Dachs Thoughts

Tonight I saw a Shakespeare-adjacent play at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, The Book of Will. It’s hard for me to say how much I loved this play. I had seen it once before, a few years ago in Ashland, and tonight’s production reminded me how much I like it. It is the tale of how the authoritative First Folio of Shakespeare’s works came to be. A few years after his death, his friends from the theater world undertook to collect the bits and pieces of the original words, which didn’t exist in one place or in complete form, in order to preserve them for history. This production was well acted and it was very moving. Paraphrasing what I said before, this play is a love letter to acting, to theater, to the words of Shakespeare, and to people who enjoy them. Shakespeare’s works and words have come to mean so much to me after attending live productions for more than 35 years that I became quite emotional at various places in the play where well known lines from various plays were called out in the context of this story. This was a great evening at the theater. It also emphasized the disappointment I feel due to the fact that two of the three Shakespeare plays I had planned to see this week were canceled do to Covid outbreaks. However, this play was so wonderful it maybe makes up for it a bit.

I finally got to start the Shakespeare part of this trip. After a false start with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, with my first play being canceled (later rescheduled) due to a Covid outbreak, I finally managed to see some theater with a fun production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It was staged in a fairly traditional way, except some of the Italian stereotypes were amplified for laughs. There were a couple of choreographed dance interludes which were fun and did a good job of storytelling as well. And they had a sweet dog joining the cast. This is a classic, possibly the first, Shakespearean comedy with some dramatic/romantic tension along the way, but everything ends up happy at the end. A fun night out.
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Tonight I again joined Bob and went and saw another play from the SPARC Theater, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. I’ve always found the plot somewhat silly, but I guess that’s what makes it a classic comedy of mistaken identity. This production chose to set the play in El Paso, Texas, which didn’t overly affect the play, but gave them a chance to do a little variation on the basic play. The actors did a good job, and it was an enjoyable play to watch. it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it was a fun evening. It was pleasantly warm, and the new venue is a beautiful setting with the vineyards in the background. It was good to see my second Shakespeare play of the summer. I can’t wait for more.
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Tonight I saw my first theater production of the year, and my first CalShakes production since 2019 as they’ve been locked down a long time. This was a last-minute decision when I realized they were only going to be doing the first play of the season for another couple of weeks, but I bought tickets last night. (They’re only doing 2 plays this season). I ended up sitting front row center. It was a beautifully warm evening and I barely needed a jacket.

I was a little hesitant to go for this first play because it sounded a bit like a woke-Berkeley play, but because I love Romeo and Juliet so much I decided to forge ahead. This was a bilingual adaptation of Romeo and Juliet called Romeo y Juliet. It was pretty much the same story with some notable changes. The first was the setting, 1800s Alta California (Mexico), and the dialog floated back and forth between English and Spanish. Due to the acting (which was very good) and emotion you could follow the flow of things even though you didn’t always understand the words — but I’m glad I knew the play quite well. I recognized some of my favorite speeches, but for me, they suffered a bit from bouncing back and forth in language. Nothing beats the Shakespeare language for some of the key speeches. But the change of setting and language was an interesting variation that overall made the play interesting.

The second big shift in the play was to have Romeo be a woman. I didn’t find this added anything to the play other than being different. The dramaturg before the play suggested this was a 3rd layer of the adaption showing how Juliet was rebelling in a way consistent with a relationship that is allowed in 2022. The actors were good and carried it off, but it felt a little flat. The casting didn’t help this: the actress playing Juliet appeared youthful and innocent, which worked perfectly; however, the actress playing Romeo was quite a bit older (which was particularly evident from my front-row seat), and she didn’t really play it youthful, so it was a little creepy like a middle-age woman was going after this 13-year-old girl. But apart from those quibbles, the emotional highlights came off. Overall I found the play very moving, as it almost always is for me, and I’m very glad I went.
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