This post is a spin off from my last post. Looking for the connection?
10 Things I Hate About You (Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, and the girl from
Alex Mack, one of the best shows Nickelodeon ever produced alongside
Pete and Pete) is an interpretation of Shakespeare's,
The Taming of the Shrew. So there you have it.
Last night I saw a production of Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare's comedies, at the Old Globe in Balboa Park (essentially meaning that the play ends in marriage and not death). Without becoming too periphrastic (one of my daily vocab iphone app words, and I know I know, OOOO wow, Brad's using big words in his blog, but give me a break, if you don't use it, what's the point!) the play revolves around the character of Viola, who disguises herself as a man after a shipwreck on a foreign land. She is in love with the duke of that land who bids her (him) to woo Olivia, who in turn falls in love with Cessario (Viola's man name). Oh yeah, it gets more fun with Viola's fraternal twin brother cruising around the island of Illyria unbeknownst to his sister or anyone else. Its really a fun play and the rendering of it last night was well done. Most of the parts were very well executed minus the role of Sebastian (the twin brother) who I found rather dry. On the other hand, the role of Andrew Agucheek was brilliant. If you don't know what I'm talking about you should see the movie in the very least. There is a good one with Ben Kingsley in it as the fool Feste.
To speak more specifically about last night's performance, the costume and setting were adapted to an affluent 1950s Mediterranean setting. Recently seeing a beat version of mediocre A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was a little skeptical when I saw the costume designs in the program. Despite my apprehensions, the play really was fantastic.
If you are going to approach Shakespeare, at least as a hobbyist and not as an essayist, I suggest approaching it in the following descending order: live performance, film version, audio tape, text. Shakespeare is meant to be on stage. Period. It is really enjoyable seeing all the entrances and exits of each character, how each character interacts with the set and each other on stage. There are little nuances that make the live production more enjoyable, at least in my opinion. You don't get cuts or edits, you get ad lib and improv if something goes south. Productions are always changing. Sets from one year to the next. Performances from one night to the next. Its a lot of fun being a part of something that is presented in its entirety from beginning to end without a director's CUT and a coffee break. I hope to attend more plays in the future.
It did help to sit second row back to the slight left of the stage thanks to a 50% student discount. Seriously, hold on to those IDs and milk those discounts for as long as you possibly can. My student ID doesn't have a date on it anywhere so as long as it isn't scanned, nobody will know whether or not I actually am in school or not. Hopefully they'll be offering student discounts for a showing of "Herringbone" playing at the La Jolla Playhouse throughout the month of July.
