troisoiseaux

Joss Whedon's Artsy Modern Much Ado About Nothing is actually way more charming than I remember it being??? I saw it when it came out and apparently I enjoyed it at the time (my mom loves this movie, though, so she might be biased in remembering this) but I think the fact that the overall concept just feels soooo pretentious— it's filmed in black and white, at Whedon's house, with a cast of, basically, Whedon's friends, and has a very early-2010s boho-bougie vibe; very Anthropologie— and also, well, the Unfortunately, Joss Whedon of it all soured my memory of it. But, hey! Turns out it is in fact quite charming! Shakespeare's language feels completely natural in this cast's toned-down, conversational delivery - if you muted the movie, you wouldn't guess they were "heigh ho"- and "by my troth"-ing - and although I prefer my B'n'Bs less polished (maybe my biggest complaint is that Alexis Denisof's Benedick takes a solid -10 charisma hit when he shaves his beard) and more chaotic than this adaptation's, they did have some delightfully silly moments, such as Benedick doing pushups throughout the "Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner" conversation, and Beatrice (Amy Acker) falling down a flight of stairs in surprise when she overhears Hero and Ursula discussing Benedick's love for her. Clark Gregg as Leonato stole the show - his "funny goofy dad" vibes and his heel-turn when Hero is jilted and his confrontation of Claudio when Hero's name is cleared but they're still pretending she's dead were all *chef's kiss* - although honorable mentions go to the bumbling buddy-cop duo of Nathan Fillion's completely deadpan Dogberry and Tom Lenk's goofier Verges, and also to the random wedding photographer who kept taking pictures when Claudio objected at his own wedding.

Other notes/random thoughts: this adaptation made one of Don John's henchmen into his girlfriend and so had a certainly novel staging of Act 1, Scene 3, in that Don John's conversation with Conrade was literal pillow talk; this is also the only version of Much Ado I've ever seen where Leonato's line referring to Beatrice as "almost the copy of" Hero is actually accurate.

Watched Underdog: the Other Other Bronte (National Theatre, 2024), which was especially interesting to watch with osprey_archer's review in mind because I was coming at it from a completely different background: I love Jane Eyre, but I'm otherwise a total casual when it comes to the Brontës - it's only a slight exaggeration to say any preconception I had was just that one Hark! A Vagrant comic - and so I was perhaps more open to being sold on Underdog's take on the Brontë sisters and their respective literary legacies. It's also just a very fun play to watch! Great energy from the main actresses, clever use of a small ensemble cast playing both bit parts and Greek chorus and of weaving scenes from the Brontës' works into the narrative about their lives, and very fun effects. (I liked the one where, when the sisters send their first works off to publishers, they put their manuscripts into a basket that's pulled up out of view, only for the rejection letters to literally rain down.) What Osprey's review had not prepared me for was to be emotionally wrecked by the last ten minutes or so: ( ... )

Watched As You Like It (National Theatre, 2016), which was charming. I've seen this play before, but even beyond the fact that particular production was a Beatles jukebox musical, it was cool to see what the two stagings did differently. The 2023 STC production tried to make it make sense by grounding it in a particular time (1960s) and place, while this production was a very vibes-based staging: for example, the 2023 one played Duke Frederick's court as a sleazy Vegas club with a wrestling show for entertainment/profit; this production also went the obvious WWE-style wrestling route for Orlando's fight with Charles the Wrestler, but set it inexplicably in the middle of an open-plan office, because why not. The set was very cool! When the action shifted from the court to the forest of Arden, the orderly rows of desks and chairs became a giant's mobile of furniture hanging from the ceiling. Celia stole the show in this one - with the melancholy Jaques as a close second, particularly for his dramatic "kill me now" interpretative dance during Amiens' song - but I was also surprised and delighted to recognize some of the actors in smaller roles: Fra Fee (one of the revolutionaries in 2012 Les Mis) as one of Duke Senior's courtiers-in-exile and Siobhán McSweeney (Sister Michael in Derry Girls) as the shepherdess Audrey (whose courtship by Touchstone is, I must say, much cuter when done as a duet of the Beatles' "When I'm 64").

Watched Present Laughter (Old Vic, 2019) with Andrew Scott as a flamboyant light comedy actor in the 1930s careening towards a mid-life crisis and a love triangle heptagon, which is in fact a great role for Scott, who does "guy trying to mask that he's achingly lonely" very well. (Interesting to watch this one after Vanya, since there's some similar... core to Scott's version of this character, Garry, and his Ivan.) This production genderswapped a couple of characters (and, presumably, some of the references to Garry's past flings?) to make it queerer: in the original, both Garry and his manager Morris have an affair with Joanna, the wife of Garry's producer Henry; here, Joanna is Joe and Henry is Helen (whose own extramarital flings, as referenced, are not genderswapped, and who is styled with shades of Dorothy Arzner).

Rewrite/update of my 2019 round-up of all the Shakespeare plays I've seen, mostly for my own personal reference:

( Seen live )

( Seen filmed )

I don't know if I've ever fallen quite so hard for a specific production of a play I didn't already have strong feelings about as the STC's Comedy of Errors, but I ended up seeing it three times. This production turned the comedic sidekicks into main characters by casting Alex Brightman and David Fynn (who both played the lead role in the School of Rock musical, on Broadway and the West End, respectively) as long-lost twins Dromio and Dromio, servants of long-lost twins Antipholus and Antipholus. It's also a musical, and is apparently set in the '90s, although the set/costume design is sort of a grab bag of aesthetics. (You can get a sense here.)

This turned out to be a great show to see multiple times, because I saw a slightly different cast each time— the second night I went had the understudy for both Dromios covering for Brightman as Dromio of Syracuse, and the third had the Antipholi's understudy as Antipholus of Syracuse. (Plus trickle-down shifts in the ensemble parts, as the understudies' understudies stepped in.) Even aside from that, the performances were noticeably different each time: a lot of ad-libbing and improvised physical comedy bits, and last night I noticed that both Brightman and Fynn played some scenes differently than they had in the previous show(s).

This show was very much designed around Brightman and Fynn— who are both phenomenal physical comedians, and look enough alike that between the costuming, slight-of-hand staging, and playing their roles with uncannily similar mannerisms, the first time I saw this it took me fully until Act 2 to figure out how to tell them apart, and by that point I'd long since lost track of which Dromio was paired with which Antipholus— but honestly, the entire cast is fantastic. Just 10/10 comedic timing all around, but especially Shayvawn Webster, who plays Antipholus of Ephesus' long-suffering wife Adriana. I also think one of the things that charmed me so much about this show is how the cast clearly has a lot of fun performing it??

Last night's performance had a post-show discussion with some of the ensemble cast and someone from the production team, so I learned some fun details from that:

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Saw The Tempest at the Round House Theater, which was SO COOL. Seeing this show has been a long time coming: I had seen photos of director Aaron Posner and magician Teller's co-produced Tempest online years ago (2015?), so I was over the moon when I discovered it was coming to DC, and then I had to wait for two years to even get tickets, because the pandemic happened. (The venue also ended up being moved from the Folger to the Round House, in the meantime.) It was absolutely worth the wait.

Everything about this play was the literal coolest thing I have seen on a stage, and unfortunately, I am not going to be able to explain it in a way that does it justice; this video, from a prior staging of this production in Chicago, gives a suggestion of the overall vibe, and you can see production photos from the Round House staging here, but believe me when I say it was so much cooler in person. The set evokes the the deck of a steamboat, with touches reminiscent of both the ocean and a vaudevillian stage; as you can see in the video, there was a group of musicians on the "top deck," providing both songs and sound effects. The overall aesthetic was very steampunk, with an extra shot of surrealist Victoriana— the spirits of the island looked like the anthropomorphic animals from a Victorian Christmas card, but like, super unsettling. Caliban was played by two actors who moved together, kind of like Chinese lion dancers, but again, way more weird! Ariel was so freakin' cool, styled with albino-pale skin and white hair and contact lenses that made his eyes all white except for the pupils, and did card tricks the way that people talk with their hands. THERE WERE MAGIC TRICKS.

I studied The Tempest in a literature class I took in undergrad, but actually seeing the play performed made it click into place for me in a way that just reading it - and reading Margaret Atwood's retelling, Hag-Seed - hadn't. In that class, we mostly discussed the play in the context of colonialism, and it was interesting to watch with that in the back of my mind, especially in the earlyish scenes that present the shipwrecked characters' different visions for the island and in their interactions with Caliban. I might go back and dig into my notes from that class, actually; I know I wrote an essay on one of the scenes with Ferdinand and Miranda, and I'm curious to see what I think of it now, because that was one of the things that actually seeing the play performed illuminated for me— just reading the text, I was inclined to roll my eyes - like, okay, sure, Miranda grew up on a deserted island and just saw a young human man for the first time, but what's Ferdinand's excuse, ya weirdo? - but when it's two people in front of you, it makes sense! And just, in general... okay, look, this is going to sound really dumb, as I type it out, but, the fact that the characters are people who have relationships with each other?? Knowing that Prospero was betrayed by his brother is one thing; seeing the reunion play out is another. There was one moment, slipped into the scene where Prospero gives his blessing to Miranda and Ferdinand, where Prospero and Miranda do a levitation trick— and, I can't fully explain it, but there was something in the way that he took her hand, or in the way that she smiled as she got into her place, that spoke volumes about the story of a father and daughter learning to do magic on the island where they'd been shipwrecked. Maybe acting was the real magic all along??

Gonzalo and Stephano were both cast as women, and the language of the play was tailored in the former case but not the latter. In terms of Gonzalo, I found myself thinking of the Folger's Henry IV from a few years ago, which had a female Earl of Worcester, and this casting had an interesting impact on the vibe of some scenes— to borrow from my own post, "being kicked out of the court discussions by King Henry reads differently when she was the only woman present in a room full of men, as does the scene where she's trying to tell Hotspur about her plan but he keeps interrupting her to pitch a fit about how he was treated by the king." (x) Here, similarly, Gonzalo is a character whose attempts to look on the bright side are dismissed as frivolous by the king's other counselors, and who had taken pity on Prospero and Miranda when the others did not, but wasn't brave enough to try and stop the murder plan outright— it reads differently when Gonzalo is a woman with a political position to maintain, and asshole colleagues to deal with. (The sense of deja vu wasn't just in my head: when I got home, I compared playbills, and it actually was the same actress, Naomi Jacobson, in both roles.) In Stephano's case, they kept Caliban's references to the character as a "man" and a future "king" of the island, and Stephano leaned into the mistake by hamming it up, like, "yes! I am a man! watch me do manly things, like spitting!"

One thing that's been on my mind since I left the theater is a comparison between Ariel and Puck— both fairy servants, but such different characters?? The obvious difference, of course, is that Ariel is a prisoner, and not so much a servant as enslaved, but I think it also matters that Ariel is the servant of a human rather than a fairy king. I keep thinking of Ariel's line about how he would feel pity, if he were human ("[I]f you now beheld them, your affections would become tender" / "Dost thou think so, spirit?" / "Mine would, sir, were I human"), both on its own and in conjunction with "Do you love me, master? No?"......I may come up with more coherent thoughts about this, at some point, but right now I'm just, like, jennyslateNASAscream.jpg about it.

...I think The Tempest might be my second-favorite Shakespeare play, now. It's never going to beat Hamlet, though, sorry.

DC's Shakespeare Theater Company, my beloved! Last night, I saw their production of Much Ado About Nothing set at a modern cable news station, which isn't the wildest recontextualization of a Shakespeare play I've seen (that prize still goes to "Merry Wives of Windsor as a 70s sitcom," which was actually fantastic) but is certainly a combination of words.

Overall, it was a fun production! The cable newsroom concept was played really cleverly, with some added-in scenes of squabbling co-hosts Benedick and Beatrice "on air," delivering breaking news— the death of the king of Denmark ("no word yet on plans for his son's coronation"), a rash of stabbings in Verona, "climate activists in Scotland up in arms after discovering that Birnam Wood has been uprooted"— and even Claudio, reporting on the weather, quoted other Shakespeare plays (e.g., "the rain it raineth every day"). There was a slickness to this Benedick and Beatrice— as compared to, say, the chaos of David Tennant's and Catherine Tate's— that I didn't know what to think of, at first, but it actually worked well with the production's broad slapstick humor and when Beatrice, heretofore unflappable even when facing an unexpected proposal or climbing out of a trash bin, delivered "I would eat his heart in the marketplace" in a tone that can only be described as roared, the audience burst into applause.

Much Ado is just... such a weird play, narratively. The tonal whiplash! I always forget that Benedick and Beatrice actually confess their love halfway through the play, since it's followed up immediately with "I need you to kill your best friend for what he did to my cousin." Pretty much everything that isn't B. & B. matching wits (or, I suppose, Dogberry & co., here the enthusiastic if incompetent studio security) sits oddly in a modern setting. I liked what they did with Don John, though— burdened with an ankle monitor and an embarrassing public video of his arrest, and reduced to fetching his brother's coffee, his motivation for screwing with everyone out of sheer boredom actually made a twisted kind of sense.

While Macbeth probably isn't the weirdest Shakespeare play to see with your mom on mother's day, it's... definitely up there. (This wasn't planned; the tickets were actually a birthday/Christmas gift from my parents.) This was also one of the odder, if not the oddest, stagings of a Shakespeare play that I've ever seen...? Where do I even begin.

So, this is the Macbeth at the Longacre Theater, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. It also featured Amber Gray (of Hadestown and The Great Comet fame) as Banquo— which was rather an odd bit of genderbent/-blind casting, since by having the witches declare that Macbeth will be king, but Banquo will be the mother of kings... look. There's a much more obvious interpretation here that, while troubling for Lady M., would not necessitate Macbeth jumping straight to murder...? So I found that a bit of a staging-induced plot hole (akin to the time I saw a modern-setting Romeo & Juliet and found the ending rather undermined by my brain yelling why can't she just text him???).

The production itself was very stripped-down— minimalist set, costumes that were just, like, normal clothes and went largely unchanged even as actors swapped between characters (Macbeth and Lady M. were both more styled/got more costume changes, but not that much more), a (purposeful?) sense of DIY to a lot of the lighting and smoke effects. A lot of the acting was, uhh, minimalist as well (with some notable exceptions, which I will discuss later, so I can end this on a positive note). Things got unexpectedly flashy for the final battle, which was not necessarily an improvement. For most of the play, the most notable setpiece was a table with a working(?) hot plate, which was used by various characters throughout the play, from the witches to Macduff's wife.

I was trying to write this in a fairly coherent narrative, but dear readers, I need to talk about the soup. The soup?, I hear you ask. I... don't remember there being soup in Macbeth? You would be correct! Regardless, all the weirdest stuff in this production involved soup.

( Warning for gore )

To end on a positive note: Ruth Negga was AMAZING as Lady Macbeth. The actor who played Macduff did an incredible job with the second half of Act 4, Scene 3. The porter scene was creatively done; they took the scene's inherent weirdness and ran with it. Daniel Craig played post-second-witch-encounter Macbeth very well: simultaneously overconfident and twitchily paranoid. (On a related note, my mom, and apparently also the NY Times, noticed shades of Putin in the way Craig's Macbeth was styled, held himself, etc.) It was also just really cool to see live theater again!!

tl;dr

Last night, I watched the Bridge Theatre's 2019 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (courtesy of National Theatre Live At Home) with Gwendoline Christie as Titania, which I was very much looking forward to seeing, although it turns out this staging swapped Oberon's and Titania's roles so technically it was Gwendoline Christie as Oberon, which turned out to be even better!

As you can probably guess from that, this production was WILD. It had a stage made up of moving platforms! Aerial acrobatics! Bottom and Oberon dancing to Beyoncé!

( Read more... )

This production is SO fun to watch; I cannot emphasize enough how much fun it is. It's on YouTube until July 2!

Saw Henry IV, Part I at the Folger Theater last night! This time, I did some pre-show Googling of the plot and historical context, which helped, but I think it would have been easier than Richard III to follow regardless— for one thing, there were fewer people to keep track of, but also, I feel like I didn't need to know the historical context to follow the actual drama of the play? (I mean, arguably all the context one needs to follow Richard III is that he's trying to kill everyone who stands between him and the throne, but there's also a whole complicated web of alliances and rivalries going on there that gets confusing.)

The thing that appealed to me about Henry IV is that the personal felt as, or more, important than the political. Like, Prince Hal feeling torn between his role as his father's heir and the fun of slumming it with Falstaff & co. is Symbolic of the inherent incompatibility between Being A King and having a normal life, or whatever, but it's also the instantly recognizable, understandable - relatable, even? - drama of a young man feeling caught in a zero-sum situation, with his father's high expectations - which he wants to live up to but fears he won't - on one side, and on the other, a father figure who's sympathetic and permissive and fun and expresses appreciation for him in a way his real dad doesn't, but isn't a good influence.

I liked Hotspur better than Prince Hal, although if I had to pick the better actor, I'd probably say the other way around. I'm still not entirely sure what I think of Falstaff, although the actor who played him was fantastic. I was especially struck by the scene where he and Hal take turns play-acting as King Henry, using it as a mask for expressing cruel truths (in Hal's case) and vulnerability (in Falstaff's).

I'd only been to the Folger once before, so I'd forgotten how small the theater is. It's very intimate! The set was minimalist - the main set piece was the throne, which could be turned over to double as a table, bed, etc. as needed - but big on chrome and neon. I couldn't pin down the aesthetics of the play in terms of time or cultural context: Henry's soldiers wore camo pants and quilted jerkins; Hal's Eastcheap friends dressed in a cross between ren faire casual and post-apocalyptic chic.

The Earl of Worcester was genderswapped, which made for some fascinating scene dynamics. Being kicked out of the court discussions by King Henry reads differently when she was the only woman present in a room full of men, as does the scene where she's trying to tell Hotspur about her plan but he keeps interrupting her to pitch a fit about how he was treated by the king.

The most fascinating dynamic in the play, for me, was the relationship between Edmund Mortimer and his wife— they only get one scene together, but it gives a glimpse into a marriage between two people who can't even speak the same language but appear to genuinely care for each other; I want to know so much more about both of them.

I was surprised but delighted by the fact Owen Glendower - yes, that Owen Glendower - was a character in this! Also, to realize this play must be where "by Shrewsbury clock" comes from? Not to mention about half of any given list of Shakespearean insults.

I’ve been spiraling about David Tennant slightly less than I have about Michael Sheen since seeing them both in Good Omens only by virtue of the fact I have a steady foundation of adoring David Tennant since I was 14-15 to keep me from completely hitting rock bottom, so I picked up my every-episode-in-chronological-order of post-2005 Doctor Who watch where I left off: season 3, ep. 4 and 5, a two-episode storyline where the Doctor and Martha travel to 1930s NYC to stop the Daleks from using the newly-built Empire State Building to turn everybody else into Daleks.

On one hand, I feel like this arc was actually pretty serious and genuinely moving – the commentary on inequality and the ep. 4 plotline about how people were disappearing from Hooverville, because the Daleks’ human agent was able to prey on their desperation for work and the police didn’t care about poor people going missing; the dalek-human hybrids’ ability to feel emotions and question orders; the Doctor working to save the last of the dalek's slaves because “there’s been enough death today. Brand new creatures, wise old men and age old enemies!”, etc. – but. BUT. It also featured baby Andrew Garfield with a Southern accent distinctly à la Forrest Gump and just generally, there was something amusingly disorienting about watching a story set in 1930s New York created by a British TV show with all British actors. There was a whole grab bag of emotions here, is what I’m saying.

This past week, I also watched the 2011 Wyndham Theater production of Much Ado About Nothing starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, which is available on YouTube (act 1, act 2.) It’s every bit as enjoyable as the Tennant-and-Tate casting suggests; the best possible description of their vibe in this production is a post I saw on Tumblr that described Tennant’s Benedick and Tate’s Beatrice as “two Kinsey 5s making it work.” Tennant also gets to use his Scottish accent, which is definitely a plus.

( Assorted thoughts )