Tonight I attended the first CalShakes play of the season, which was Twelfth Night. We had a full house as Nathan B, and Kyoko and Ben, joined Bill, Andy and me. We lucked out as the night was very pleasant considering how cold it had been at home the previous night.
Overall, I enjoyed the play. The set was very basic with a background wall, and a coffin in the middle of the stage that evolved from coffin at the beginning as the reason for Olivia’s grieving, to bench, to prison cell. There were a couple of aspects that didn’t really enhance the play for me, although in the end they weren’t annoying enough to impact my enjoyment. The first was that it was a very small cast with a couple of actors playing multiple parts. As the play revolves around mistaken identity, this additional source of confusion didn’t add to the production. The second was that most of the primary may roles were played by women. In fact there was only one male cast member, and he played a bunch of secondary roles. He was ok, and he sang quite pleasantly in a number of songs that were in the production. The women playing men weren’t terrible, it just wasn’t great, or necessary, and came off a bit gimmicky to me. As the play already revolves around a woman disguising herself as a man, this additional gender-bending wasn’t necessary.
Overall glad to be restarting the Shakespeare engine again for this year; it’s been too long. 117