Rambles Reviews

Last season, there was a swath of productions of Titus Andronicus, as college troupes saw it, realized it was a fun play which didn't deserve its negative reputation, and decided to perform it themselves. I would be really happy if the same thing happened with King John this season, and the Actors' Shakespeare Project production, playing now until June 8th, demonstrates why.

See, Titus picked up a reputation as being too bloody and over-the-top to be performed, but a couple good productions, including ASP's, showed folks that "bloody and over-the-top" is not actually a BAD thing in a play. This play has a reputation as being so full of deception and plot twists that it can't be followed -- and it doesn't deserve that. Oh, it's chock-full of deception and twists, but that's a good thing. I suppose that, if one was reading the play, one would have trouble following who was backstabbing whom, but when it's performed on stage with a competent cast, the actors are able to take you through with no trouble whatsoever.

Yes, the plot twists and turns, and you never know what's going to happen in the next scene. But, no matter where you go, there you are. It's not hard to keep track of what's going on, even if you can't predict what will happen next.

It's sort of like one of those walking labyrinths, like the one that my parents built in their backyard, or the ones that a number of churches have painted on the floor. It consists of a single twisting path, looping back on itself, but with no deviations. You walk through the path, never knowing quite what the path will be, but nonetheless, never getting lost. There is only one path, and it takes you through it -- no matter how convoluted it looks from the outside.

Hold onto that image, by the way. We'll be coming back to it.

Shakespeare provides us with a guide through the treachery and deviousness of the court -- the two-fisted action Shakespearian pulp hero Philip Falconbridge, who has become one of my favorite Shakespearian characters. He's noble, brave, upright, and witty, with an action hero's penchant for snappy one-liners and clever observations. Stick with Philip the Bastard -- he'll take you through the play unscathed. Of the few characters who are more-or-less honest, he's the only one who isn't a victim.

So. This being the Actors' Shakespeare Project, let's start with talking about which odd corner of Boston they've found to fit with this play.

Next to the Common is an Episcopal cathedral, the Cathedral Church of St Paul. The Church has a basement. Deep in the bowels of the basement is a room which is used by a Chinese congregation, a homeless congregation, and a Muslim congregation, at different times. And, until June 8th, it's also used by a Shakespearian acting troupe.

I can only imagine what went through Ben Evett's mind when he looked at the space. (Well, that's not strictly true. I could, y'know, ASK him -- it's not like his email address is hard to find, and he's a generally approachable guy. But imagining is more fun.)

Evett would have walked into a room which feels like a high school gym cum-function hall. And he would have looked at the unfinished rough stone walls, and the beautiful faux-marbled pillars, and the beat-up-high-school-basketball-court floor. And the labyrinth painted on that floor in slightly-chipping but very tough paint. See? I told you to hold on to that image.

And he would have thought, "This space has character. What story does this place want to match up with? What play wants to be heard here?"

Like most of the places that ASP has found, this one is weird. And like most of the places, they use that weirdness to shape their performance.

There are a few things about the space that are genuine weaknesses. Those four beautiful faux-marble pillars obstruct views occasionally. The performance space is buried deep underground -- I felt that a miner's helmet might have been appropriate, and I'm not sure about how handicapped-accessible the space is. (The press materials state that the space is accessible, but I didn't see how that worked, so, if mobility is an issue for you, call them and ask what the situation is.)

But most of the things which seem like they WOULD be weaknesses ended up, bizarrely, as strengths. Somehow, the trains rumbling through Park Street Station diagonally above us added to the experience -- it's a play in which mysterious ominous rumblings are dramatically appropriate.

And the whole production design -- sound design, lighting design, everything -- works with the space to create an atmosphere for backstabbing, betrayal, and back-room dealing.

Now, let's talk about the actors, and how they portray the characters. And, since he IS my favorite character, and holds the play together, let's start with Bill Barclay's portrayal of Philip the Bastard.

See, there are two types of Shakespearian monologues. First, you've got the ones like Hamlet uses -- where he's talking to himself, or to God, or to something like that. They're introspective -- they're about the internal life of the character.

The other kind, though -- well, those are the ones where the character realizes that we're there, and decides to tell US what's going through his mind. And Philip is THAT kind of character. And so he needs to form a connection with the audience. The actor needs to have chemistry with the audience.

(As an aside -- this is among the reasons I think Shakespeare generally works better in smaller theaters, and in the round. A proscenium is a border between the audience and the actors -- and I think that a lot of Shakespeare needs to be more interactive. Maybe less so for his latest plays -- I think that The Tempest and Pericles, for instance, can work in proscenium-type settings.)

And Barclay does. He's our guide, our buddy, and we are willing to hang out with him as he attempts to find his way through the treacherous footing of the play. Barclay portrays a Philip who covers a spine of steel under a somewhat goofy exterior -- and it works.

Shakespeare wrote Hubert as King John's thuggish hatchetman, but, in this production, Sarah Newhouse plays a female Hubert, which changes all sorts of relationships. I don't want to say too much about it, because I don't want to give away plot points, but it's an interesting variation, with resonances throughout the play. Jennie Israel's Constance is emotionally powerful, and John Kuntz is deeply creepy as the manipulative Cardinal Pandulph.

As King John, Michael Forden Walker is the center of the play -- but he is shaped by circumstances as much as he shapes them -- he's as much a victim as he is an active player, and Walker's performance shows this dichotomy.

So -- to conclude: the Actors' Shakespeare Project shows us that a complex plot need not be a confusing plot. Their actors and production team lead us through the labyrinthine paths of King John's many betrayals and twists, letting us feel the emotional impact of each one, but never losing us or confusing us.

Tickets are forty bucks, plus or minus a couple bucks depending on which seat, for adults, thirty to thirty-five for students. But remember, guys: they also may have student rush tickets available just before the show, for just fifteen bucks. I encourage you to go and check it out -- I'd like to see if you in the college companies like the play as much as I do. If so, I'd love to see what you'd do with it if you put it on yourselves.

The first question about any production of Henry V -- any production going back to the first time that Shakespeare's company put it on after he wrote it -- is "how do you deal with the audacity of trying to put an empire-spanning war, including one of the most dramatic battles in English history, on a stage?"

Shakespeare's answer was to, in effect, "hang a lampshade on it". Do you know that phrase? It means to call attention to the ridiculousness of a concept, to encourage the audience to go along with it. Actually, the time Shakespeare REALLY did this was in Twelfth Night, when, after the "big reveal" of everybody disguised as everybody else and all the other wackiness, one of the characters says, "If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." In Henry V, he uses a slightly different tack. He simply tells the audience that the task of representing what he's representing is impossible. So we, the audience, will have to fill the rest of it in.

I assume most of you know the speech that opens the play. If you're not familiar with it, you may want to take a quick look at it before I go on.

Now, there are two ways you can go with this: you can take this as a challenge to fight against, and prove that you CAN do more to represent reality, or you can embrace it, and trust your audience to fill in the gaps. Of course, one can debate about what Shakespeare would have done if he could -- if he could, would Shakespeare have done a Cecil B DeMille "cast of thousands"? Would he have preferred to do a Battle of Agincourt with seventy thousand CGI warriors fighting?

It's an interesting question, but "what Shakespeare would have done" is not terribly relevant to the question of how a director wants to present the play.

The Actors' Shakespeare Project, under the direction of Normi Noel, has chosen to embrace the "trust the imagination" school of thought. They present a lean, spare production, in which the forty-some-odd characters in the play are portrayed by five actors: Ken Cheeseman, Paula Langton, Doug Lockwood, Seth Powers, and Molly Schreiber.

The space they use is the basement of the Garage in Harvard Square, the same space they played Titus Andronicus and Love's Labours Lost last season. Those of you who have seen those productions can remember the . . . challenges . . . of the space, not least of which is the big freakin' support post smack dab in the middle of the room.

This production uses a similar layout as they did in Titus, making the support post the center point of the stage, with seating on all four sides around it. This, naturally, means that, no matter where you sit, there WILL be times where you can't see exactly what is happening, or, at least, you can't see the facial expression of characters. Of course, the blocking they use attempts to minimize these problems, but it nonetheless can be frustrating. I know that some people I've talked to were annoyed by this when ASP put on Titus in this space, so be aware that many of the same issues exist.

But they also use this. It is a small space, and an awkward one, and they use that as part of the energy in the play. When Ken Cheeseman asked, ". . . can this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France?", a ripple of laughter went through the room, as we recognized the simple truth of that. The Prologue worked in a way I've never seen it work before -- because the space was so small, the task of bringing forth this tale so impossible, the idea of presenting the scope of the story so ridiculous, that we, the audience, accepted the task of filling in the gaps with our imaginations.

Who remembers Infocom text adventures? Like Zork and the rest? There was a way in which the best-written ones were more immersive than games written today with photo-realistic graphics and all the rest. There are ways that radio plays are more immersive than television, and books are more immersive than radio.

And storytelling can be the most immersive of all.

That, at least, is the goal of this presentation of Henry V. The role of "Chorus" -- aka, the narrator -- is taken by different cast members at different times. And, for me, those were some of my favorite moments in the play -- when one of the members of the cast comes out, and talks to us, filling in bits of the story that just can't be staged.

Because of the space, because of the energy of the production, I, at least, felt comfortable allowing my mind's eye to fill in all the action sequences. This goes for the fight scenes, too. In previous productions, I've seen the fights done (in movies) with special effects and realism, I've seen impressive fight choreography, and once, I saw the fights done as interpretive dance. That last one was kind of embarrassing to watch.

In this production, the fighting happens offstage. We see people running in, exhausted, wounded, and sick, or victorious and bold, or disheartened, and from that, we know what happened. There is one exception: just before the "Once more into the breach" speech, they use a rather symbolic piece to show the English onstage attacking and being thrown back -- and, to me, that was one of the weakest moments in the play.

One final bit that I want to mention is the final scene, where Henry woos Katherine, the Princess of France, as part of the treaty to make a lasting peace between England and France. In order to have a happy ending (or, rather, as happy an ending as you can honestly have in a history), the play ends with a romance, to end the violence. The concept is that this marriage is, or at least, can be, a marriage of love, as well as one of political expedience, and Molly Schreiber and Seth Powers get only one scene in which to attempt to have two people meet and fall in love.

They nail it. The scene is just adorable. I don't know what else I can say about it. Maybe "KAWAII!!!"

Henry V
Directed by Normi Noel
January 10 – February 3
Downstairs at The Garage
38 JFK Street, Harvard Square

This is probably one of the most intimidating reviews I've ever attempted to write. Robert Brustein is perhaps the most significant name in American theater criticism in the past several decades. He is the person who, in many ways, codified and defined what a competent theater critic should know and be, and what a competently-written theater review should include. Lis and I are trying to write things that fit in with some of his ideas of criticism.

He is also the author of the new play The English Channel, which just had its world premiere at the newly-refurbished and gorgeous C. Walsh theater at Suffolk University -- and therefore, there is a chance that he'll read this thing.

Um, Prof. Brustein, if you read this, please feel free to criticise our criticism -- we'd actually be very glad of your opinion of our opinions.

The English Channel is an example of the developing subgenre of "Will&Kit" fiction. There are enough examples out there of stories which imagine the relationships between Shakespeare and Marlowe, and their contemporaries, that one can start to notice themes and tropes among them. The stories range from the highfalutin' literary to porn, and even a few which are both.

Brustein's play isn't either extreme, but has elements that would appeal to fans of both types.

The content of the play doesn't break any new ground. The action is set in one room of the Mermaid Tavern outside London, where Shakespeare is living while the playhouses are closed, in April and May of 1593.

In terms of characterization and interpretation of events, Brustein generally chooses the interpretation most common among this subgenre. As various people and events were mentioned, I saw Lis marking off notes in her "Stories About Shakespeare and Marlowe Checklist": Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, check; the Baines note, check; Dutch church libel as a frame-up, check. . . .

But, see -- all that is just the framework. Sure, Brustein stole the plot and outline of the play, from history and from other writers' interpretations of history, Of course he did: it's a play about freakin'Shakespeare. If you're writing a play about Shakespeare, and NOT stealing the plot, you're kind of missing the point. Shakespeare is about writing characters, and about language.

So, let's start with language. On that matter, let me give my highest commendation: Robert Brustein must be totally out of his frickin' mind. I know of no higher praise I can give an artist.

He wrote the entire play in iambic pentameter. If that was just a stunt, I'd have enjoyed it, just for the novelty and "goddamned cool" factor. But it wasn't a stunt. It worked. The story which the play tells, the characters on the stage -- they need to talk in blank verse. It just is who they are. Of course the historical people on whom these characters are based didn't do that -- but we're not watching the historical people. We are watching the characters which Brustein wrote -- and they are characters who think in poetry.

Okay, that's enough about the play as written, for now: what about the play as performed?

Set designer Richard Chambers gave us Shakespeare's small, cramped room above a tavern, with a mattress on the floor, a desk and a chair, an armoire, a bench, and all the props that the theater company owned that had to go SOMEWHERE when the theaters were closed. The effect is flashy, vibrant, and claustrophobic.

The play's four characters are Kit Marlowe (Sean Dugan), Emilia Lanier (Merritt Janson), Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton (Alex Pollock), and William Shakespeare (Gabriel Field).

The costuming of Southampton appears based on his portrait from 1600, but the portrayal is also influenced by the 1590s Cobbe portrait -- you know: this one -- also known as "That's No Lady; That's the Earl of Southampton" Portrait. Shakespeare's costuming is reminiscent of the Chandos portrait,and Marlowe's look is, thankfully, not based on the Corpus Christi portrait.

It's a small play -- one room, four characters, and the proscenium arch works perfectly for it. As Lis and I review mostly Shakespeare stuff, we're actually more used to non-proscenium stages (we generally feel that most of Shakespeare, with the possible exception of his later Romances such as Pericles, don't naturally fit with the proscenium), But you can feel when a play is written for the proscenium, and this one is. The claustrophobia of room, the energy of the four people, is contained in the stage-space, making something of a pressure cooker.

And there's plenty of pressure to cook. Political plots, sexual affairs, jealousy, treason, spying, and all the other things that you'd expect from any "Bill and Kit's Excellent Adventure". But what's actually happening is secondary to the characters.

Among four characters, there are six relationships, some sexual, some not. Will's schtupping Emilia, Emilia's schtupping Will and Southampton, Southampton's schtupping Emilia and Kit. Kit considers himself to be Will's friend and inspiration -- or, at least, Will steals all the best ideas from him, Southampton is Will's patron.

Southampton is a traitor, Kit is a spy for the Queen, Will is stuck between them.

In the mix, I feel Emilia's character gets a bit lost. She feels somewhat one-note. Admittedly, it's a really interesting note: she's a firm believer in women's strength and dignity and inherent worth in a time where that's hardly the prevailing norm -- and it does put her in an interesting position, with interesting conflicts. But she still seems shallower than the other characters. After their first couple scenes together, which I enjoyed, it feels like every conversation between Emilia and Will devolves into carping and bickering -- which is okay -- about the same topics over and over again -- which is not okay. An argument that you've already had gets boring the second time around.

Southampton is a powerful and relatively simple character -- at least compared to the rest of the cast. He is nineteen, passionate, driven, and impetuous. He is driven by a lust for adventure, for conspiracy, for excitement, and for, well, lust. He is beautiful, and knows it. He shows up on stage like a meteor -- bright, hot, and heading to burn up. He is in the "live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse" mode.

So is Marlowe. But Marlowe is a bit older: twenty-nine to Southampton's nineteen. He is perhaps equally as impetuous, lustful, and adventurous, but, if not more cautious, at least more skilled. . . which makes a bit of irony as to which of them is alive at the end of the play, but that's history, and historical fiction, for you.

I found Marlowe to be my favorite character, until one of his final scenes, when Dugan, unfortunately, hit one of my pet peeves: he Played Drunk Badly.

I don't know why so many stage actors can't act as if they are drunk. It's not like actors typically are unfamiliar with alcohol, and yet it is extremely common for them to stagger about the stage in an annoyingly unconvincing manner.

Nonetheless, I liked the rest of his performance, both as a living Marlowe, and in his role as a ghost, delivering the prologue of the play and helping bring about the resolution.

Shakespeare is the central character in the play -- there are very few moments in which he is not on stage. Brustein's conceit for Shakespeare is that he does not naturally have a strong personality of his own, but rather channels the personalities of others -- influenced both by the flesh-and-blood people around him, and by the characters he channels as he writes his plays. It's a difficult concept to play on the stage, and Field does it well. He does have his own passions and motivations, but he finds them shaped by the powerful personalities around him. When he butts heads with Emilia, it is as much because her ideas of what women are are in conflict with what Southampton and Marlowe think women are -- in effect, Emilia is in conflict with the other two men in the play, through the medium of Shakespeare, as much as she is in conflict with Shakespeare himself.

The further conflict in Shakespeare's character is a between Brustein's conceit of "playwright" versus "poet". His idea is that poet creates a work which is an expression of his or her own personality, while a playwright is a channel for the personalities of the fictional personalities which inhabit his or her mind. And the play includes this conflict within Shakespeare -- when he is writing sonnets, he is expressing more of his own personality, but that personality is easily subsumed under the overwhelming personalities around him, and by their very language. Brustein has fun with a Shakespeare in Love-like conceit in which Shakespeare observes and absorbs the witty turns of phrase, and the motivations and actions, of the people around him in order to use them in his own writing, and Field appears to enjoy playing that aspect of the character.

In general, The English Channel has a decent but unoriginal plot, four fascinating characters, and amazing language. It very much works as a play, and deserves to be played regularly. And this is a worthy first production of a worthy play.

There are four more productions, next week:

Thursday, September 13: 7:30 pm
Friday, September 14: 7:30 pm
Saturday, September 15 3:00 pm & 7:30 pm

At the C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University, 55 Temple St, Boston

All seats are General Admission. Please note that the content of this play is not recommended for children.
Tickets for the general public are $30 and $15 for students with ID.
Box office: Theatre Mania, 866-811-4111

So, Lis and I saw the Industrial Theatre's production of Henry IV today. It'll be playing again tomorrow at 2, next weekend on Saturday and Sunday at 2, where we saw it, on the lawn of the First Parish Church in Taunton Center, then it will be at the Sanders Theater at Harvard on the 27th, and in the state park in Easton on the 28th and 29th.

All shows are free -- just show up.

So, is it worth showing up?

Short answer: sure! It's free!

Frankly, it's a pretty basic production -- no particularly impressive conceits, no standout amazing performances. Very basic sets (which, incidentally, I tend to like), very simple costumes. They chose to put Hal, Bartolph, Pistol, and the rest in modern dress when they were boozing it up, and they used bottles of Bud for the sack, but, other than that, it was all more-or-less-generic-medievalish-kinda costuming.

The performances were solid. Nothing amazing, but the lines were delivered clearly, and with appropriate amounts of emotion and inflection. No complaints there.

If I had a complaint, it would be that the fight scenes could have been better. They were fine, but, given that we're in Boston, which has so many people working on medieval and Renaissance swordplay, and so many people who do fight choreography, I've gotten to expect a pretty high standard for my Shakespearian swordfights. But, again, there was nothing wrong with them.

Everything was solid. It was a good, average production.

Which made it a hell of a lot of fun, because the play is good. We'd not seen Henry IV before, although Lis had read it. I was generally familiar with some of the basic outline of the story, but not the details.

And it's a good, fun play. Some of the bits where Shakespeare is deliberately trying to be funny are, well, kind of embarrassing -- I generally feel that people who deliberately annoy their waiters should be beaten with sticks -- but other humor bits are damn good. And the main plot itself is fast-paced and exciting, while Prince Hal is a genuinely interesting guy.

So is it worth it? Yes -- I mean, c'mon, it's free. But even so -- we drove an hour to Taunton and an hour back, and feel that it was time well-spent. If you can easily get to Taunton, the Borderlands state park, or the Sanders Theater, it's worth going. Especially if you've never seen Henry IV before.

The Actors' Shakespeare Project is finishing off their third season with an extra, bonus play, a six-person Love's Labour's Lost, a light, fluffy, and funny play to balance out a season which would otherwise be entirely about psychotic princes killing their families.

If you include the 2000 Kenneth Branagh movie version, Lis and I have now seen LLL four times. In those four times, we've seen it done more-or-less straight once.

This wasn't that time.

(For the record, it was the 2006 Huntington Theater production, reviewed by Lis and by me. The other one was the 2005 ART student-troupe production, which I also reviewed.)

As pure entertainment, it works very well. If you want to laugh and enjoy yourself for two and a half hours, this is an extremely good way to go about it. The belly-laughs started within thirty seconds of the actors' first appearance on the stage. They use physical comedy, including slapstick, and very clearly let you know what you're in for -- and they deliver handsomely on that promise of entertainment and humor.

So it works as entertainment. Which makes it worth watching. But how does it work as a production of Love's Labour's Lost?

About the venue: imaginary_love_ mentioned that she had problems with the venue as it was set for Titus. I'd like to reassure her that the venue is entirely re-arranged for this performance, and that I don't think she'd have the same obstructed-view problems that she had then. The production has very simple set dressing, and the stage is placed against a wall. While, for Titus, they used the support pillars of the building as part of the stage (or, at least, that's how I recall it), in this case, those pillars are simply things that the risers for seating are built around. Titus used a very creative and evocative set-dressing, but, as imaginary_love_ discovered, no matter how good that is, it rarely comes without some sort of cost; this is much less experimental, a much more typical setup, with seating on three sides of the stage. It's one of the ways to set up a room that I consider typical, and consider a generally solid choice for performing Shakespeare.

We didn't notice any of the problems with heat that she'd had, but, then, this WAS an evening performance on a pretty nice night.

So, to summarize: first, it's a heck of a lot of fun. Second, doing it with a six-person cast is not simply a gimmick, but it strengthens the play by allowing everybody to concentrate on one or two of the stronger roles in the play, while de-emphasizing the weaker ones. Third, after a season of murder, psychosis, paranoia, and treachery, the ASP really deserves to get to do a fun, light play. And finally, you deserve to see it.

The Shakespeare Society of Wellesley College has been putting on shows since 1886, and this semester, they chose Much Ado about Nothing. Director Alyssa Kwok chose to set her production in a version of post-WWII Paris, albeit one with (appropriately to the play) more Jazz Age glamor and less post-war rebuilding.

In the spirit of being a critic (what's the point of writing theater criticism if you can't be critical?), let me start with the few -- and minor -- quibbles I have with the production.

As with most college productions, the differing levels of experience of different actors did cause a few rough spots -- for some actors, this is their first production, while others could list dozens of plays in their resumes. Obviously, actors who have never been on stage before are going to be some combination of more stiff and hesitant, and over-broad in their delivery than more experienced ones. The main thing I noticed was a tendency not to leave enough time for audience reaction -- there were many times that someone would deliver a great line, the audience would crack up, and we would miss the next couple lines in the laughter. This is a minor quibble at most, and, to my mind, is a small price to pay for a Society to be able to nurture and encourage those students with a love of Shakespeare but little exposure to it from the inside, as it were. Anyway, this is one of those problems that only develops when the actors are getting the big laughs in the first place.

I also would have made a different choice in how they handled a bit at the end of the play. Most of Shakespeare's comedies have some touch of melancholy in how they close, and in this case (and the following is a bit of a spoiler), the melancholy comes from Don Pedro -- who also could have loved Beatrice, and ends the play on a wistful note, wishing his friends well, but with a bit of "might-have-been". I tend to feel that these little melancholy, bittersweet notes add to the plays, and, in this production, they choose to undercut that by having Don Pedro find another snugglebunny pretty much instantaneously.

And I got the impression that Kwok may have allowed some of the "bit-part" actors a bit too much freedom. In rehearsal and in developing characters, it's a good thing for each actor in a scene to play and improvise, and to play as broadly and amusingly as they can manage. But I also feel that it's the director's job to rein that in before performance. In Act II, Scene I, the bit with the masked ball, Beatrice and Benedick were upstaged by some, admittedly, truly funny bits of business between some of the minor characters. Personally, I'd regret losing those gags, but I regret more losing the Beatrice and Benedick dialogue that those gags upstaged.

As is appropriate, they gave those two roles to two of their most experienced members, Dahlia Al-Habieli as Beatrice, and Trevi Ramirez as Benedick, and they played brilliantly together.

A few other performances to note:

In the performance I saw, director Alyssa Kwok played the musician Balthasar. However, the arrangement of "Sigh no More, Ladies" that Balthasar plays was written by Emily Hall, who normally takes the role. It's a fantastic arrangement.

Elizabeth Stone's Dogberry was over-the-top, as is appropriate, buy not overly over-the-top -- I can think of two Dogberry performances I've seen in which he was just annoying (Michael Keaton is one of them), and Stone didn't fall into that trap -- she managed to keep his craziness more-or-less in control, which is a challenge for that role. The rest of Messina's Keystone Kops were also effective in the "comic relief from the comedy" roles.

It's also fun to see what Stephanie Pollard does with the relatively minor role of Conrade -- and how Verges reflects that theme among Messina's constabulary. . . .

The person with whom I went to the play called Anna Krohn's Don John "Snape-like", which is a pretty good description. She brings an oily sinuousness to his general bad-guy-ness.

Sixth and lastly, the set design and costume design (including hair design) deserve mention. They're gorgeous.

And, to conclude:this is a fairly strong production of Much Ado, which avoids some pitfalls I've seen in other productions (the "I Love Kenneth Brannaugh So Much That I've Watched His Movie Over And Over Until My Eyes Bled" syndrome, and "The Curse Of the Overemphatic Dogberry".) Some of the actors are up to professional standards; most are somewhat amateurish -- which isn't a failing in an amateur company. Even when some of the actors aren't as polished as they could be -- and WILL be in a year or two -- they still demonstrate the "amat" part of amateur.

Remaining shows:

Sunday the 15th at 7 p.m.
Thursday the 19th at 7 p.m.
Friday the 20th at 8 p.m.
Saturday the 21st at 8 p.m.
Sunday the 22th at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m

$5 students, $10 general public. At the Shakespeare Society House at Wellesley College

The first ballet I ever saw was Nutcracker, when I was three or four years old. As my parents tell me, I sat in rapt attention through the whole first half, and then, when the curtain came down and the lights came up for intermission, I clapped long and hard, then got my coat and said, "That was fun," and got ready to leave. My grandmother and mother looked at each other, and thought about whether to tell me that there was a second half, and they said, "Well, he's done, and he had a good time. That's good enough."

And I'm pretty darned sure that they made the right choice. After all, all the plot happens in the first act -- Act II is a bunch of pretty neat dances, but nothing happens.

I still like Act I better than Act II.

I like ballet okay, but I'm not the ballet fan in the family. That'd be my sister, sproutntad, and, for that matter, her fiance', too. I like the music, I like the athleticism and artistry of the dance, but my mind starts wandering if I lose track of the plot -- or in parts of ballets that don't have plots. And Lis is even more so.

Which is why we're home right now, even though the second act is probably only now just finishing up. We skipped out at intermission of the Boston Ballet's production of Midsummer Night's Dream. Because all the plot happens in Act I, and Act II is the celebration of the triple wedding.

Oh, also because we're tired and we're not at Boskone. We'll go tomorrow morning.

One of Lis's co-workers had two tickets to the ballet tonight, but his wife was unexpectedly called out of town on a business trip. So he gave her the tickets, figuring, correctly, that as she is a Shakespeare geek, she'd enjoy seeing a Shakespeare ballet. Well, technically, it's a ballet based on a piece of music based on Shakespeare, but close enough.

George Balanchine wrote the ballet in 1962, around Felix Mendelssohn's music written to the play.

So, this was as much an experiment for us as anything else -- we wanted to see if watching a ballet in which Lis was completely familiar with the story would be easier and more enjoyable for her than it usually is. And it was a pretty solid success for us.

We were helped by the facts that it's a darned good ballet, with a lot of humor and fun, and that it's a darned good company, who can play the humor and fun.

I don't know enough about ballet to be able to write a review, especially since we skipped out after the first half. But I know that we loved Puck, and Bottom, and Titania, and Hippolyta, and all four lovers, and Oberon. And the twenty-five kids from the Boston Ballet School who played the bugs and little fairies -- the ballet has a couple dozen roles written for children.

So I guess I'm just writing this to say thanks to Lis's co-worker, and to mention that the ballet was really fun. I could talk about the performances and the costumes and the sets, but I really couldn't say anything intelligent or useful about them, only that "I like them." Which isn't terribly helpful. I could mention that the role of Puck was danced with a lot of humor, mischievousness, the certain amount of menace which is appropriate to Puck, and vast athleticism, that Hippolyta's dancing was explosive and warrior-queen-like, that the children from the Boston Ballet school were adorable and skilled, Helena chasing after Demetrius, Demetrius chasing after Hermia, and, later, Hermia chasing after Lysander while Lysander chases after Helena were all done well and in character, the scene where Puck leads Demetrius and Lysander through the forest as they attempt to find each other and duel was creepy, funny, and effective, and that the Bottom and Titania dance had the entire audience laughing out loud, repeatedly, that the costumes were effective and helped define the characters, and the sets were gorgeous and mysterious. But I can't say anything really insightful. So I'll just say "thanks" to Lis's co-worker and his wife, and leave it at that.

The Wellesley College Shakespeare Society is presenting the first of several productions of Titus Andronicus that will be performed in the area in the coming season.

They've made the decision to set the play as a Western, with the Romans as cowboys and the Goths as Indians. It is disturbing just how amazingly well this conceit works. The Goths/Indians are less technologically advanced, and therefore more barbarous. The Romans/cowboys cloak their equal brutality in the language of civilization and religion.

And now I want someone to take this idea even further and do a genuine Western using this plotline.

The use of music (Western-style stuff) during scene changes is effective, and often ironic. For instance, after Chiron and Demitreus drag Lavinia off to rape and mutilate her, a cheery version of "You Are My Sunshine" plays.

The quality of acting is significantly above what I expect from a college production, and rivals what I expect from professional productions. There were a couple line-bobbles here and there, but nothing distracting or problematic, and the important thing is that the actors got the characters and the lines, and delivered things well.

A few performances deserve special mention. Dahlia al-Habieli as Aaron the Moor was amazing. Evil with that smooth sexy villainy that makes it clear why Tamora is with him.

And Corina Morris's Tamora is also a strong point. Manipulative, totally in control, ruthless, and equally sexy.

The third absolutely outstanding performance is Titus himself, played by Nicola Collett.

All the other performances are also strong, but those three deserve special mention.

Also deserving of mention is the effective lighting design -- simple, and effective.

The staging is relatively simple in terms of props, but beautifully done -- a Western swinging door to the back, lovingly-done trees. . .

In short, this has set a very high bar for the other productions to measure up to. It's playing tomorrow, Sunday, at 7, and next week, at 7 on Thursday, 8 on Friday and Saturday, and 7 next Sunday. It's $5 for Wellesley students, and $10 for the general public. And it's worth it.

So, last night, Lis and I drove up to the University of New Hampshire to see their performance of "The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the cittie of London: as also in the two vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where."

You know, the version that was published in Quarto form in 1603. The "First Quarto." AKA "The Bad Quarto."

So, my review is going to be in two parts: one, how the Quarto itself works as a play, and two, how the UNH Theatre and Dance department did with it. This one will be on the Bad Quarto, and I'll work on the specific notes a bit later. Um, spoilers for "Hamlet", both versions, will be in here.

The "Second Quarto", of 1604, AKA, "The Good Quarto", is called "The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie."

It's nearly twice the length. And the Folio edition adds another thousand lines or so to it.

The only version of "Hamlet" of which I know that attempted to do the whole damn thing uncut is the 1996 Kenneth Branagh version. Which ran 4 hours. This one ran 2 and a half hours, including intermission. It's fast.

Imagine what "Hamlet" would be like if you took out all the bits where Hamlet vacillates, wavers, gets confused. Imagine if he started out depressed and upset, but, as soon as he found out that his father was murdered, went into "action" mode.

That's this version, basically.

Some of the scenes which we know are just not there -- Hamlet never encounters a soldier returning from Fortinbras's war, and never has to deal with the fact that lots of people are dying for honor, while he sits around not killing his uncle. Because he doesn't have to. He's not wasting any time.

Many of the other scenes are in a different order, as well.

Oh, I'm familiar with the "bad memorial reconstruction" theory, and there's good evidence for it in the play. Like, for instance, they totally bungle the whole "Where is Polonious?/At supper" jokes.

KING: Where is Polonius?

HAMLET: In heauen, send thether to see, if your messenger finde him
not there, seeke him i'th other place your selfe, but if indeed you find
him not within this month, you shall nose him as you goe vp the
stayres into the Lobby.

KING: But sonne Hamlet, where is this body?

HAMLET: In heau'n, if you chance to misse him there,
Father, you had best looke in the other partes below
For him, and if you cannot finde him there,
You may chance to nose him as you go vp the lobby.

Tonight was the opening night of the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble's production of The Tempest, running 8 pm this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and again next week on November 2 through 4.

The short version: one of the fantastic things about living in Boston is college (and community) theater -- for less than the price of a movie ticket, you can see live theater, and this is an example of how much of a good thing this is. It's well worth the $8 a ticket it costs -- at that price, how can you go wrong? It's a hell of a fun way to spend two hours.

Lis had never seen the play, and I haven't seen it in long enough that I only remembered the barest outline, and this production was a fine introduction and re-introduction. They played it straight -- no tricky staging or unusual period setting, and did it quite competently and enjoyably. Nothing fancy, just straight-up Shakespeare done by people who clearly understand their characters and the play, and are having fun. And how can you avoid having fun seeing such a production?

Michael Haddad is the oldest member of the cast, by which I mean he's about my age. And, as you want your Prospero to be older than everyone else, and more in control, that's a good thing. He seems to be the most experienced and skilled actor in the production, which makes sense, and is a good thing in your Prospero.

Miranda is played by Anna Roussanova, and she's adorable in the role. I think, to play Miranda well, you need two main things: innocence, and love. And Roussanova brings both notes out well. You can really believe that Ferdinand would fall in love with her at first sight, she with him, and that they really could live happily ever after (something which I have a hard time believing with some of Shakespeare's couples sometimes). Anthony Rindone plays Ferdinand, and, while he's not the strongest member of the cast, he's fine.

Finishing off the corporeal residents of the island, Kellas Cameron's Caliban is amazing, truly one of the highlights of the show. He moves like a misshapen, half-human thing, sometimes scampering like a monkey, or scuttling like an insect. He really seems like a deformed subhuman beast, just as Shakespeare intended.

The incorporeal characters are headed by Ariel, played by Meg Rosenburg, also the costume designer. I strongly suspect some ballet training in her floating, spirit-like movements. As much as her Ariel wants his/her/its freedom from Prospero, he/she/it also appears to be having a hell of a good time messing with the other characters under Prospero's direction. Pretty much what you want from an Ariel. I noticed a little hesitation in some of her delivery of Ariel's longest soliloquies, but, heck, it's opening night, and, in any case, it wasn't bad.

Alonso, the king of Naples, is played by Bonnie Krenz, who does a fine job being noble, and upset at the (supposed) loss of his son. The main thing you notice about Laird is her physical presence: she's imposing and handsome. Good kingly qualities.

Sarah McDougal plays the kindly and perhaps somewhat naive Gonzalo with humor, playing up his age for cheap laughs. Works for me -- I thought it was funny and liked it.

Alonso's brother Sebastian is played with slow-witted sleaziness by Deirdre LaBounty, and Prospero's brother Antonio is played by Holly Laird. I didn't have any problems with Laird's Antonio, but felt that it was really not that much more than adequate. Sebastian was a bit better, but the treacherous lords aren't the highlights of the play. But they also don't detract -- they're not bad, just not outstanding.

Onto the drunken clowns Stephano and Trinculo, by Jennifer Benoit and Sharon Gouchenoun respectively. I think I nearly hurt myself laughing. Trinculo, in particular is just hysterical.

Marilyn Edobor, Tana Waterman, and Paul Boudreau play various spirits, sprites, and sailors. In addition, Boudreau plays the ship's bosun, and Edobor and Waterman play Ceres and Juno -- well, more accurately, play spirits portraying Ceres and Juno -- I don't think Prospero's quite powerful enough to boss around actual gods. All three of them do well in the ensemble bits, but Boudreau and Edobor tend to be halting and not quite fluent in their longer speeches. I liked Waterman's bits of business as Juno, given fewer lines than one might expect.

As the house lights went down, the actors came out, handing out costumes, getting into them, chatting, and wishing each other well. The Actors' Shakespeare project did a similar thing with the opening of their Julius Caesar, and, although I felt the ASP did it better (as one would hope: they're a top-notch professional Shakespeare company, with full-time actors, as opposed to a college production in which the actors have to balance their rehearsal time with studying for exams), I enjoyed the conceit in this production, too.

The play opens in a terrible storm, which I felt that they portrayed well. Lis had problems actually hearing the dialogue, as did I, but I don't care -- nothing is said in the opening scene that much matters -- the idea is to present a ship in distress in a terrible storm, and that they did quite well.

Magic was done effectively, and primarily through acting -- Ariel sent people to sleep, froze time, caused swords to drop from nerveless hands. Characters were paralyzed, hypnotized, occasionally brutalized (although only the bad guys), disarmed, charmed, though never harmed. And all that was portrayed through competent acting. Two moments were portrayed through special effects of sorts: the opening storm which gives the play its title used lighting and sound to great effect, although its effectiveness was also dependent on the actors -- one of the most effective uses of "Bridge Lurch Left! Bridge Lurch Right!" I've ever seen. They did better than the Star Trek folks on that.

The other magical effect somewhat fell flat, but I suspect that was mainly a technical issue and, it being MIT, I doubt a technical problem has is going to last long. I mean, it worked, but with a loud "THUNK" that made it kind of less impressive. However, I was still impressed, because the effect in question was part of the original production, so I was glad they did it.

The action was presented in the way that I personally tend to like best -- no curtain, no breaks between scenes except one group of characters walking off and another one walking on immediately. Especially in a play like The Tempest, in which, frankly, nothing much happens, but it happens with style, keeping the action moving is vital. The production clocks in at a snappy two hours, plus ten minute intermission, and that is a very good length and pace for this play.

So, to summarize: if you've never seen The Tempest, or it's been a few years, this is an excellent, straightforward production, and you should see it. If you've seen The Tempest a lot, then presumably you like the play, and you should therefore see it.

It's playing Thursday (which already happened), Friday, and Saturday of this week, and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of next week, at MIT's Little Kresge Theater (that's the theater downstairs in the Kresge building, y'know, the little one, the one under the big Kresge Auditorium). It's $8 a ticket. Even if it was a bad production, it would be worth seeing at that price -- and this is in no sense a bad production. True, it's amateurish in parts, but I don't count that against amateur theater. I think Shakespeare would approve. More importantly, I think you will approve when you see it.

Other papers and stuff are now getting their reviews of Hamlet up, and we've been reading them, partially to see what they say, but more to see how they say it. We're self-taught reviewers, and I, at least, am a little uncertain if I'm doing reviews, criticism, or something in between.

Lis and I would like to learn how one is supposed to write reviews. I'm not sure that we would write stuff that way, but we'd like to at least know what standard practice is, so that, if we do something different, we can do it from a position of knowledge.

It seems to me that blogging a review, or a criticism -- whatever it is that we are doing -- has a couple advantages, and a big disadvantage, over writing a review for a newspaper. The disadvantage, of course, is audience. A newspaper review is in the homes of thousands upon thousands of people, it's accessible, it reaches a larger audience, and it reaches people who aren't specifically searching for reviews and criticism. You can't, really, come across Lis or my reviews by accident -- you have to be looking for them. And that's a big downside.

But we do have some major advantages, too. One is that we're faster -- the Herald's review got out today, the Globe's probably won't be out until Thursday -- papers tend to have at LEAST a two-day lead time, while Lis and I can often write it the next day, and get it up by the day after that, which is a day faster than the papers. And we theoretically could go home, write it up immediately, and then post it that night, although we never do, because we like to have a night to talk about it, then sleep on it, and then figure out what we want to say, and how. So, even though we're not on deadline pressure, we're still faster.

But, since we're NOT on deadline pressure, we can spend more time thinking about things.

And we can do things with that time, because of our biggest advantage: online, there are no column length limits. I don't have to keep myself to 5000 words, or 10 column inches, or whatever. I can keep blathering on as long as I like. This is why this is also a disadvantage, obviously -- but I still feel that it's more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

The fact that Lis and I aren't answerable to anybody but ourselves goes along with this. We can write whatever we want, at whatever length we want, and, as long as we're doing a good enough job that the theater companies consider us to be useful members of the press, we get press tickets. Again -- that's an advantage and a disadvantage: no matter how crappy a job the Globe or Herald reviewer does (hypothetically -- their reviews are usually pretty good) -- they're going to continue to get tickets. We're only going to get tickets as long as we produce competent work. " Competent" does not mean necessarily "positive" -- we could slam a production and still get tickets, so long as the people getting slammed believed that we were doing so fairly and not stupidly. Anyway, the most negative reviews we've given so far have been "mediocre."

So, the biggest positive thing about writing on blogs instead of newspapers is that we can say whatever we want to say at whatever length we feel it ought to be said. And the biggest negative thing is that the only people who are going to see it are people who are looking for it.

The Actor's Shakespeare Project opened their third season this past Thursday, with Hamlet, starring founding member Ben Evett in the title role. Other veterans included Marya Lowry as Gertrude, Sarah Newhouse as Guildenstern, and a couple minor roles, and Ken Cheeseman as the ghost, the Player King, and the gravedigger. Many of the other roles were played by newcomers to the ASP stage, although not newcomers to the stage in general -- the guy who played Claudius, Johnny Lee Davenport, has a goal of performing in every single Shakespeare play -- and he's nine plays away from doing it. He also does film and television. So, as you can see, ASP continues to attract top-notch actors to work with them -- all the members of the cast in major roles have resumes like that.

Now, full disclosure: Hamlet is not one of my favorite plays. I've seen a half-dozen productions throughout my life -- four on stage, two movies -- and, in many ways, I'm Hamlet-ed out. It's a difficult play, anyway -- it's one of Shakespeare's longer ones, the versions we have could possibly have been written to be read rather than performed (it's a theory, anyway -- don't know if I believe it or not), and the character of Hamlet is . . . confusing to say the least. He sometimes acts like a teenager, but we know he's at least a few years older than twenty-three. (Yorick's been buried 23 years, and Hamlet knew him well enough to remember getting piggyback rides from him, so Hamlet's got to be at least 25, 26, maybe older.) It's never clear how insane he is, and how insane he isn't. And it's not even clear why his strategy is to pretend to be insane -- in the original story, there's a superstition that, if you kill a madman, you go crazy, so nobody is willing to kill Hamlet so long as people think you're nuts, but I don't know if Shakespeare knew that superstition, or Shakespeare's audience knew that superstition, and I know that we modern audiences don't know that. So, in order to put on a production of Hamlet, you have to:
1. Decide how crazy Hamlet actually is, why he's pretending to be crazy, how action-packed he actually is, how over-thoughtful he is, and why. How did he feel about his father, how did he feel about his uncle before he found out his uncle killed his father, does he love his uncle, did he ever love his uncle? How does he actually feel about Ophelia, how did he feel about Ophelia before this all happened? He's got a massively confusing and complicated character, which is why people LIKE playing him, but it's totally not easy to figure out.
2. Decide what Claudius is really like -- how he feels about Hamlet, how he feels about Gertrude, how he feels about his brother, all sorts of things that can be played in all sorts of different ways.
3. Decide what Gertrude is like -- how she feels about Claudius, how she feels and felt about the former king, what she had to do with her former husband's murder, if anything -- lots of stuff.
4. What's Polonius like? Is he smart, or foolish? Does he love his children? Does he love Denmark? Does he like being a power behind the throne? Hell, you could imagine a backstory for him in which he and Claudius jointly decided to off the old king to grab more power. I don't know of anyone who actually has gone in that direction with him, but it could be cool.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -- hapless dupes? Co-conspirators in trying to bring Hamlet down? Did they know the content of the note they were carrying?

You know, you could perform the play such that EVERYBODY who died, except Ophelia and Hamlet, had a hand in killing the old king. . . never seen anyone do it, but it'd be interesting.

That's challenge number one. The second challenge is that everybody does Hamlet, so what can you bring to your play that is both original enough to make the play worth putting on, yet not SO different that it's alienating to your audience?

So, how does the ASP do with both of these question -- how do they do with their interpretations of characters, and have they found things to do that are original, but not too original?


Well, let's go through the cast.

Horatio, played by Willie E. Teacher, was strong. There wasn't much unexpected in his performance, but he played "strong, smart, loyal, decent, and upright" well. I kind of see Horatio as a bit of a Boy Scout -- if there's a real, genuine good guy in the play, it's probably he. And that's what Teacher delivered, and well.

I really liked Ken Cheeseman's interpretation of all three of the roles he played -- the ghost, the head of the troupe of actors, and the gravedigger. He was appropriately otherworldly and, pardon the pun, grave as the ghost of the old king, and, as Lis pointed out, having the Player King and the Ghost played by the same actor gives you a kind of a neat thrill, since the murder in the play-within-a-play, you realize, looks pretty much exactly like the real murder must have looked. He always turns in a wonderful performance as a Clown -- being funny without being overbearing, and recognizing appropriate gravity in the characters without sacrificing humor, and his Gravedigger was a fine example of how he pulls off that balance.

Johnny Lee Davenport's performance of Claudius was, I think, the highlight of the play. He portrayed a villain with sympathetic qualities, and a believable internal life, who is nonetheless sufficiently vile that you feel he has to die. While I've always seen Claudius as killing the king to take over the kingdom, and marrying Gertrude as part of his bid to consolidate power, his Claudius committed his crimes as much to gain the queen as the country. And the deep and passionate love he feels for Gertrude is reciprocated.

That was the main note that Marya Lowry brought to the character -- her passion for Claudius. I saw her as a victim, pushed around by circumstances, and wasn't really sure who she was -- did she have a hand in her husband's death? Her feelings for Claudius would have given her a motive, but I can't really believe it of her Gertrude. So I didn't really understand who she was, what her motivations were, how she really felt about her former husband. And that made it confusing to me.

Edward O'Blenis's Laertes also failed to blow me away (although Lis quite liked his performance). I felt that he had a tendency to chew the scenery a bit much (which, admittedly, so did Davenport, but Davenport did it with style). Laertes felt. . . overacted. He has a hell of a lot of emotional stimulus to react to, and reacting to all of it at the top of his lungs was exhausting, and, to me, less believable. His quieter moments at the beginning of the play, I felt, were better -- I really liked his reactions to Polonius, and how he and Marianna Bassham developed the Laertes-Ophelia brother-sister dynamic. That felt real. And his death speech really moved me. But there was a lot of stuff in the middle that left me cold.

So what of Marianna Bassham's Ophelia? If there is one character in the play that you truly feel for, it's she. And this performance brought that facet forward and polished it to a high shine. Ophelia, as Bassham played her, is pure emotion, and perhaps, pure love. She exists in her relationships with other characters -- and that's why she's so fragile. Her performance was downright heartbreaking.

Polonius -- Robert Walsh. I don't think I've ever seen a less sympathetic, less likable Polonius. Walsh created a Polonius that you didn't mourn for when Hamlet killed him. It was a really interesting effect, and I don't know whether I liked it or not. I think of Polonius as pedantic, maybe foolish, an old man with some wisdom, a somewhat grandfatherly type. Walsh played a Polonius who was calculating and cold in his professional life, and baffled and emotionally distant when dealing with his family. It is no wonder that Ophelia was so fragile that she could be driven into insanity -- she was raised in an emotionally sterile household by a withdrawn father who was unable or unwilling to support her when she needed him most. It was a disturbingly believable interpretation, and one that is forever going to color my perception of the character.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Ted Hewlett and Sarah Newhouse, were, more or less, non-entities. Which is a totally legitimate way to play them, but makes it hard to say too much about the performances. They were pretty clearly victims of circumstance, pushed around by people much more powerful than themselves, without a hell of a lot of control over their own destinies. It's hard to believe that they deserved to die, but, well, it's also hard to get too upset over them.

So, that brings us to Ben Evett's Hamlet. It was, simply put, perfectly reasonable. But I've seen him be brilliant before (Cassius in Julius Caesar, Edmund in King Lear), so "perfectly reasonable" was a bit of a letdown. He did a lot really well. I genuinely felt that he was faking being insane to start with, but that, at some point, he started to crack, and, as the play went along, the amount he was faking insanity vs. the amount he actually WAS insane ebbed and flowed, but with a general "more insane as time goes on" trend. But, in general, the performance didn't do that much for me.


So now we get to "what did the ASP do differently", and this, ladies and gentlemen, is what's called "burying the lede." Because THIS is the important part.

The Strand Theater in Dorchester is a beautiful 1918-vaudeville/movie palace, which seats 1400 people. It was a deteriorating, cruddy mess when it closed in the late sixties, at which point, the City of Boston claimed it by eminent domain, and fixed it up and turned it into a center for arts and performance.

This presented a real challenge for the ASP -- they use interesting neighborhood spaces, and use the quirkiness of the space, its unique and odd characteristics, to help influence how they put the play on. This is what they're good at -- finding a way that a story, and actors, and a funky space can all work together to create something.

Besides, 1400 seats? The ASP is a community project. The idea is to create great art that people can feel a part of. They don't really like to perform for more than maybe a couple hundred people at a time -- and that's the HIGH end. I get the sense they like to be able to be aware of every member of the audience individually, rather than just as a mass.

The ASP is the only troupe I can think of which would consider the chance to perform in a building designed for the purpose to be a challenge to be overcome.

How the hell can the ASP use an actual, real live THEATER? It's a fantastically gorgeous space. How can the ASP use a fantastically gorgeous proscenium arch theater which seats one point four thousand people to create an intimate theater experience?

Answer? Backwards.

The seating is all on the back parts of the stage. Most of the action takes place on the front part of the stage. And behind them, the cavernous, empty space formed by fourteen hundred seats, a sloping sea of seats, with a balcony above and ANOTHER sea of seats . . .

The best part of the play was the opening. The ASP always does AMAZING starts to their plays, and I'm loath to say to much about it, because it was so amazingly effective. Let's just say that Hamlet starts with guards on watch, in bitterly cold weather, completely on edge because, first, there are rumors of war with Norway and/or Poland, and, second, there's a FRIGGIN' GHOST HAUNTING THE GODDAMNED BATTLEMENTS and scaring the shit out of everyone.

And, well, I, at least, was cold and on edge by the end of the scene. The vast space of seats feels empty and cold and creepy. If you've ever been in an empty theater -- especially an OLD empty theater -- you know that they feel . . . haunted. All of them do. There's something about a big theater with nobody in it that feels . . . wrong, eerie, creepy. Maybe holy, in a scary way.

The ASP used that fact. They made that feeling the setting of their play. It is the feeling of the play Hamlet. And that's what they did.

Oh, and also, half the actors are black, which was a deliberate choice, as Dorchester is a primarily black neighborhood, the ASP's mission is to get more people to watch Shakespeare, especially folks who don't usually watch Shakespeare. Having black actors is a way of sending the message to black folks who live nearby, "Hey, this Shakespeare stuff belongs to you as much as it belongs to anyone."


http://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org/season3/hamlet.html

The show started last Thursday, and is running through November 12, in the sort of standard "Thursday through Saturday nights, with matinees on weekends, which meas two shows on Saturdays" pattern. Tickets are $40, $35 on Thursdays, and there are student and senior discounts. I heard a rumor that they've got a discount for Dorchester residents, too, but I don't know details.

It's at the Strand Theater at 543 Columbia Rd in Dorchester, and you're allowed to park in the bank parking lot next door in the evenings. Also, there are a bunch of buses that run along there, but I don't know the details, since Dorchester is out of my usual stomping grounds.

[Crossposted to bard_in_boston]

I had always believed that you couldn't do a more-or-less straight production of Love's Labour's Lost -- the basic structure of it works for a modern comedy, but it's best used as a framework to hang your own work off of. I thought that a lot of the humor in this play was too much based in the peculiarities of the late sixteenth century to translate directly for a modern audience.

The Huntington Theatre Company has proven me wrong.

This is the third production of LLL that Lis and I have seen, and, like the other two, it's a musical -- Branaugh's movie version using Broadway classics, the Zero Arrow Street/ART production using Rat Pack crooner songs, and this one, with original music by Michael Friedman.

As we understand the story of how this production came to be, Huntington originally planned to do A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, but the person they originally cast for Pseudolus had a conflict, and the director's vision really hinged on that actor's portrayal. So, rather than recast the starring role, Nicholas Martin, having a fine cast already, decided that the emotional tone of LLL was similar to what he wanted to do, and the actors he'd assembled would do well in it.

I think he had a point.

So: let's start with the staging.

In recent years, I've seen fewer plays on proscenium arch stages than on other venues, and I've got something of a prejudice against them. I feel that they are constricting -- which works well for some plays (You Can't Take It With You is set entirely in one large, cluttered room, so it feels natural to have the walls of the stage be walls), and less well for others.

So I was impressed with the sense of freedom and openness that the set design portrayed for the outdoor scenes.

There are a number of clever and impressive bits of staging and set dressing. The opening scene, taking place in the library of Navarre, has for a backdrop the most impressive trompe l'oel painting I've seen in years. The staging of the arrival of the ship which carried the Princess of France and company was both impressive and adorable. And that tree which figures prominently in many scenes. . .

Similarly, their lighting designer clearly knows his business. Lighting effectively conveyed and reinforced emotional tones.

On to the performance itself.

I want to start by singling out an outstanding performance by Robert Jason Jackson as Holofernes. I believed that the role of Holofernes was among the main reasons why one couldn't do a straight production of this play. I mean, what was Shakespeare thinking? "Oh, I know! We'll make a boring, totally not funny, incredibly dull pedant! And he'll be boring, not funny, and dull! Won't that be funny?" Yeah, right. Shakespeare clearly had invented crack four centuries early and was smoking it.

Except, no, he wasn't. Now I know what Shakespeare was thinking. Jackson found the funny. It was there. I never saw it before tonight -- but it was there, and it was funny. Damn, it was funny.

I mean, here's a gag which I totally didn't get before tonight:

Sir, I do invite you too;
you shall not say me nay: pauca verba. Away!
the gentles are at their game, and we will to our recreation.

Okay. I'm going to explain the joke. And this is definitely one of those jokes where explaining it is like dissecting a frog -- you may know better how the frog works at the end, but it's unlikely to jump much afterward.

Right. So the last speech in a scene in Shakespeare is usually a cute little verse -- something that rhymes.

So:
"You shall not say me nay; pauca verba. Away!
The gentles are at their game, and we will to our play."

Except the gag is the Holofernes never uses a simple word where something more complex will do. So, when the scene-ending verse is given to Holofernes, it doesn't rhyme or scan anymore. . .

I totally missed that previously. I got it when Robert Jason Jackson said it. And now, if you see it, it won't be funny, because I just squashed the frog. Sorry. But there's a lot more where that came from -- and I never knew it before tonight. Major, major props to Jackson for finding the funny and showing the funny in a really challenging role that is nonetheless funny when done right. I never saw it done right before.

Neil A. Casey also gave a standout performance as Boyet. I was so tempted to write that he "minces churlishly" through his scenes, but I figured that most people wouldn't get the reference. Besides, while he does mince, the sense in which it was "churlish" was already out of fashion a hundred years before Shakespeare wrote the play. So it would totally be misleading and not worth it just to get a "Cowboy Wally" reference into the review.

His Boyet is wonderful, though.

In general, the cast are all competent and professional and understand the essence of their characters. But . . . I've gotten used to the acting from specifically Shakespeare troupes. Jackson, with credits including Othello, Banquo, Bolingbroke, Sir Walter Blunt, and Horatio, was the only actor with extensive prior Shakespeare experience listed in his bio in the program, and it showed. He was the only one who I felt really got all the dirty jokes. And, as I've said before -- if you don't get the dirty jokes, you can't deliver them. And unless you're experienced with Shakespeare, you're not going to understand how much of it is dirty.

While I had no problem with any of the acting, and enjoyed it, I found myself recasting the play with some of the ASP's actors, asking myself things like, "How would John Kuntz have delivered that line if he were playing Berowne?"

So not all the humor was delivered that could have been. But most of it was. This was the first time, in the three times we've seen the play, that we actually saw the Nine Worthies play-within-a-play. Well, the Four Worthies, Then Everything Goes To Heck And Falls Apart Before They Can Finish.

And what of the drama?

As I've said before, what makes Love's Labour's Lost a play for the ages, rather than just a piece of light froth is the last part of the last act. The Nine Worthies play has been heckled to death, and folks have started brawling -- it's all wacky fun -- and then, WHAM. Emotional whiplash.

And it's the grounding of the emotional whiplash that actually makes the play something special. I've talked about this before -- had all the lovers happily gone on and gotten married, it would have been one of Shakespeare's apparently-happy-but-actually-when-you-think-about-it-really-more-is-that-REALLY-a-good-idea? endings, like All's Well that Ends Well. But with the king of France dead, and the lovers separated for a year in which they will all grow up and THINK and decide if this is something they REALLY want to do -- it becomes a much more satisfying ending, by being less frivolously happy.

And yet, even after that, there remains ANOTHER emotional change. And, once again, this was a part of the play that I though was unstageable, emotionally inaccessible, and gratuitous. And, once again, Huntington proved me wrong.

After this grounding of separation and mourning, the passel of clowns who had been putting on the Nine Worthies play show up again, and ask if they can sing the song that was supposed to close their pageant, a song about the Cuckoo and Spring, versus the Owl and Winter.

Gratuitous, no? A song AFTER the emotional climax?

No, not gratuitous. Not when sung as they sang it, not with the setting they composed. Instead, it recapitulates the emotional whiplash, with a bright and cheery first verse, and a sober and pensive second, reinforcing and strengthening the grounding after the comedy.

So, that's what we saw: a more faithful adaptation that I thought possible, a production which used the genius of their own actors and composers to bring forth and explicate much genius in the play that I had never previously seen nor been aware of.

The Actor's Shakespeare Project, our favorite Shakespeare troupe, is putting on "All's Well That Ends Well" through May 14th. If I say that, of the six plays they've done so far, this is the weakest, please understand that it is STILL amazingly good. It's just that it's very hard to follow up the best "King Lear" in 20 years in the United States.

I guess, if I had to rank them, I think I'd go
King Lear
Richard III
Measure for Measure
Julius Caesar
Twelfth Night
All's Well That Ends Well

Maybe I'd swap "Julius Caesar" and "Measure for Measure." Perhaps this simply means that I like tragedies better than comedies? I just don't feel that there's as much "meat" in "Twelfth Night" and "All's Well" as in the other ones -- although there IS enough, and the company and director find it, and use it.

Now that I've said that it's not as good as their other productions, let me tell you just how amazingly good it was.

Let me start by talking a little bit about ASP in general. It's a repertory company, so we get to see the same actors in role after role.

When my little sister, sproutntad, was growing up, she and my mother would go to the ballet regularly. My sister got to the point that she recognized each of the dancers, and had favorites, and would make CERTAIN to go to various performances if certain dancers were dancing. She was a real fan of the company.

Lis and I have a somewhat similar relationship to this company. Except that EVERYBODY is our favorite.

One thing I want to mention is that, in my review of "King Lear", I mentioned that, "Allyn Burrows (who played Kent in this one, Glouscester in Richard III, the Duke in Measure for Measure) really does Upright Noble And Pure characters really well, and Ben Evett (who played Cassius in Julius Caesar, and Edmund in this production of Lear) does scheming bastards really well. And I'd love to see Burrows get a chance to play a scumbucket, and Evett get a chance to play a paladin-type, just 'cause I think the actors would have fun with 'em."

Well, Ben Evett directed this one, but didn't act in it. But Allyn Burrows got to play Parolles, so I got half my wish. And it certainly looked like he had fun.

Well, on to discussing the play itself. I should start where I usually start, talking about the space. In general, I'm convinced that the set designers who work with ASP are, to a person, insane-in-the-good-way. I mean, they must walk into a space, squint really hard, and say to themselves, "How can I use this space in a way that nobody's expecting, but will work better than anything which a NORMAL person could come up with?" Some day, we're going to walk into an ASP production, and discover that the seats are all duct-taped to the ceiling or something like that. And it's going to work, too.

The space they were using is the theater in the upstairs of the YMCA outside of Central Square in Cambridge. This poses some challenges for them, because, for instance, it's the same place that they performed "Julius Caesar". And so they clearly had to use the space differently.

So they built risers from the floor up the stage, and used that as stadium seating, and put the stage on the floor. Worked really well, partially because, as it is stadium seating, you never have to try to look through someone's head, and partially because of how they used the stage.

The stage had a backdrop of curtains emblazoned with symbols -- fleur-de-lises, stars, and the like. This reminded me of how the Rose and the Globe theaters were painted, according to the most recent research that I've heard of -- symbols on the walls and ceiling of the stage actually had meanings, which, perhaps, were used in the plays, although that's pure speculation. In any case, these symbols seemed appropriate -- a motif of fleur-de-lis showed that the play was set in France, for instance. The floor was painted in what appeared to be an abstract map, which matched the wide-ranging scope of the play -- people running from one country to another.

The other thing which they did, which was brilliant, was how they set up the curtains so that, at a certain point, they could swing them back and reveal a much larger area for the set, allowing them to do dances, and, in general, make a scene feel less claustrophobic. They used this emotional effect quite well.

So that's the space. Now let's talk about the sounds.

Music has been an important part of every ASP production we've seen so far, but mostly in a background, atmospheric context. But in "Twelfth Night", they had musicians onstage and part of the action, as you really HAVE to do for a play which starts, "If music be the food of love, play on!"

And they continued this. And improved on it.

The first thing we heard was the actors, backstage, doing vocal warmups. They've done things like this before -- "Julius Caesar" started out with actors, in groups, chanting lines, building up energy. So I didn't think much of it. They do these things on purpose, of course -- if they are doing warmups in front of you, it's because they want YOU warming up to see the play the same way they're warming up to perform it.

And the first we saw of the actors, the real START of the play (they always do interesting things to start the play) was four of the actresses standing in a circle, part-singing a folksong.

Between each scene, and, more than once, within a scene, actors would sing a song, which always related in theme to what was going on in the play, reinforcing it, and giving it more emotional impact. As they don't do proscenium arch staging, they change scenes in front of you, and this was, from a practical point of view, something to keep the audience involved during the changes.

But, if you remember from my review of Theater@First's production of "Merry Wives of Windsor", I felt that doing open scene changes like this, in Shakespeare, often disrupts the flow, and kind of dissipates the energy and momentum that the plot builds up. By matching the music to the plot and the emotional tone, they avoided this problem, and, instead of dissipating the energy with each scene change, they intensified it.

This is partially because of the brilliance of Sara Stackhouse, the music director, in choosing the works, and partially because the actors in ASP have voices that range from pleasant through oh-my-ghu-get-this-man/woman-a-recording-contract-NOW.

I don't know why I'm so surprised by this. I mean, the folks in ASP are consistently amazingly talented. I should have expected that they could sing. At this point, I should just expect that they can do anything. If, next season, in their production of "Hamlet", they all demonstrate that they can fly, shoot laser beams out of their eyes, or turn into giant robots, well, they've shown that they can do everything up to that.

In any case, now that they've demonstrated that they can sing, and have a brilliant music director, I want them to sing in EVERY play they do from now on. At least the comedies. (They're doing "Titus Andronicus" next season. Think that would work as a musical? You could call it "TITUS!" With the show-stopping number, "Bake The Kids A Pie", and the downbeat "Sing Without a Tongue", with the unforgettable lines, "Ah ha a ahh gaaa ahhh ahh/Aa aaah a aahha." I mean, if we've learned anything from "Sweeney Todd", it's that musicals about cannibalism are always big hits. Um. Yeah. Back to the review.)

So let me talk a little bit about the play itself. Both their performance, and what Shakespeare wrote.

The play is made up of pretty typical Shakespearian bits, but put together interestingly. It's by-the-numbers -- but the numbers are put together not entirely as you'd expect. It starts with a head-fake.

Okay, simple setup. Boy = Bertram, just made the new Count of Rossilion (a county in southeastern France, although it's actually spelled "Roussillon", but we can forgive Shakespeare that, as he lived before regularized orthography), as his father just died. Girl = Helena, a young, virtuous, beautiful woman whose father, also recently deceased, was a brilliant doctor, who left his recipes for medicines with her. She's being fostered with the Countess of Rossillion, Bertram's mother, and loves Bertram, but doesn't want to say anything because he's a count and she's a commoner. Bertram's mother, no dummy, takes about thirty-eight seconds to figure out that Helena loves Bertram, and, since Helena is a beautiful, smart, virtuous woman who would really make a fantastic wife for her son, is not at all displeased by this. The Countess encourages Helena to follow her plan: go to Paris where the King of France is very sick, and see if she can heal him. If she can, she can make a deal with him -- he can gentrify her, and she'll be able to marry Bertram.

She gets to Paris, shortly after Bertram (who has to go there 'cause he's the new count), and strikes a deal with the king: he gets better, she gets to marry any nobleman she pleases; but, if he doesn't, she dies.

So, that's the plot, right? You know how it's going to go: she's going to have a great deal of trouble curing him, and it's going to be all suspenseful to see if she dies or if there's a happy ending, right?

Nope.

It's a head-fake. The king's cured in the next scene. And she chooses Bertram.

And Bertram freaks.

And THAT'S where the plot starts.

See what I mean? It's by-the-numbers -- but not the numbers you were expecting.

Enough of that -- I'm sure you can find plenty of discussion of Shakespeare's use of tropes in "All's Well" on your own. So let me talk about THIS performance.

Slapstick, and lots of it. The humor in "All's Well" -- most of it isn't on the page. Some is -- there's a scene where a bunch of folks stage an abduction of Parolles, the cowardly braggart, which is almost as funny when you read it as when you see it -- but most of the humor is in the delivery. And, in this production, in the physical comedy.

John Kuntz, who plays Bertram and The Clown, got his start in comedy, but, in ASP, his purely comedic roles have been minor ones so far. So this is the first time we got to see him, as The Clown, cut loose and go totally over-the-top nuts. He adds some physical humor to his portrayal of Bertram, too, largely in scenes which would otherwise be boring since they consist entirely of exposition.

Parolles, too, is done with a good deal of physical humor. But Allyn Burrows is too good an actor to just leave Parolles as nothing more than a comic relief character -- although he does that part admirably. But along with the comedy, he adds enough to the character that we have a bit of sympathy for this variant of Il Capitano.

It's been commented that the ending of "All's Well that Ends Well" is a bit ambiguous. I mean, as the play ends, everything looks like it's been tied up neatly and everything is all beautiful and hunky-dory. It's not until you're thinking about it later on that you start to wonder whether everything did end well, and whether all is well. . . .

This production doesn't shy away from that ambiguity, and, in fact, has a beautifully staged grace note between Helena and Bertram, no words, which intensifies it.

So, that's this production. Extensive use of slapstick, music, and emotion. Actors and directors who truly care about their characters. A play which is far more ambiguous and complex than it seems on the surface, and a production which recognizes and highlights that fact.

You can get performance times and buy tickets here.

And you should.

So, a real good sign that you're going to enjoy a Shakespeare production is if four beautiful women come out in their underwear and corsets and dance around, flirting with and throwing Christmas crackers to members of the audience. At least, for me, that's a good sign that you're going to have fun.

And then, as the (live, onstage) musicians finish up their dance number, they go into a slower, more melancholy piece -- and you realize that it's "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence. As they play, Greg Steres, as Duke Orsinio, enters, hops up onto a window ledge next to the musicians, and tells them, "If music be the food of love, play on -- give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die."

I don't know how many people in the audience recognized what song was being played on cello and piano -- but for those of us who did, and know the lyrics, we realize that they found a song whose (unsung in the play) lyrics and music perfectly compliment the emotion and message of the scene. And that level of craftsmanship and detail is, as we've come to expect from Actor's Shakespeare Project, present throughout.

I'll be honest -- I was worried about "regression to the mean." I mean, their last production was "King Lear" -- arguably one of the most difficult and powerful plays in the entire English language, and they put on what was quite possibly one of the best productions done, well, ever. So was this play up to that standard? No, of course not -- and it didn't have to be. It was up to an entirely different standard. As artistic director Ben Evett pointed out after the play, this was the first comedy the ASP has put on -- at least, if you think of "Measure for Measure" as a "problem play" rather than as a comedy exactly. Which means that it is judged on entirely different standards than "Lear", and entirely sidestepped the problem I was worried about -- that I'd be somehow comparing it to their last performance. The issue never came up for me, as I found myself comparing it to nothing except itself. It's a screwball comedy, not high drama.

That's not to say that it's easy.

"Twelfth Night" is one of Shakespeare's basic screwball comedies, with all of his normal screwball comedy tricks -- women disguised as men ending up in awkward love triangles, twins being mistaken for one another (ending up in awkward love triangles), forged love notes (ending up in awkward love triangles), cowards who claim to be brave duelists, cheeseheaded nobles with a weak command of the English language, drunk lecherous dissipated Discordian noblemen who cause trouble for the fun of it, and the rest. Not much of kings, not much of crowns, but chock-full of liars, lovers, and clowns. And I think that just about everyone reading this knows that comedy is hard -- often harder than drama.

But just because it's a screwball comedy doesn't mean that it doesn't have some strong, real emotion and message at its core. If you hang a screwball comedy on nothing but fluff, well, then it's just junk food, empty calories -- fun while it goes on, but nothing that really sticks with you. And some of Shakespeare is like that -- even some of my favorite plays. "Comedy of Errors" is bust-a-gut funny, but there's not much in there that's really emotionally gripping. Really good directors and actors can find stuff to work with, but, well, that's not THAT play's strong point.

I was surprised by how emotionally moving I found THIS play. I expected it to be funny, and it was, but I didn't expect it to be as romantic as I found it. It's a good date play.

A lot of that comes from the music. Music is a strong part of the play -- enough that I'd count this as a musical. Much of the credit for the strength of the music in the play goes to Kenny Raskin, who plays Feste -- who's referred to as "the clown" or "the fool", but might be better thought of as the "minstrel". Raskin is himself a clown and a musician, but one who sees clowning and music as a way to bring forth truth -- which means that he's perfectly cast for Feste.

Okay -- I know what the question on all of your minds is, at least, all of you who know the play. You all want to know, "How did they play Malvolio?" See, as the butt of the worst of the pranks of the Discordian crew, he's a bit of a challenge. He has to be enough of a pompous prig that you enjoy seeing him set up and knocked down, but, given how much time the audience spends with him, you can't go TOO far in that direction, or he'll just annoy the audience.

Ken Cheeseman gets that role, and I think he did well by it. Like I said, it's a tough role, and I remember reading some director's notes as to how he approached it and how he tried to strike that balance -- making himself unlikable enough that it is funny when he's locked up as a lunatic, while making him sympathetic enough that you actually do CARE what happens to him. Tough tightrope there, but I think he walked it well.

So -- the upshot is that Ben Evett and the Actors' Shakespeare Project have done it again. They've put together a fantastic show, funny, witty, romantic, fast-moving and enjoyable, but with a solid emotional core and message of love, loyalty, and light, realization, and redemption.

So, I just got back from the Theatre@First production of "Merry Wives of Winsor."

One line summary is "It was good, go see it." But I'll go into more detail about what did, and didn't work. And one thing that sucks is that, when I talk about things that didn't work, they'll be things done by friends of mine, some of whom may be reading this. Just so you're not going to worry too much, I loved the acting; the things I had some problems with were some set design choices and some directorial choices. Given that the director and the set designer are both people I know and like, it's kind of tough to criticize, but I'll do my best. Even so, while reading anything critical, please note that I was roaring with laughter, as was the whole audience, and that one of my friends, who had also never seen the play before, was missing a really good show at the Avalon, with a band that he's not seen in ten years that he LOVES, and afterward was raving about how, as much as we wanted to see that band, seeing this play was a much better choice.

Anyway, this will be in no particular order, since I'm just sort of stream-of-consciousness-ing it as I'm thinking about what I saw.

So, let's start with some general comments, about the form and format of the play. Elizabeth Hunter's production was presented on a fairly standard proscenium arch with a thrust stage, in a room that looks like it would be a fundamentally difficult room to work with -- there were support columns which blocked line-of sight from some points in the audience to points on the stage, and a support column in the stage itself. This, obviously, presents huge difficulties in staging and set design that I don't feel were completely well dealt with.

It seemed to me that the best spots to work on the stage were the places at the sides -- most stages have sort of "live spots" and "dead spots" where, for whatever reason, action works or doesn't work -- and it felt like the weakest part of this stage was the dead spot at center stage. The action tended to work better when it was off at the sides -- partially because of sight lines, but perhaps also from that sort of nearly mystical concept of "dead stage". And a lot of the action was presented at center stage.

The biggest problem I felt with the production, however, was the scene changes. They were done quite professionally and rapidly -- lights down, an efficient crew moving the props and changing the scene, and lights up, with recorded Elizabethan music playing. But even though the crew did a fine job, the very fact of scene changes brought the momentum of the play to a screeching halt a dozen times.

What with Lis starting up bard_in_boston and us trying to see most of the Shakespeare presented locally, we've started to notice things about Shakespeare plays in general. And I think that the Theatre@First folks may have been hindered here by being a general theater company, rather than a Shakespearian company specifically. Shakespeare himself didn't actually do scene changes -- he wrote his works as a sort of seamless cacophony of activity in which, as soon as something finished happening, something else would start happening immediately -- no breaks, no downtime. Sure, there are faster bits and slower bits, but he knew that, if ever everything STOPPED, well, the audience would start throwing things, and he'd damn well better keep everyone distracted so that didn't happen.

So my feeling is that the ANY scene changes in Shakespeare are harmful. Modern plays are sequences of self-contained scenes, each with an emotional completeness -- each scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and has an emotional tone. It's a little story, which tells part of a bigger story. Every scene has an emotional flow, which, taken together, adds up to an overall flow.

And I got the impression that that was how the Theatre@First folks were approaching Shakespeare -- and, in my experience, Shakespeare doesn't work that way. Shakespeare's stuff is much more. . . organic, perhaps. Less neatly constructed. Sloppier, even. With a play from the 19th or 20th century, scene changes give you a chance to regroup, internalize what you've seen, and get ready to go on to the next scene. With Shakespeare, a scene change just destroys your momentum. And Shakespearian comedies are about momentum, the way that the Three Stooges are about momentum.

It was for this reason that, as nifty as a lot of the set dressing was, I found myself resenting it. I kept asking myself -- "Does having different colored walls for different locations really add anything?" And, of course, it DOES add something -- but I found myself resenting it more than I liked it. I'm used to a Shakespearean scene change being indicated by, as one group of characters walks off stage left, another group walks on stage right, maybe a lighting cue, and the new group says something like, "Well, here we are in blah blah blah . . ." -- trusting the dialog and the actors, and trusting the audience.

So, let's talk about the actors. There is nobody who did a bad job. So, let me just do a couple thoughts. . .

Derek Henderson's Sir John Falstaff was good, but not world-class. He hit all the notes he had to and played a perfectly good lovable good-looking sleazeball. And yet . . . I can't exactly put my finger on WHAT it is, but I felt that there was SOMETHING . . . not missing, exactly, but something else that could have been there in the performance. Henderson's Falstaff was simple and one-dimensional, and that's all that you need for the play, and it worked fine. But, I don't know -- I got a feeling that someone really could do something more with the character. But I don't precisely know what. I suppose I'll have to do research and thinking, and, if I figure it out, direct my own version.

David Policar, as the unfairly jealous Frank Ford, on the other hand -- I felt that he DID add whatever it is that I felt was missing in Falstaff. I suppose it's possible that Policar was given more to work with -- Master Ford is written as a two-note character. But somehow, I felt like he was a little more fleshed-out, a little "real-er".

I quite liked the completely gormless Abraham Slender. Jason Merill's characterization reminded me of how Hugh Laurie played the Prince Regent in "Blackadder the Third".

Obviously, the play "Merry Wives of Winsor" is dependent on said merry wives, and Katie Leeman and Gilly Rosenthol turn in, by far, the two strongest performances in the cast.

Elizabeth Hunter stripped out a lot of scenes, and even a few characters, and, flipping through the original text and comparing it to what I saw, I feel confident that she did quite well in doing so.

The opening scenes of the play feel choppy. It's a rough beginning, even in the original text. It's not clear what's going on, who the people are, and what they're doing until you're well into the first scene. So it takes a bit for the audience to get into it -- this is often the case; you need to wait for the audience's brains to switch into hearing the language anyway. But that meant that there were a couple of funny bits at the beginning that I, at least, wasn't quite "into" the play enough to really get -- so they were lost on me. It's not until the merry wives themselves show up and start talking that they sort of pull the audience into the play, and the rest of the cast starts clicking, and it all starts REALLY hanging together.

There were a couple points where lighting was used incredibly well.

I really felt like the cast actually GOT the jokes -- Lis and I have seen a couple Shakespearean comedies where we felt like the actors actually didn't get why stuff was supposed to be funny, so they clearly didn't deliver it well -- there is little more frustrating than watching someone deliver a joke that they don't get. So the fact that this cast DID -- well, that helps a lot. . .

Okay, I'm not getting really tired, and I'm posting this to my LJ right now. Anyone who saw the play, or was in the play, or anything, who wants to make comments or ask questions or so forth, please do so. I intend to actually turn this meandering into a review at some point and post to bard_in_boston.

So, the Actor's Shakespeare Project production of King Lear, which is their first show of their second season, has been extended twice, and is currently sold out until the end of the run. Even so, they occasionally have standby tickets, and Lis managed to get two for tonight.

I've never seen nor read the play before -- I was more or less familiar with the general outlines of the plot (three daughters, two of whom are scum, nice one gets screwed over, it's a Shakespearian tragedy, so everybody dies (except for in the Nachum Tate version, which was actually the more popular version for most of its history, in which Tate managed to put a happy ending on it, but that's neither here nor there.))

So, my impressions will partially be comments on the play, and partially on the production.

First, the space. One of the things that ASP has made a trademark is its use of unconventional spaces, and conventional spaces in unconventional ways. I mean, when they did Measure for Measure, the space they had included a fairly typical proscenium arch stage. Which they used for additional audience seating. 'Cause proscenium arch stages are far too confining for the way that these actors move.

What was this space? As Lis and I took our seats, we tried to imagine what the space actually was before ASP got ahold of it. Our best guess was that it was a hallway or foyer of some sort. There was a staircase, walls, pillars. The space wasn't quite rectangular -- or, if it was, they disguised the fact quite well. They painted murals on the walls, hung creative and somewhat disturbing lighting, put rows of stadium seating along the sides, and covered the floor in, well, I think it was shredded rubber -- the stuff that looks like mulch, but it's made of shredded rubber. Painted the pillars gold, couple of red padded chairs as thrones, a big rug in the middle of the area.

The lighting was on the dim side, and with a subtle orange sodium-bulb-type wrongness to it.

So, even when we were just sitting in the room waiting for the play to start, we were in an environment with no 90% angles anywhere to be seen, and with the kind of lighting that you associate with eerie parking lots, deserted highways, and the like. So we were already on edge, just from the ROOM. THAT'S brilliant set and lighting design.

The play starts, and this odd, quiet, repetitive, mechanical low moaning noise starts. I think a lot of people didn't even quite notice it, exactly, but I know my blood pressure went up, and I felt my heart rate rise.

Even before any actors appeared on stage, I felt the kind of sinking feeling in my gut that I feel when I'm on the upslope of a roller coaster, about to hit the dropoff. I hate roller coasters, by the way.

Allyn Burrows and Colin Lane show up on stage, Allyn Burrows showing a calm, steady demeanor, and Colin Lane showing a more animated, active waiting.

And, basically, nothing happens for five minutes -- and it's FANTASTIC. I mean, for five minutes or so, the rest of the cast who are in the opening scene walk out, in pairs or singly, slowly, with many pauses and more time than you'd think a modern audience would be willing to grant -- and it all works. As all this is going on, you're watching the body language, the facial expressions, and the interactions, and there's this weird, almost subliminal noise going on, and the lighting is off, and there are no right angles, and it all feels just very slightly nightmarish.

And then the play starts.

I don't really want to give too much away. There's a character who is either pretending to be mad, or has actually gone mad, and you get a real sense that he's honestly not sure which one it is. There's a scene where this madman (or sane man pretending to be mad to save himself) is talking with the king, who is going mad, and the king's fool, who probably is mad, is doing his best to maintain sanity.

There are dirty deeds, done dirt cheap, and dialogue that was wonderful in English, but for which I hope to someday hear the original Yiddish. (King Lear was a huge hit on the Yiddish stage, and, having finally seen it, I understand why -- "How sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child" is SUCH a Yiddisher thought -- along with King Lear's curse of Goneril, which, well, if King Lear isn't ACTUALLY a Jewish mother, then he went to the same school.)

What else can I say? During the scenes of violence (blindings, vicious sword and knife fights), I heard genuine gasps and whimpers from the audience. Including me. The violence felt . . . violent. Harsh. Scary. Actor's Shakespeare Project has fantastic fight choreographers, and their violence, no matter how stylized, never feels fake. It may be obviously staged, but it never feels stagy. It always has emotional reality. Which, of course, means that watching their fight scenes feels like going through an emotional meat grinder.

Also, I note that they've obviously been having some cross-pollination with the Higgins Armory Sword Guild. People in their sword fights are doing things like, y'know, bashing with the pommel, using wrestling moves with the blade as a lever, grabbing the blade at the riccosa to do stronger blocks, and so forth. Which is one of the reasons why the violence feels so visceral.

I'm not even going to single out particular performances: they were all great. The only thing I'm going to say about that is that Allyn Burrows (who played Kent in this one, Glouscester in Richard III, the Duke in Measure for Measure) really does Upright Noble And Pure characters really well, and Ben Evett (who played Cassius in Julius Caesar, and Edmund in this production of Lear) does scheming bastards really well. And I'd love to see Burrows get a chance to play a scumbucket, and Evett get a chance to play a paladin-type, just 'cause I think the actors would have fun with 'em.

So, now I've seen King Lear. And I don't think that I could have seen a better production. I loved this cast, I loved the space and how they used it, I loved the lighting design, the sound design, and everything.

So, Lis and I just saw Shakespeare and Company's production of King John, directed by Tina Packard, last night. This is one of those plays that's not often performed these days, although it was moderately popular in the eighteenth century.

It's a long play, with lots of characters, and I was worried that I was going to get bored, or confused, or lost.

I mean, let's face it -- at heart, I'm a groundling. I'm SLIGHTLY better socialized than the groundlings in Shakespeare's day, in that I don't usually throw stuff at the actors when I get bored, but not much.

I loved the play.

I don't know if the credit goes to Shakespeare's script, Tina Packard's direction, or the actors' skill -- or, more likely, a combination of all three -- but it was FANTASTIC. I had such a good time. I think everybody should see it.

Anyway, there's this scene, okay? The Duke of Austria is fighting for France. Some time before the start of the play, he'd killed Richard the Lionhearted, and wore a lionskin that apparently Richard had gotten from a lion he killed. Other characters are Constance, who's the widow of Geoffery, and mother of Arthur, on whose behalf France was fighting, and Philip the Bastard, who's Richard's illigitimate son, and the real hero of the play -- a brash, honorable, and violent knight, eager for the fight.

So, France and England have made peace, which pisses the HELL out of Constance, who is vituperating and cursing the King of France and everyone else who swore holy oaths to defend her claim and is now backing out of it. Austria, for instance, was GOING to fight for France, but is now backing out. . .

AUSTRIA
Lady Constance, peace!

CONSTANCE
War! war! no peace! peace is to me a war
O Lymoges! O Austria! thou dost shame
That bloody spoil: thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villany!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou Fortune's champion that dost never fight
But when her humorous ladyship is by
To teach thee safety! thou art perjured too,
And soothest up greatness. What a fool art thou,
A ramping fool, to brag and stamp and swear
Upon my party! Thou cold-blooded slave,
Hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side,
Been sworn my soldier, bidding me depend
Upon thy stars, thy fortune and thy strength,
And dost thou now fall over to my fores?
Thou wear a lion's hide! doff it for shame,
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

AUSTRIA
O, that a man should speak those words to me!

BASTARD
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

AUSTRIA
Thou darest not say so, villain, for thy life.

BASTARD
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

It's hysterical. And he KEEPS taunting Austria this way. It's brilliant, and very, very funny. It works better on stage than written, but it's really great on stage.

I don't know why this one is so rarely performed. If performances of this can be as good as Tina Packard's, it doesn't deserve obscurity.

So, as I said, we went out to Lenox to see the production of Taming of the Shrew.

Tina Packard, the founder and heart of Shakespeare and Company, hates the play, and so, any production they do has to be really damn good to make up for that. And this was really damn good.

Let's start by talking directly about the reason people hate this play. The first time I saw it, when I was in junior high school, I was a little less aware of how the Scientologists, and cults in general, and Guantanamo Bay, and so forth, work. I didn't know how brainwashing and psychological torture are done.

PETRUCHIO

Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully.
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty;
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come and know her keeper's call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not;
As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed;
And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly I intend
That all is done in reverend care of her;
And in conclusion she shall watch all night:
And if she chance to nod I'll rail and brawl
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness;
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak: 'tis charity to show.

Petruchio's methods are starvation, sleep deprivation, and keeping Kate away from her family and friends. That's all there is to it: the actions which we nowadays call brainwashing, torture, and abuse.

So how do you deal with that, as an acting company, and as an audience?

Does the name "Christopher Sly" ring any bells?

I've gotten the impression that Christopher Sly is cut from many productions of Taming of the Shrew. Because he doesn't seem to add anything to the play, and, in fact, it seems rather as if Shakespeare forgot him halfway through writing the thing.

But, as written, "Shrew" is a play-within-a-play. Christopher Sly is a poor broken-down tinker who passes out drunk in front of a lord, who thinks it would be really funny to pick him up, stick him in a good bed, and have all his servants pretend that the poor guy is a rich lord who was out of his wits and only THOUGHT his was a poor tinker.

Comedy gold, right? I have to admit, it struck me pretty strongly that this was written for an audience that thought bear-baiting to be great fun.

In any case, a bunch of actors show up, and the (real) lord decides to have them put on a show for this fellow. And the show they put on is "The Taming of the Shrew."

And Sly has no further lines after the play-within-a-play starts, except once, at the end of the first scene of the first act of "Shrew":

First Servant
My lord, you nod; you do not mind the play.

SLY
Yes, by Saint Anne, do I. A good matter, surely:
comes there any more of it?

Page (disguised as Sly's wife)
My lord, 'tis but begun.

SLY
'Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady: would 'twere done!

And that's it.

So plenty of people cut the character, because he doesn't really add much.

Except he does.

He adds distance.

For me, in many of the most uncomfortable scenes of brainwashing and abuse, I was able to look at Sly sitting there in the upper loft on the set. watching the play, and I wasn't watching brainwashing and abuse -- I was watching a FICTION about brainwashing and abuse. Sly and the page sitting there helped keep that from being as painful: they were a strong presence keeping it from being as real as it would otherwise be.

They also used him quite well later on when. . . but I don't want to give THAT part away, because it was so funny. Although I think Lis may mention it in HER review, because she got some fantastic photos of that scene.

They also did one other bit to finish off the play that also helped redeem it. And, again, I don't want to say too much about it, because I want people to go see this production and I don't want to spoil it. But, in the program, there is an actress listed only as "A Surprise Visitor", who also helps deal with the abusive messages in the play.

I'll write more later, I think, about "Tamer Tamed", which we saw the next day.

The Actor's Repertory Theater is a theater troupe associated with Harvard, and tonight was the last performance of a show put on by some of their students.

"Love's Labors Lost" is generally considered to be one of Shakespeare's "lesser comedies", and sometimes is even classified as a "problem play." This is how Shakespeare scholars say, "waitaminute -- this play sucks."

I mean, theref's a lot of good stuff in the play, but, on the whole, not much happens, and there's a whole lot of boring bits in it making fun of Elizabethan scholars, which is apparently really funny if you know a lot of Elizabethan scholars.

So, modern productions, recognizing these facts, take the basic setup, characters, and outline of the play, and all the good scenes and lines, throw out the boring bits, and then fill in the rest with whatever they want.

When Kenneth Branaugh did it, he filled it in with 1930s musical numbers.

This production used mainly 1950s musical numbers. Oh, and Don Adrieano was Chico, Costard was Groucho, a couple of the minor roles were Harpo, and Jaquenetta was Marylin Monroe.

In general, I think this was a very good idea. Get rid of the dull bits, add in funny bits to make up for it. If a set of jokes fall flat in the modern world, replace them with better ones.

Before I start talking about this play too much, let me take a moment and talk about the ending of the play. The ending is probably one of the best parts.

See, the whole play is this wacky screwball comedy about a prince and his three buddies who swear off women for three years, forgetting that the Princess of France and her three buddies are showing up and wacky fun ensues. Naturally, everyone falls in love, and there's all sorts of hijinks, and, at the end, everybody is just about to have their light, frothy happy ending.

You know, screwball comedy romance. Meet cute, end up marrying. The kind of thing that you KNOW, in real life, would never work out, because it's not ACTUALLY based on anything, and people haven't shown any REAL emotional depth and the relationship would crumble as soon as an actual problem showed up.

And just as they're getting ready for that ending, the Princess's secretary comes in with a message. Her father just died.

This is EXACTLY what the ending needs. Someone on my friends list was talking about the concept of "tragic relief" -- that you need something serious to cut the fluff in a comic piece. And all of a sudden, these eight wacky kids have to face something real, for at least a page or two. They have to agree to take time off and mourn, and deal with serious things for a year, and come back afterward and see if they are actually in love.

So what about this performance of the play?

Well, Lis liked it better than I did. I liked it quite a bit, but I was very aware of its weaknesses. To start, when you're doing a musical, it's noticible when only one or two of the actors can sing. Everyone else DOES sing, but only a couple of the voices are any good. I mean, nobody was painful or anything, but there wasn't much there vocally.

Then there was the comedy. It was generally good, but not great. And, well, if I see someone dressed as Groucho, well, I feel like they are setting up a very high expectation. If you put on a greasepaint mustache, you're making a pretty extravagant boast: that you think that you can do Groucho. And that's a very high bar to set for yourself.

Did they hit it? No, not quite. But they didn't miss by much.

They replaced many of the set pieces in Shakespeare with either musical numbers or Marx Brothers bits -- for instance, when they decide to put on the play of the Nine Worthies, Chico decides he doesn't like any of the Nine Worthies in the script, and they do the "party of the first part" routine from Night At The Opera, leaving them, at the end, with no worthies. . . so they have to put on a performance about the Tenth Worthy -- Captain Spaulding. Given that the Play of the Nine Worthies in Shakespeare's text is actually pretty lame, and they did manage to keep the two good lines from that section and put them into the "party of the first part" routine, it worked out pretty well.

A note about the costuming is perhaps in order: they color-coded the lovers. And it worked. The men, throughout the play, wore tuxedoes, suits, Russian costumes, and so forth; the women, sundresses, evening gowns, swimsuits, and so forth. In each case, the Princess of France and the Duke of Navarre wore purple, Rosalind and Biron wear yellow, Logaville and Maria, blue, and Dumain and Katherine, red. Makes it easy-peasy to tell who ends up with whom.

And, for that matter, given that each lover, when he or she writes love-notes, uses statonery in the matching color, and each lady's luggage is in the same color, it helps kieep track of what is whose and what's going on. It's stagey and artifical, but fine for screwball.

So, all in all -- it was fine. I thought the comic timing could have been better, and that a lot of the stuff was played over-broadly and the actors aren't quite as talented clowns as they think they are, and that the singing could have been better, and that some of the staging and blocking was rather amateurish. But I did enjoy it, anyway.