gaveston. This was not a play that shied away from being in your face; not only did they have Edward and Gaveston all over each other (but not Edward and his other companions), they also had onstage a men-in-pleather-pants-only grope scene, a simulated blowjob, and the red hot poker up the wazoo murder. Controversial, but it fit the themes, and nobody walked out at either intermission.
I didn't like Titus or Troilus, which were also venial and violent, and as no particular fan of slash it wasn't the guy on guy aspect that got me either, so I'm not sure why I liked this and not the others. Possibly because nobody vacillated all over the stage; in both Titus and Troilus you could get whiplash from characters changing their minds and building plots. Edward was perfectly straightforward - the king and the peers were fighting for supremacy and the king finally won... just not THAT king.
There were lots of beheadings, although those took place offstage via sound effects. (I almost used *WHACK*WHACK*WHACK*thud* as the header for this, since they took three chops to get through Scott's stiff neck.) Although the heads were almost universally cabbages in sacks, the sound alone was enough to get a woman ahead of me to mutter, "Oh, that's gross!"
Obviously, she hadn't been reading the playbill writeups. Ron Kennell's says "...in the latter two plays he had his head chopped off, thus losing his head about 59 times." Graham Abbey's says that after starting as a young page, "...he has been married, divorced, impaled, poisoned, decapitated, shot, and even graduated high school on the Stratford stage."
After the show, I went around to mingle with the crowd and the fleet of bicycles at the stage door. Scott took a long time getting out, so I struck up a conversation with Ron Kennell. I felt a bit sorry for him, to have come out through that crowd and gotten no attention, and he seemed to be waiting for someone himself. So I told him how wonderful I thought he'd been in Karamozov. Well, no actor's going to turn down a conversation that starts like that! He's a nice guy, charming and interesting, and we chatted a bit about the problems that had gone on during that show - he admitted that he and his friends HAD had a few drinks over it later at his place; "Wednesdays are Reality Show night; we watch So You Think You Can Dance." Talked a bit about this production of Edward; "You can always tell when people don't want to say they're offended but they are. They talk about how nice it is to have it in 'a small space' or 'an intimate stage like this one and not on the big stage'." Compared it a bit to two T plays - I told him I preferred this but hadn't figured out why yet - and discussed the use of offstage sound to heighten effects. (He thinks that they're going heavily on the cabbages in sacks because the news is so violent these days.)
Scott popped out for a bit and pressed his cheek to mine (I'm not entirely sure whether he meant to hug me - but he didn't raise his arms - or he was allowing himself to be kissed. Guess next year I'll kiss his cheek to find out. :>) He said I didn't miss much in missing his Benedick - "Nobody wants to be in Winnipeg in the winter" and that everyone in the family is fine and he has no idea what his plans are for the future. We talked a bit about what he's doing ("Last year was easy, only the one play.") I wanted to ask if there was a Guardsman soundtrack, but Marion popped up just then so they went off.
Ron was still waiting for whoever he was waiting for - to my quiet amusement, the rest of his conversation was all about how great it was to work with Scott and how wonderful an actor Scott was. Which, yes, I agree wholeheartedly, but I was trying to show that he wasn't the ONLY reason I came up... even though he'd been the original main reason. Then Ron's friend came by and I vamoosed.
(My B&B proprietress tells a Ron story - she was trying to call someone down the block to turn around, but couldn't shoult loudly enough. Ron was passing by and she asked for his help - HE had no problem projecting down the block!)
Dinner was at Garlic, which I think is new. Very expensive, but I was willing to splurge a bit. What I wasn't willing to do was eat spicy food, and although I thought I'd ordered something mild - beef in a smoked gouda sauce with a corn/tomato/spinach thing and potatoes dauphin - it tasted like Dante's Inferno. So I bolted before dessert and picked up a "chocolate monkey" ice cream at Balthazar's to quench the fires.
Then The Lark. I'm still not sure what to think. Nobody does, judging from the highly mixed reviews and the half-empty theater. The lines were great; there were a lot of them that are still so topical that the audience laughed at the modern use more than the context. Graham used his crutches to great effect, flinging them forward so that he looked like a predatory animal or insect as he roamed around. The setup; with many of the main characters aware that they are in a story, worked for me. (The 1940s costuming didn't work for everyone; in the Eaton Lounge I overheard a man protesting in a British accent that "making the Engish into Nazis is a bit... unsubtle.")
When I looked at the program book I thought that Amanda Plummer had an oddly rictus grin in many of the shots, and discovered that her performance owed far too much to Peter Pan in the first half. She bubbled and bounced and laughed and even when she got stern, she came across less as otherworldly and more as an adolescent stamping her feet at the adults. (Although points for pronouncing all the French correctly.) And Stephen Stutcliffe's Dauphin whined about courage so much that I expected him to start belting out "If I Were the King ofthe Forest France!" any second.
During the intermission I though about that. I thought about how much I was enjoying the writing of the play vs having a book of Hellman's at home vs the experience of such great actors vs Peter Pan and the cowardly lion vs how interesting the second half might be vs how tired I was vs how much I wanted to get every drop out of Stratford vs the legroom and my numb butt vs once in a lifetime opportunities vs having no obligation to anyone but myself...
...and I stepped into the warm Stratford night.
Today is the last day to fling myself into idyl; I have Hello Dolly and The Tempest, both at the Festival, so I'm not going far. Probably just down to the river, here in the communication center, and the Principal's pantry for dinner, with stopoffs for a snort in the Eaton Lounge. I've bailed on the review book du jour - reading three cozies where the kooky, fashion-conscious lead is dating the detective is two too many in a row - and am reading the thriller about Marlowe and modern intelligence gathering.
I'm over 40, I shouldn't have to say "Mother may I" to access anything!!!
*huff* Okay, on with the show. This is gonna be a long one, so lots of cuts below.
It was EDWARD II for yesterday's matinee. I wasn't sure what to expect; I'd been told that the play wasn't coherent, that it was dumb, that it wasn't really something for the Stratford stage, that I wouldn't miss it if I went to see something else. I found it to be interesting, exciting, well-acted, perfectly coherent... in that Tudor sex, swords, and gore sort of way. Edward III, a 14-year-old boy making his Stratford debut, was quite good; Harry Thomas may well be a man to watch. And it had loads of Scott; he was second only to Edward II in terms of character importance, and I think beat him in stage time. Red leather doublets suit him, and he might be greying, but he can still swing a sword well. (They did all the battles as slow motion bits, once with action down in the voms with their shadows projected on the walls.)
I do hope, though, that David Snelgrove and Jamie Robinson are either gay or bi, because they were seriously macking on each other as Edward II and Gaveston. This was not a play that shied away from being in your face; not only did they have Edward and Gaveston all over each other (but not Edward and his other companions), they also had onstage a men-in-pleather-pants-only grope scene, a simulated blowjob, and the red hot poker up the wazoo murder. Controversial, but it fit the themes, and nobody walked out at either intermission.
I didn't like Titus or Troilus, which were also venial and violent, and as no particular fan of slash it wasn't the guy on guy aspect that got me either, so I'm not sure why I liked this and not the others. Possibly because nobody vacillated all over the stage; in both Titus and Troilus you could get whiplash from characters changing their minds and building plots. Edward was perfectly straightforward - the king and the peers were fighting for supremacy and the king finally won... just not THAT king.
There were lots of beheadings, although those took place offstage via sound effects. (I almost used *WHACK*WHACK*WHACK*thud* as the header for this, since they took three chops to get through Scott's stiff neck.) Although the heads were almost universally cabbages in sacks, the sound alone was enough to get a woman ahead of me to mutter, "Oh, that's gross!"
Obviously, she hadn't been reading the playbill writeups. Ron Kennell's says "...in the latter two plays he had his head chopped off, thus losing his head about 59 times." Graham Abbey's says that after starting as a young page, "...he has been married, divorced, impaled, poisoned, decapitated, shot, and even graduated high school on the Stratford stage."
After the show, I went around to mingle with the crowd and the fleet of bicycles at the stage door. Scott took a long time getting out, so I struck up a conversation with Ron Kennell. I felt a bit sorry for him, to have come out through that crowd and gotten no attention, and he seemed to be waiting for someone himself. So I told him how wonderful I thought he'd been in Karamozov. Well, no actor's going to turn down a conversation that starts like that! He's a nice guy, charming and interesting, and we chatted a bit about the problems that had gone on during that show - he admitted that he and his friends HAD had a few drinks over it later at his place; "Wednesdays are Reality Show night; we watch So You Think You Can Dance." Talked a bit about this production of Edward; "You can always tell when people don't want to say they're offended but they are. They talk about how nice it is to have it in 'a small space' or 'an intimate stage like this one and not on the big stage'." Compared it a bit to two T plays - I told him I preferred this but hadn't figured out why yet - and discussed the use of offstage sound to heighten effects. (He thinks that they're going heavily on the cabbages in sacks because the news is so violent these days.)
Scott popped out for a bit and pressed his cheek to mine (I'm not entirely sure whether he meant to hug me - but he didn't raise his arms - or he was allowing himself to be kissed. Guess next year I'll kiss his cheek to find out. :>) He said I didn't miss much in missing his Benedick - "Nobody wants to be in Winnipeg in the winter" and that everyone in the family is fine and he has no idea what his plans are for the future. We talked a bit about what he's doing ("Last year was easy, only the one play.") I wanted to ask if there was a Guardsman soundtrack, but Marion popped up just then so they went off.
Ron was still waiting for whoever he was waiting for - to my quiet amusement, the rest of his conversation was all about how great it was to work with Scott and how wonderful an actor Scott was. Which, yes, I agree wholeheartedly, but I was trying to show that he wasn't the ONLY reason I came up... even though he'd been the original main reason. Then Ron's friend came by and I vamoosed.
(My B&B proprietress tells a Ron story - she was trying to call someone down the block to turn around, but couldn't shoult loudly enough. Ron was passing by and she asked for his help - HE had no problem projecting down the block!)
Dinner was at Garlic, which I think is new. Very expensive, but I was willing to splurge a bit. What I wasn't willing to do was eat spicy food, and although I thought I'd ordered something mild - beef in a smoked gouda sauce with a corn/tomato/spinach thing and potatoes dauphin - it tasted like Dante's Inferno. So I bolted before dessert and picked up a "chocolate monkey" ice cream at Balthazar's to quench the fires.
Then The Lark. I'm still not sure what to think. Nobody does, judging from the highly mixed reviews and the half-empty theater. The lines were great; there were a lot of them that are still so topical that the audience laughed at the modern use more than the context. Graham used his crutches to great effect, flinging them forward so that he looked like a predatory animal or insect as he roamed around. The setup; with many of the main characters aware that they are in a story, worked for me. (The 1940s costuming didn't work for everyone; in the Eaton Lounge I overheard a man protesting in a British accent that "making the Engish into Nazis is a bit... unsubtle.")
When I looked at the program book I thought that Amanda Plummer had an oddly rictus grin in many of the shots, and discovered that her performance owed far too much to Peter Pan in the first half. She bubbled and bounced and laughed and even when she got stern, she came across less as otherworldly and more as an adolescent stamping her feet at the adults. (Although points for pronouncing all the French correctly.) And Stephen Stutcliffe's Dauphin whined about courage so much that I expected him to start belting out "If I Were the King of
During the intermission I though about that. I thought about how much I was enjoying the writing of the play vs having a book of Hellman's at home vs the experience of such great actors vs Peter Pan and the cowardly lion vs how interesting the second half might be vs how tired I was vs how much I wanted to get every drop out of Stratford vs the legroom and my numb butt vs once in a lifetime opportunities vs having no obligation to anyone but myself...
...and I stepped into the warm Stratford night.
Today is the last day to fling myself into idyl; I have Hello Dolly and The Tempest, both at the Festival, so I'm not going far. Probably just down to the river, here in the communication center, and the Principal's pantry for dinner, with stopoffs for a snort in the Eaton Lounge. I've bailed on the review book du jour - reading three cozies where the kooky, fashion-conscious lead is dating the detective is two too many in a row - and am reading the thriller about Marlowe and modern intelligence gathering.
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Date: 2005-08-26 03:36 pm (UTC)There is rumor afoot that, after "300," my Secret Boyfriend (Gerard Butler) may play Marlowe in a bio-pic. I don't know how well that'll work, as I think he's a bit too old (Marlowe was 29 when he died) ... but OTOH, Rupert Everett played him brilliantly in "Shakespeare in Love," so we'll see if it a) comes to pass and b) works.