Dachs Thoughts

Superb! This has been quite a week+ of wonderful plays at OSF, and it ended with an outstanding production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was the longest play of this trip, but there’s a lot of story to pack into one play. Despite being long, and a cold night, it was a terrific evening. Catching Odysseus near the end of his epic journey home, we see many of the events as retellings of the tale. We see many of the events in flashback, then he finally gets to make it home, and kills all the ill mannered suitors of his wife. It was really well done, cleverly adapted, and the acting as usual was great. One particular scene stand out as Odysseus and his crew must pass the Sirens. They were a group of women all dressed in red sitting in a row of chairs in unison saying all sorts of things that men stereotypically love to hear from women. It was very funny.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad play at OSF, but sometimes there’s a range from just good or ok to a few that take your breath away. On this trip every play was really good. Every one was outstanding, and the trip ended with wonderful one.

Trailer

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.
Trailer

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 Goeffrey Kent and his wife, the actor/fight director I’ve seen in several Colorado Shakespeare Festival productions. The lead actress in this play was a friend of theirs, who’s also been in a number of the CoSF productions.
Trailer

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 Vietgone, but this one was from a Korean perspective. It was Hannah and the Dread Gazebo. It was comedic but ultimately very moving dealing with family and culture. It even got into the North/South Korea tensions, the DMZ, and had an appearance of the ghost of Kim Jong-il. I was very moved at the end, but not quite sure exactly why, except there was resolution of family connections and clarity of the character’s cultural history. The staging was clever and sparse, and they used the Thomas in a 3-sided configuration, at one point dropping down the wall of the 4th side to provide an interesting, surreal, place. A very enjoyable play.
Trailer