redbird | Entries tagged with theatre

Since several people on my reading list have been posting about memorable (including memorably good, bad, and just plain weird) productions of Shakespeare 's plays, and listing what they have and haven't seen, I tried to make a list. I have thus discovered, or confirmed, that there are plays that I can't remember whether I've seen.

So, for what it's worth, Shakespeare I've seen, or might have seen:

A Midsummer Night's Dream, several times -- it seems to have been a popular choice for theater companies to put on in the 1980s and 1990s.

Cymbelline, an outdoor production in Central Park, during the years when Joe Papp decided the Public Theatre was going to put on all of Shakespeare. (A lot of those were in their theatre in the East Village.)

Hamlet, also several times, including Raoul Bhaneja's excellent one-man version, at the New York Fringe about a decade ago. One summer weekend in New York, looking for something to do, I saw that there were three different free outdoor productions of Hamlet in NYC that weekend, including "Shakespeare in the parking lot."

King Lear, which I had the good fortune not to have read before I walked into the theatre. That was at La Mama ETC, an off-off-Broadway space in the East Village, and very good. ( Read more... )

Measure for Measure at the Barbican, when I had an extra day free in London before or after some convention or other; I was unimpressed, by play and performers, but to be fair I picked it because there were tickets available, not because I particularly wanted to see that play.

Romeo and Juliet, a few times. Also * Shakespeare's R and J*, which assumes the audience is familiar with the play that the characters are clandestinely performing.

Two Gentlemen of Verona, a (poor-quality) videotape of the Flying Karamazov Brothers' production. I note here that one of the times I saw them for a couple of hours of "juggling and cheap theatrics" they referred to themselves as "the only vaudevillians on Broadway."

Beyond that: I think I've seen Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III, and have a vague feeling I may have seen Julius Caesar.

I also saw something at the reconstructed Globe in London, a couple of decades ago, but mostly what I remember is the building, and that I bought a groundling ticket for five pounds, online when that wasn't a common way to book, because I wanted the experience, and was a lot younger and had better joints; I wouldn't try it now.

I may have seen another comedy or two; I don't remember seeing any of the other tragedies.

Ancillary material:

I've seen Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, first a live production in a black-walled squash court and then the film version. The almost-bare stage in the squash court was just right for this. (One of the student theatre groups when I was at Yale did three different Stoppard plays, in different semesters, in the same space.)

I may have seen West Side Story before I saw Romeo and Juliet, but I think I read/studied the play in English class before seeing either.

Jo Walton put on a staged reading of her Shakespeare's "Tam Lin," as considered canonical on Barrayar, as part of her wedding festivities, though I don't remember much about it. (That was almost two decades ago, and it was a busy weekend.)

The Reduced Shakespeare Company, a comedy which offers highlights, for some value thereof, of all of Shakespeare's plays in a couple of hours, with Coriolanus as a TV cooking show.

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rysmiel and I had tickets for two Fringe shows Sunday night, but the first one, "Checkout 606," was cancelled due to wind. (The venue for that seemed to be a bit of street next to a food truck.) So we went to Frits Alors! for dinner, then walked back up St. Laurent and saw The Passage, a play about the Yukon Gold Rush, told by a woman who is trying to make her way to the Yukon. It's very effective—simple staging, mostly a lantern and a handful of other props, while the actress tells her story in an otherwise-darkened room.

The story starts with the expedition Nelly is part of losing their horses; she loops back a bit to talk about joining the group and the departure from Edmonton, and then tells about the ongoing journey and what goes wrong, and her interactions with the men and boy in the group, and theirs with each other.

My program says the performer [sic] is Jen Viens, and the writer/director is Adriana Bogaard, both originally from B.C. "The piece was inspired by the true story of Nelly Garner - the first woman to travel to the Klondike via Edmonton. However, many creative liberties have been taken."

Crossposts: http://redbird.livejournal.com/1500175.html

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Or, Chorégraphie qui mène à la satisfaction: the show was bilingual, though without a lot of dialogue in either language. (I suspect I would have gotten more out of it if I understood more French; I also suspect there are bits a monolingual Francophone would have missed.)

Performer and choreographer Nika Stein is good, and definitely expressed emotion and change within that. As promised on the Fringe website, there is a happy ending: the promotional bookmark in fact says "Warning 18+ Explicit emotional content, nudity, and happy ending."

Recommended, for my hypothetical reader who is in Montreal in the next week and likes dance. (Studio Jean-Valcourt du Conservatoire, 4750 av. Henri-Julien metro Laurier or Mont-Royal)

Meanwhile, I am feeling warm and cozy because I saw this with

rysmiel yesterday and we have more Fringe tickets for tomorrow, and

adrian_turtle and

cattitude are going to a free outdoor performance of Macbeth this afternoon.

Crossposts: https://redbird.livejournal.com/1499706.html

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Thursday night,

cattitude and I saw the current Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, starring Bernadette Peters and Elaine Strich (and Alexander Hanson, but it was Strich and Peters that made me want to see this).

It was as good as I'd expected, which is very: I'm a Sondheim fan, but had never seen this show, only listened to the cast album. Sondheim's songs are excellent, but they gain from the context of the rest of the show). I'd wanted to see Elaine Strich act since we saw her one-woman show Elaine Strich at Liberty a couple of years ago, and Bernadette Peters is as good as I'd heard. (I suspect I've seen her before, but I'm not sure.) Her "Send in the Clowns" was almost heart-breaking, as well as technically very good: a bit of my brain was detached enough to notice the skill involved in putting those pauses, as if to catch her breath, in without ever actually losing her place.

We had a very good time; this was worth waiting for. I continue to be impressed that Strich and Peters are the replacement cast; this is the production that originally had Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (There aren't enough good roles for older women, or maybe there aren't enough directors and producers willing to put on those plays.)

Strich, as Madame Armfeldt, has only one song to herself, "Liaisons," which she did well. And I caught on one bit of the lyric, and wondered if it was meant as characterization: Mme. Armfeldt, reminiscing about her past, sings about having been the mistress of the King of Belgium. The play is set "at the turn of the last century," or around 1900; the timing suggests that this was likely Leopold II, the infamous creator and ruler of the Congo Free State. The musical is about (heterosexual) romantic/sexual relationships, and there's definitely political text there (for example, Count Carl-Magnus's jealousy and treatment of his wife and his mistress); I don't know whether Sondheim or Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book, thought about the implications of "In the palace of the king of the Belgians," rather than picking it for scansion. But it sheds a less flattering light Mme. Armfeldt, though I don't know how much the king's mistress would plausibly have known about goings-on in the Congo around 1870. (I can imagine her having learned about it years later, been glad to no longer be involved with him, but also still glad of the villa and money he gave her, and determined to play up the romance or status of a king, any king.

The choreography is also very good, both larger things like the way Frederika is mostly excluded by the adults in the opening waltz, and small things like the way several of the actors mime riding a train or bus (a slight anachronism, perhaps, but it works). The Playbill lists an "associate choreographer," suggesting that at least some of the choreography is from the original Hal Prince production.

[I don't have a lot to say about the play as a play, except that it works; I'm glad not to be anywhere near anything like Count Carl-Magnus's possessiveness and double standards, or in the sort of milieu where that kind of thing is normative; and that I think it's technically a comedy.]

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I saw Spamalot last night.

The show is cheerful silliness. A lot of it was familiar from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but there's a bunch of rather self-referential new material about the knights being told to put on a musical, and
"Once in every show there's a song like this" and a character listed in the program as "Diva" singing "What happened to my part" There is a distinct shortage of female roles, though lots of scantily clad dancers there to give a Vegas feel to things and because there are people in the theatre audience who like looking at pretty young women.

We also got quite a bit of joking about Lancelot being gay, definitely on the flaming/queen side of things (including references to "YMCA"). Similarly, a running joke about how the Round Table couldn't make it on Broadway because none of them were Jewish.

Some quick jokes were clearly dropped in recently, and may be gone in six months.

The show ended with an audience sing-along of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

One of our party needs to be reminded that even if he's seen the show before and a lot of it is taken from a movie, I don't want to hear the lines from beside me a few seconds before they're spoken on stage.

TDF, probably about half price, orchestra seats but fairly far to one side. My only complaint about the seats is that they keep making them smaller, and soon nobody old enough to attend the theatre alone will be able to sit comfortably.

Current Mood: amused

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Current Mood: amused

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Wednesday evening,

cattitude and I went (with L, and a bunch of other people who I don't think are on LJ) to the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company. We had fun, and I was reminded that I haven't been getting out enough. (I may never be satisfied with my balancing between getting out and not running myself ragged.)

Most of our group were familiar with the show; I have the original cast album, and have played it fairly often. I also went to an amateur production some years ago (I think at St. Bartholemew's church), but don't remember much about it. Being a lot more familiar with the music than with the non-sung conversations and staging can be odd: I was surprised by some of the interactions between the characters, and know many of the lyrics well enough to have spotted a changed half-line in "You Could Drive a Person Crazy." There was one significant change from the 1970 version: "Marry Me a Little" was added to the show in the 1990s.

Either the performers need to enunciate better, or the instruments were played (or miked) too loud, maybe a bit of both. I suspect someone who didn't already know the music would have missed quite a bit, especially in the opening number (also called "Company"), where a lot of singing was covered by instrumental music. The woman playing Marta did a very good job with "Another Hundred People," one of my favorite Sondheim songs. [I didn't keep the Playbill, trying to avoid clutter, and now I'm wishing I had; that's one reason this isn't really a review.] Raul Esparza is a good Bobby (not an easy role to act)and Barbara Walsh is a good Joanne, a difficult role because Elaine Strich made it, and especially the song "Ladies Who Lunch," so much her own in the original production and afterwards. Unfortunately, the woman playing Amy couldn't quite handle the patter-song speed of "Not Getting Married." (There were a couple of substitutions the night we saw the show, and I don't remember whether this was one of them.)

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Wednesday evening,

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On the strong recommendation of

xiphias and

cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and

cattitude for the Actors' Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, transferred from Boston to La Mama E.T.C. It's a theatre-in-the-round (well, rectangle) production, and takes the approach to Shakespeare that I tend to like, namely very minimal scenery. I do wish the actors, particularly those playing Lear and Cordelia, had enunciated better.

The company used the space well: not only were entrances and exits frequently up and down stairs, but some of the action was on the stairs between the seats. In particular, at the beginning, when Edmund is told to step back, he simply sat down on the stair, about six feet from us. By the time everyone else had exited and he spoke, I'd forgotten he was there.

I not only hadn't seen Lear live before [1], but if I ever saw a filmed production, it was a long time ago, and I didn't remember details. More precisely, the details I remembered were the lines everyone quotes, not turns of the plot.

The emotional shape of the play is odd; the first half is a lot closer to comedy than Macbeth or Hamlet. It's not just that the Fool, as Cattitude pointed out, has the best lines, it's that everyone has comic lines. Then there's a storm, and everyone and everything turns a lot darker. By the end, I was thinking "if he [Edmund] survives the battle, we're in trouble." He does, of course.

A good production, if not quite as good as my Boston reviewers led me to expect, but I don't know if that was me or the play; transfers are always potentially iffy, and 3.5 hours is a long time to sit in a metal folding chair even with a fifteen-minute intermission during which I found space to do most of my shoulder and heel stretches.

I think I want to track down a good filmed Lear and put it in our Netflix queue, for a few weeks from now. Good defined for these purposes as minimal cuts, good acting, and clear speech. Period/costuming aren't important, and while I know there's no film equivalent of a bare stage, the focus should be on the language, not the landscape or the storm effects. Recommendations, please.

[1] Lots of Hamlets, multiple Macbeths, Tempests, and A Midsummer Night's Dreams, some very good variations on Romeo and Juliet, from West Side Story to Shakespeare's R and J, a four-man production set in a boys' boarding school, an assortment of histories and comedies, even Cymbeline, courtesy of the completists at the Public Theatre. Some of that is fashion: The Tempest was very popular about ten years ago. And some is probably chance.

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On the strong recommendation of

xiphias and

cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and

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We saw Alan Ayckbourne's play House last night. It's half farce, half marriage-falling-apart. The farce part worked better--it was a little too hard to sympathize with most of the characters.

The gimmick is that it's paired with another play called Garden, to be done in an adjoining theatre with the same actors playing the same roles; this requires very careful timing by all concerned. The problem, in this case, is that Manhattan Theatre Club's production used a much larger theater for House than for Garden, making it difficult to see both. Our organizer, the indefatiguable L., did grab three tickets for the matinee of Garden, so she saw that before she, and we, saw House. Garden apparently is more farce, with lots of physical comedy, and less emotional or other serious content.

A clever conceit, but it's not great art. Though I do now imagine a demented director or producer booking two theatres and doing simultaneous productions of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but I don't think the timing would work. The Ayckbourne pair were written to fit this precisely, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Afterward we went out for snacks and conversation, meaning it was close to 1 a.m. by the time we got home, medicated the kitty, and fell into bed.

Dunno if I'll make it out for barbecue this afternoon (and after urging

agrumer to bring the corn).

Current Mood: cheerful

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theatre

agrumer to bring the corn).

Current Mood: cheerful

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theater,
theatre

I meant to write about the Japanese production of Pacific Overtures when I saw it--but that was the same day as the job interview, and I was rather overwhelmed.

There is something surreal about the familiar tunes, sung in a foreign language, with Sondheim's clever, complex, multi-rhymed words projected overhead.

I'd say "go see it" but the company has gone back to Japan; they did five performances in New York, and will be doing five in Washington later in the summer, and that's it. The show ended its run in Japan a while ago--but Sondheim was there for the last two shows, and decided that it should come to the US.

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Wow! We saw Copenhagen last night. It is wonderful. This is what theatre should be. It's not about fancy special effects or stage design: it's three human beings, on a stage, trying to understand their lives, what they did and why, in the fact of uncertainty and under a great deal of stress.

Yes, there's more to my life than theatre. But this month, there seems to be a lot of theatre. I'm pleased.

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theatre

Yes, there's more to my life than theatre. But this month, there seems to be a lot of theatre. I'm pleased.

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theater,
theatre

Go see The Rocky Horror Show. It's a lot of fun. Dick Cavett is the unexpected star of the show, as the Narrator. The producers have given him carte blanche to talk back to the audience, and otherwise to ad lib. He greeted Cuban visitors, joked about politics, and explained to any who needed it why someone in the audience had shouted "Describe your balls."

This didn't have the full-scale chaos of the midnight movie experience, but it was considerably more participatory than the average Broadway musical.

A blond Frank was a surprise at first, but we got used to him quickly. The singers/actors and the orchestra are all good, and all seem to be having a good time.

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This didn't have the full-scale chaos of the midnight movie experience, but it was considerably more participatory than the average Broadway musical.

A blond Frank was a surprise at first, but we got used to him quickly. The singers/actors and the orchestra are all good, and all seem to be having a good time.

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

Shakespeare I've seen

Montreal Fringe: The Passage

Fringe show: Choreography which leads to satisfaction

A Little Night Music

Spamalot

Spamalot

Company

Company

King Lear: Actors' Shakespeare Company

King Lear: Actors' Shakespeare Company

fluff, but pleasant fluff

fluff, but pleasant fluff

in the original Japanese??!

in the original Japanese??!

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