Dachs Thoughts

Tonight I saw this year’s San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s (Free Shakespeare in the Park) production in Pleasanton. It was The Winter’s Tale. It was actually very well done. The production was pretty much traditional, and the acting was solid. The second half, which takes place in Bohemia, featured lots of singing and dancing. Ironically, as it supposedly starts in Sicilia in the winter, the night was an unseasonably cool one for July, so it was fitting. I was joined on this occasion by Bob and Blanca who seemed to enjoy it too. This is going to be a play-heavy month, with two more next week, and CoSF in a few weeks.
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Today I saw the first play of the CalShakes season, an adapted version of Much Ado About Nothing. The gang included Andy and Bill as well as Doug who is back for the summer from Mississippi. I was a bit underwhelmed with the production. The adaptation featured an abridged version of the play framed within a larger story. The play starts peripheral to the aftermath of the wedding of Hero and Claudio, and the servants are cleaning up. They start talking about the back story of the wedding which turns into them acting out the original play, with a twist of some ladies’ parts played by men, and some men’s parts played by ladies. I’ve gotten a bit bored the last couple of years with the gimmick of gender switching of roles. The play within a story device made this a little less gimmicky, but I think the verbal sparing and the sharp language lacked some of the punch of a normal production. It was also quite brief (1:40), cutting out much of the constable comedy, which doesn’t usually work for me anyway.

It was overall a warm enjoyable evening getting back together with some of the old gang. I learned some things about the play I didn’t know during the grove lecture (e.g., multiple meanings for the play’s title). We’ll see how the rest of the season goes with the new Artistic Director.
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My Shakespeare season started early this year with my first trip to Berkeley Rep to see a fantastic production of Macbeth. This was my first trip to Berkeley Rep, and I was motivated by the fact that the play was starring Francis McDormand (from Fargo and Almost Perfect) and Conleth Hill (from Game of Thrones). It also included a couple of familiar faces from CalShakes, including James Carpenter. The acting was really outstanding. For better or worse, I was seated front row center, five feet from the stage, and I could really see the nuance of the acting. You know a play has got you when you catch yourself holding your breath.

The theater is not that large, and the stage fairly compact, but the staging was very effective. Some background image image effects were used with powerful results without being distracting. In one case only one character was at the front of the stage play-running towards the audience, with the background image being like a movie effect; with me being so close to the stage and him right in front of me, it was a very effective effect.

I used BART to go up there, and it was nice to visit downtown Berkeley again. I definitely am going to be following up with this theater company. Considering it’s the 400th birthday year for Shakespeare, this was a great way to start my season.
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This afternoon I picked up Bob and Blanca and we went over into the city to see the African-American Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet. This will certainly be my last Shakespeare play for this year. I had a little trepidation after last year’s production of The Tempest, but I kept an open mind.

Again, the staging was extremely minimal, the primary element of which was a balcony-like piece that could be rotated around for various uses, and at various times a bed and bench. But that wasn’t really an issue. Some nice aspects of the production were that they used very young actors (high school) to play the young leads. It also gave full speeches to secondary parts, which are often edited out. They also kept in the language that emphasized the rhyming poetic nature of the words. The downside of using such young actors was they really weren’t up to delivering the Shakespearean lines; but amazingly they did remember all their complicated lines quite well; they just lacked the maturity to understand the meaning of all the words as they delivered them. I could pick on a lot of little things, like ultimately distracting 70s background music, and seemingly out of context pictures projected up on the back of the stage, but ultimately it came together well. And the final post-climax scene was quite moving. I always love a good Romeo and Juliet, and this one, while not great, was enjoyable.
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