Dachs Thoughts

I ended my visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a wonderful production of Henry V. This completed the Henriad tetralogy that started in 2016 with Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV that I saw last year. It starred the same actor who played Prince Hal in the last two plays, so there was a nice continuity. It was played in the intimate Thomas Theatre, and the staging was extremely spare and the cast was relatively small. It was quite impressive how they were able to convey these vast battles, and people on various sides, with just a hand-full of actors slipping back and forth between parts, and using colorless boxes and crates moved around the stage to very interesting effect. Henry’s big speeches were played much more low-key than the rousing style that one sometime sees, but it just made the words and content come across even more clearly and powerfully. This was a very good show to end my week in Ashland with.
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For my last outdoor production in the Elizabethan Theatre this visit, I saw a new play The Book of Will. It told the story of how, a few years after William Shakespeare’s death, his friends got together and tried to assemble a complete, authoritative collection of his plays that ended up as the “First Folio”. It was fantastic. The actors were great, and the play ended up being a love letter to the art of acting, and theater, and the words and stories of Shakespeare. It told of their love of the man and the words and their effort to preserve them from quickly disappearing. In the finale the actors did a swirl of memorable lines from various plays, and it ended with a video collage of all sorts of people all over the world speaking the words of Shakespeare … as the words live on. As someone who has been attending Shakespeare plays for more than 30 years, I found it extremely moving. It’s one of those theatrical experiences where I just want to go back and see it again.
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Tonight I returned to the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre to see one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet. I guess by categorizing it as a favorite, I set the bar higher for my expectations. This production had some weaknesses for me that kept me from fully engaging, particularly in the first half. In the second half, where the tragedy really starts to build it got better.

The two things that bothered me were 1) it seemed that a lot of the peripheral characters really had the comic aspects ramped-up, making them more silly than I remember the play being, and 2) I didn’t feel a lot of chemistry between the Romeo and Juliet actors. It also seemed the relationship between Romeo and Juliet developed with even less build up than usual (which is usually fast).  Interestingly, as I read some reviews after the fact, the reviewers had exactly the opposite reaction feeling the chemistry was great and the some of the other actors parts were unique stand-outs. So the first half failed to land for me. After the intermission it improved as the focus was on the R&J story line. I was, however, bugged by the portrail of Romeo as a blubbering baby after he learns of his banishment. I know a bit of this is part of the story, but this seemed extreme and wimpy … but maybe the point being made was that he was still immature, which leads to the finale. Despite my misgivings, the end still gets me and always chokes me up, even as I felt somewhat distanced from this production up to that point.
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This evening I trekked back to the Angus Bowmer Theatre to see OSF’s production of Othello. As I’ve said before, among all Shakespeare’s tragedies, this one bothers me the most because ultimately a good guy is brought down by a bad guy through exploitation of his weaknesses. Nevertheless, this was a powerful production. The cast was stellar and it was great to see. The primary leads were particularly good. I’m glad I got to get this rescheduled because I would have hated to miss it. Interestingly, there were a significant number of empty seats, which I guess reinforces their exhortations about a number of cancellations due to the fires have caused them to lose a significant amount of money this summer.
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