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.
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.
I spent all day Saturday and Sunday at 
After two days, I was exhausted, crouching up and down trying to get shots and felt like I’d been working out. I was happy with a number of shots I came away with, but I could have been less timid working with the models. Something to learn more about in the future. A good approach was to assign us to identify some images and then to try and reproduce them. My favorite shot was inspired by an image I saw, but it’s very different too.