Tonight I saw the last play of this year’s CalShakes season, Measure for Measure. I hadn’t seen this play in a long time, and this was a pretty good production. It was a pleasant evening for almost October, and I was on my own this time. Due to some scheduling issues Bill and Andy had switched nights. My seats were also double booked by a Chevron group, but it all worked out ok. Interestingly, I also met an older retired guy who was there with his wife, who’d been coming for decades, and who had just been up in Ashland, and it turns out he had worked at the Lab. He then introduced me to another retired Lab guy who had also been on assignment in Washington. Small world.
The play is a bit of a morality play, or about being too moral without humility and mercy. It was done in partnership with Santa Cruz Shakespeare. I enjoyed it and am a bit sad for the season to be ending. I managed to cram one more Shakespeare into this year, but it’s still a few weeks off in SF.
154
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 
After my adventurous weekend, on Labor Day I headed back north, again on the Coast Starlight. This time went a bit smoother schedule-wise. Interestingly I ended up sitting with a young guy (a software product developer) who was on a photography travel adventure. He was learning and exploring still and video. He had gotten himself a Nikon D750 with a nice lens, and also had a drone, and was planning on traveling around trying to develop some skills and perhaps a concept. He jumped out at every leg-stretch stop and launched his drone trying to get some shots. It was interesting to see his just-jump-in and try it attitude.