Tonight I took BART and trekked into the city to see what will likely be my last play of the year, Hamlet at A.C.T. This is the 3rd production of Hamlet I’ve seen this season, maybe 3rd-and-a-half if you count Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I wouldn’t normally have gone, but this was a chance to see a play at A.C.T., where I’ve never been before, and also I had received an add that had a quote referring to the star, John Douglas Thompson, as “our greatest classical actor.” It’s a bit of a trip, but it was fun to go into the city, which I don’t do enough.
A.C.T.’s Geary Theater is beautiful. I was down in the orchestra section about 5 rows back in the center. The staging was fairly simple but effective. The acting seemed to really emphasize the diction of the language, so some of the story came out clearer. The lead, while a bit older than the typical Hamlet did a very good job. The production didn’t really grab me with any emotion at the end, but overall I liked it. It certainly didn’t bore me even though it’s the 3rd time I’ve seen this story in a few months. I’m glad I made the journey, but I’m ready for a bit of a rest from all the terrific plays I’ve seen this season.
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Tonight I saw the last play of this year’s 
Superb! This has been quite a week+ of wonderful plays at 
Tonight I saw a very enjoyable production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre. It was very funny and comical as expected. Falstaff, the supposed super-randy old man was played by a woman, K.T. Vogt. I’m always a bit skeptical of that to begin with, but she was very funny and carried it off. The production was infused with a lot of music, basically a lot of snippets of 80’s pop hits. It was both funny and fun and really added to the play.
Tonight in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre I saw an enjoyable musical, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It was raining lightly at the beginning of the evening, but it pretty much ended by the time the play started. The singer actors were great, and the fantasy costumes were very well done. The transition to the cursed castle was fun, as was seeing the inhabitants slowly becoming more transition to their inanimate objects. An enjoyable production for my first visit this summer to the Elizabethan.
Fantastic! This was the U.S. premiere of the play that came out of the film of Shakespeare in Love. This was a wonderful production. The story lovingly plays with words from Shakespeare’s plays. It’s very comedic and romantic, but also has some unhappy undertones. It also features the development of Romeo and Juliet as the play-within-the-play, and that brought in those elements of poignancy and sadness and tragedy. The cast was terrific and it was a very enjoyable play to watch. As a side note, I ended up sitting next to 
After two full days of wonderful productions of Shakespeare plays, I saw my first non-Shakespeare play, again in the Thomas Theatre. It was another modern Asian immigrant story, as was last years 
After a brief 3 1/2 hour break, this evening I returned to the Thomas Theatre, and saw 
This afternoon I saw a terrific production of Henry IV, Part 1 in the intimate Thomas Theatre at the 
The first play in my week of theater was a production of Julius Caesar, the second I’ve seen this summer. It was a more abstract staging than the more classical one put on by