Dachs Thoughts

After a nice dinner at Bob and Blanca’s, Bob, Blanca, their friend Jim, and I went over to see the first play in the Livermore Shakespeare Festival’s season, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a beautiful warm night to be outside at the vineyard seeing a wonderful production.

The stage here is very small, and the set is pretty minimal, but the costumes were good, and the acting was great. It was a very funny production, and the most comedic roles were done extremely well. The character of Bottom, who gets his head replaced with that of an ass, was hilarious with little donkey vocalizations. Even one of the apprentices, who was called in as an understudy of a main character after the intermission, did a good job in that role. A very top-notch production by this little home town theater company. A very good evening.
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It’s been 8 months since I’ve written any blog posts, which probably indicates a big drop in extracurricular fun. After a couple of months of marathon traveling for work, the summer theater season kind of snuck up on me. So I happily begin blogging again as I attended the first play in the 2017 CalShakes season, As You Like It.

After a couple of fairly cool days I feared we might be freezing on play night, but luckily it warmed up nicely and it was a very pleasant evening. I was joined by Jennifer, Bill and Andy. The play was very enjoyable although it didn’t blow my socks off. It picked up some good momentum as it got to the final act where all the confusions are resolved. They had one unusual twist. Whereas the original dukedom is usually fairly bland and people escape to the beautiful bucolic Arden Forest, this time the original setting was lush and green, and Arden was a stark urban landscape with the refugees eking out their new existence like homeless people. They were finding a new spiritual freedom, but the environment itself didn’t represent that on the surface. I thought it worked well. It was a nice evening to kick off the season, and a nice play to get back into the Shakespeare mood.
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On a cool fall evening, I saw the last play in CalShakes season, a very unconventional production of Othello. This was the first play directed by Eric Ting, the new Artistic Director, and probably foreshadows the nature of things to come.

The basic setting was that this was the play as given by actors sitting on a stage doing a run-through. An extremely minimalist dark grey stage with chairs in a circle, and almost all the actors were on stage during the entire play, dressed in street clothes, just sitting down when they weren’t in a scene. It also featured interludes where someone would break character and make some comments in a microphone at the corner of the stage, sometimes a politically incorrect joke, I guess to be provocative. The basic staging became OK if you think it gave you the chance to use your imagination even more than usual … and the acting was solid. But the interludes and other theatrical devices were just kind of weird and broke the flow of the drama. The most unusual thing was right before the last moments of the play, they stopped, went into a 10 min audience question and answer session and discussion of what people thought about the production; that was quite different.

Certainly a thought/discussion provoking production. I’m not sure it improved the story telling or the play, and it doesn’t really leave me super stoked to see next season … but we’ll see how it goes. The Winters’ joined me (Andy seemed to really like it), as well as Jeff and Heather (who bailed at the audience participation session). All-in-all a descent way to end a good season of theater.
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