Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Last night I saw the most uproarious, hilarious, unique version of Midsummer Night's Dream I've ever seen - and I'd only gone because I'd been offered a free ticket and Scott Wentworth was in it!

There were white bouquets on the ends of the aisles, as the conceit was that we were all members of a wedding party watching the entertainment, presented modern times in modern dress. That it turned out to be an interracial gay wedding was the first warning that all the rules were off. As the play went on, Lysander was played by a woman, "Thisbee" was played by a bald man with a foot-long beard, and when the drag queen of the fairies showed up, 5 people in my row walked out.

And just because gender wasn't the only assumption subverted, Egeus was presented as deaf, all his lines signed and all the other actors signing to him (except Theseus-Scott, who made sure to face him closely at all times for lip reading.)

The modern dress, gender twisting, and general hilarity led to changes in the text. Demetrius added a furious "Jeeze!"to the end of his speech to Helena about leaving him alone. "Thisbee" stopped the line at "I have a beard." Puck, presented with a Hermia comfortably ensconced in a pup tent, said "she doth NOT lie on the dank ground..." A drunken Hippolyta turned her line to "I was with Hercules... Literally." (Later, even drunker, she would call to "Let them bring Frisbee forth.") Titantia's song turned into "woodbine, eglantine, you and me all the time..." The abrupt end of the dance at the end was explained by Theseus as "I have neighbors." And the moment when Oberon confronted Puck with (her? Not sure if they were presenting trans or woman in trousers) mistake about juicing the wrong person turned into this dialog (paraphrased, I don't have the text and they did use the original words):

"You said I would know the man by his Athenian weeds!”
"The MAN by HIS..."

Musical selections included Bizarre Love Triangle after the scene where the lovers' dilemma was first presented and Bad Moon Rising for the "ill met" scene.

The fairies tap danced, one of the Rude Mechanicals pulled out a smart phone to check if the moon would shine (the audience laughed at that, but roared and applauded when Quince -- played by Lally Cadeau -- found the answer faster in a printed almanac.) Bottom's suicide as Pyramis was accomplished via light saber -- which he pulled back towards him by the blade to turn off as he died. (Thisbee turned it off on the withdrawal from under his arm, winking at the audience)

There was a lot of character dropping. "I have more lines!" Demetrius wailed as he was swarmed by child fairies. "Stop making me laugh," Oberon finally ordered a grinning Demetrius, who has contorted himself into a ridiculous position to get de-juiced. (This after he'd noticed how stressful the position was, mimed looking at his watch, and moved a bit upstage to see how long it could be held.)

They did not double roles. For a Scott Wentworth fan, that meant less of him, but it meant Jonathan Goad had far more time to chew the scenery with panache. (Goad and Evan Builing switch between Oberon and Titania.) not that there was much left to chew when Mike Shara (Demetrius) and Stephen Ouimette (Bottom) were chewing madly as well.

And if there wasn't riot enough, Goad took the ALS ice bucket challenge, in character, center stage, during the intermission. He gave a speech about how, due to the stage and his costume (the wings had been removed for their safety) the ice water was replaced with a bucket of leaves... and had just enough time to shout "THAT'S NOT LEAVES!" Before the ice water hit him in the chest. "Oh, that's cold," he quavered in falsetto. "Oh, my fairy berries!" He then challenged everyone laughing at him from the orchestra.

Photos of THAT, by the way, have already started hitting twitter. Look for #stratfordfestival.

I really, really hope that this production is chosen a some of,the ones the Festival records and sells. My one great regret of the season otherwise will be that I only saw such brilliance once.

The perils of live theater: Porthos tripped down the stairs in Three Musketeers, laughing it off as D'Artangnan rushed to him.

Also in the show, someone sighed, romantically and LOUDLY as Athos described his first reactions to the girl he married. Graham Abbey looked over -- which made the audience laugh, and then that became a laughter loop for a few minutes while Graham stood onstage with his hand over his eyes.

The three men at Meet the vegetables Festival played the three suitors in Fiddler on the Roof. Perchek: "Siberia is a warm, comfy couch, so I love being sent there."

Seana, although dressed in modern clothing, *totally* upstaged everyone at Dear Mary, Dear Elizabeth, starting with a nonchalant "it's nothing" shrug as the historian talked about Elizabeth being declared a bastard by her own father. She brought the house down again with her tart delivery of "Madame" for the letter E wrote M when M married her third husband (who had, as the historian noted, probably killed her second husband and most certainly forced her.) Lucy Peacock sat serenely with a permanent smile, although at one point Seana looked over, obviously waiting for L to drop into character and get one up on Seana.

Lucy Peacock is selling a slim volume of limericks "written while lying dead onstage during The Duchess of Malfi."

The production of Fiddler on the Roof starring I-was-in-his-fanclub Scott Wentworth, is excellent!

... but it's nothing compared to the incandescently brilliant Brent Carver production of 2000.

Blythe Spirit was also fun - Seana McKenna made a multi-course banquet of the scenery - but Sara Topham will shout her lines rather than declaim them.

Other than that, it's horribly humid; not that hot, but with the humidity I'm dripping sweat in 15 minutes of being outside, making it so unpleasant that I don't want to sit by the river and read or knit, as I assumed I would (and packed so I could.). And the B&B is half a mile out of town, so one must walk through all that mugginess to get to food or shopping, but then you might as well stay out rather than walk all that way back. Next time I'm up, I'm staying in the town center! What's the point of being near the Festival when it's town where the food and shopping are?

Today I am seriously considering blowing off Waiting for Godot -- I only got it out of a sense of duty that I out to see it sometime, and a much better cast will do it in NYC later this year. My last play either way is Mary Stewart tonight. Tomorrow are festival extras and packing.


ETA: ZOMG, M just checked the weather. 28 degrees C (82ish) AND 95% HUMIDITY!!!!

Nanoseconds back from a long, lovely chat with wendymr and Spouse, and wish we could have talked all night.

Before the cut, I'll say that Seana was brilliant, but it was a rather strange Richard because they wanted to push the idea of Richard as the continuation of the medieval play character of Vice, and thus Richard wasn't a frustrated king or a politician or even a person, he was an Idea of Evil. And... that didn't particularly work for me.

However! The ending scene made up for everything. And I didn't think that anything could compare to the last RIII I watched here, where Richard was hung up by his knees in a tree, and the last image was a back-lit shape of black (no, I can't spell the s-word and the ipad doesn't have spellcheck), an image of the dying king, his withered arm slowly falling to dangle next to his good one. Brilliant stuff, gave me goosebumps.

Here, ( cut for major staging spoilers )

And now, alas, I must pack to go home, a trip that will start horrifically early in the morning. When I get home, I'll see what's up with my userpics, half of which seem to have disappeared. I'd rather still be talking with Wendymr & Spouse!

The B&B may be a long walk from city center but right now I'm not only eating a light lunch of cereal, yogurt, OJ, and chocolate poundcake supplied for free, my clothes are in the wash. @ 26 may not have the mega gourmet breakfasts Aspidistra used to give, but the amenities are well worth the walk. (And you can go right by the chocolate stores on your way back and pop 'em right into the fridge so they don't melt.)

Anyway.

NEXT PART CONTAINS AN OPENING SCENE SPOILER FOR CAMELOT. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR THE FIRST 5 MINUTES OF THE SHOW, SKIP DOWN.

Mo came back burbling that she'd seen The. Best. Warning. Sign. Ever. You know how theaters put up the signs: Warning, this play contains strobe, this play contains gunfire, etc. Camelot's reads "This play contains mist, smoke, [blah blah], birds of prey."

"Ha, ha," says Mo to herself. "That's cute."

But even having read it, she wasn't expecting the play to start with Merlin calling a live hawk to his arm.

SPOILER END

In a little bit I have my first play, Merry Wives of Windsor. I adored it and considered it my favorite Shakespeare play when I first saw it in Regent's Park.

... in 1984.

So we'll see how it plays out now. Then tonight, it's The Misanthrope, with a break for fish and chips and chocolate tour sundaes between.

This morning was a Meet the vegetables Festival* with Seana McKenna & her husband/director Miles Potter. (*So called behind the scenes) Highlights:

On doing a one-woman play: SEANA: "The cast parties aren't as fun... but you never miss a cue."

On costuming: SEANA: "I wear two corsets this season. One pushes everything up; the other pushes everything down." She also discussed how she did Richard (no platforms or bindings lest she hurt herself over the run, and building up the costume over the "strong" arm to look masculine, while her own arm would look much weaker in comparison.)

On "Shakespeare's Will" MILES: "It may be a play about an unhappy marriage, but the strains of an acting marriage? Oh, yeah, we could relate."

On a female Richard:

SEANA: Richard's always an other anyway. I'm just taking that one step further.

MILES: He's always compared to animals - the toad, the hog. I think she's doing a bird of prey. (SEANA: "Skree!")

MILES: He's pretending throughout. The gender is one more pretense

SEANA: Although one guy didn't get it. He was complaining that Richard was too effeminate.

on the seduction scene: SEANA: "In Shakespeare's time it was a man to a boy; we're just flipping that dynamic. Also, what does he tell her? 'I did terrible things, but I love you, I won't do them anymore, and you're the only one who can change me.'" (Nods as women in the audience laugh appreciatively.)


Would you believe that I haven't seen any swans yet? I've been by the river.

R

I had planned on liveblogging my trip this year, but that was before the ipod touch accepted the B&B network and the netbook didn't. Typing on that teeny screen is Just Not Worth It. (On the other hand, like the palm pilot before it, the Touch went from toy to tool in about 10 minutes; checking weather, keeping my schedule, holding play texts, etc. It certainly was lighter to carry than the netbook and a hardback book - I really see the appeal of ebooks now - and with wireless in the theaters I kinda got into the habit of doing a quick email check at intermission. Perhaps when the rumored smaller ipad comes out, I'll have something that will be better for typing on the fly as well as a better reading screen.)

The trip: We took a new route that was supposed to save 90 minutes. It added 90 minutes. *insert BLEH! icon*

The town: Two things of note for the tourists.

1) The County Food Company is now selling picnic pails. For $25, you get two big sandwiches, three small containers to fill with your pick from the dozen-item salad bar, 2 cans of soda or bottles of water, and a Secret Picnic Map (read: hand-drawn map of the Avon river), all in a bucket. It's a lot of good food, and a reasonable price for two.

2) Downtown businesses have grouped together to form the Chocolate Trail. For $20, you get 8 tickets, which you have 3 days to redeem at your choice of 16 businesses (repeats allowed). The woman at our B&B was giving us all the good hints - "Chocolate Barr only gives you two truffles, while Rheo Thompson gives you a box of 9 mixed cremes and Rocky Mountain gives you your choice of half pounds of fudge." (We chocolate trailed slices of turtle cake at Let Them Eat Cake for Mo's birthday.) Even non-candy stores were getting into the act - P'Lovers gave away chocolate mint bath salts, two tea shops gave away chocolate teas, Fosters gave away chocolate martinis, Kitchen Connoisseur gave away jars of mocha ice cream topping, and Bradshaw's gave away a plastic stemless wine glass with a couple pieces of chocolate and the promise that you could get the glass filled at a restaurant across the street.

( The theater: Peter Pan, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, & Winter's Tale )

Things are going well for Stratford. After a year of them begging me to renew my membership and a bad exchange rate (from the American point of view), I thought things would be bad for them. Instead, every show was filled to the brim.

On the personal side, I was devastated to discover that the Aspidistra is changing - it is turning into a guest house with no provided meals. As the breakfasts were the biggest draw, I'm looking for new Stratford lodgings.

On the plus side, wendymr and I had a wonderful long dinner and chat on Saturday. Great to see you again!

Now I have to go back to real life... and figure out why my feet are swelling. I know I've been walking a lot and I've spent the whole summer in the same shoes, but that shouldn't cause edema, should it?

I'll be catching up with LJ and real life tomorrow after work. Good night, all!

Color was very much a point of this MacBeth, as it was set in Rawanda, around 1960s-ish... although Lady MacB had a wig and costumes that were deliberate references to Michelle Obama. (o.O)

( From the director's notes )

The preshow discussion was about timeless themes in MacBeth - childlessness and how MacDuff cannot revenge himself suitably - "He has no children!" Lineage. Equivocation. And there were notes on previous productions, esp. the one in the 1960s here, where the stage blood for every performance was 2 gallons of actual blood bought fresh from the butcher's every day.

The production was very loud - lots of gunfire, cannonfire, helicopters sounding like they're about to land on your head - and like I said, race was very much an issue. MacBeth and Duncan (and Duncan's children) were all white, while Lady MacBeth, Banquo, and MacDuff and half the rest of the cast were African-Canadian. (There were other minorities too - Lennox and the nurse were Indian.)

The nationalities get rather weird at the end, with major emphasis on the Scottish and English flags everywhere, and the looks on the faces of the soldiers when Duncan's son starts talking about how they're going to do things the English way. (This would have worked fine if Scotland was actually Scotland at the moment, but when it's Rawanda, it got a little "bwa?")

Mixed feelings from the audience - half of it rose and cheered and the other half clapped a bit politely. (And Colm looked terribly giddy and happy for someone whose head was in a bucket downstage.)

( The post show discussion was mostly about race, with a little bit of general acting commentary )

And one teacher from Detroit said he'd brought a set of students up and they had really gotten into it - that doing MacBeth with guns and a racially diverse cast was something they could relate to and it really worked for them.

Today, Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, although without Bruce Dow, who is ill. Tomorrow - a very long drive.

The serendipity carried us through - jennetj and I made it to our flights on time despite a horrible backup at the Peace Bridge, and I even got my checked luggage ("Oh, how cute," the ticket agent cooed at the Barbie Memorial Suitcase) just in time to make it to the earlier bus to my place. Yay!

Am now stuffed on spaghetti and trying to catch up on scary amounts of email and internet stuff.

Shakespeare's Will:
I worried about this play when I saw that the script was written
in the sort
of blank modern verse
with one
or two or three
words per line.

I hate that.

Fortunately, Seana McKenna has riveted me from the moment she first took the stage as Medea 7 years ago. The play is basically her talking to the audience, replaying bits of her life as Anne Hathaway on the day she buried Shakespeare, with flashbacks. She keeps snapping about "your sister Joan, the bitch," which makes for pretty powerful foreshadowing if you are familiar with Shakespeare's actual will. However, much of the rest of the action is based on supposition and twisted history, which I'm always ambivalent about. So I'm going to say this one is a powerful performance with a wobbly text.

Favorite memory - right at the end, a when we all knew it was the end but the second before the lights dropped so Seana could take her curtain call, someone in the audience very loudly said, "Wow!"

Lear - no cut because I have very little to say. It was a well-done Lear, but it broke no new ground and had no extraordinary thing to say about it. Scott The First (the first of my actor crushes named Scott) did a great job as Gloucester.

Sunday 7 Yes, even traveling, I managed to do it. Go me. I will be freecycling an overnighter bag and a wallet on account of having replaced them in Canada. (I should be freecyling a purse too for the same reason, but I'm going to hang onto it, as you never know. It's a nice midway size between the one I had, the one I bought, and my largest duffle-sized one.) I put two of the books that I'd taken into the B&B bookshelf for someone else to enjoy. And I tossed assorted toiletries (soap, shampoo, conditioner) because such things only ever make one-way trips.

There's thunder outside, so I don't know how long I'll be on. But I'm home and catching up, electronics willing.

I'd say sunny Stratford, but we were caught in rain coming up yesterday and there's thunder outside now. Feh.

But other than that, I love it when a plan comes together. Serendipity has been working overtime for jennetj and me; both of us had amorphous single plans that were a little too expensive, but being able to combine our trips at the last minute has dovetailed perfectly. (And hey - half off the car rental and B&B price!) When we got to the B&B, we were even able to change from the room with one queen bed to the one with two twin beds... turns out the people coming in today usually go for the queen room, but were unable because I'd reserved it first.

So everything works out for everybody. It's a good sign.

Today is comedy play and shopping day; tomorrow more of the same although all the plays are tragedies; Sunday home. I'll be trying to swing through and keep a vague eye on email and LJ tomorrow morning, but if there's anything I really need to know; comment here.

PS - What has LJ done now to upset everyone?

"This place is full of Shakespeare stuff, it's like living in a gift shop."
"I just wanted to throttle a swan."

Oh, no, this isn't based on Stratford at all!

*snicker*snort*