All You Need To Know About The Two Gentlemen Of Verona

Today the Royal Shakespeare company is live-broadcasting its current production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona! Not familiar with the play? No worries! I've got you covered. 

The comedies always seem so much more complicated than the tragedies, don't they?

If you've seen Shakespeare in Love, you know more about The Two Gentlemen of Verona than you think you do. The bit in the beginning with Queen Elizabeth laughing at the dog on stage? That's Crab, from Two Gents. The "What light is light if Silvia be not seen?" speech that Viola gives at her audition? That's one of Valentine's speeches, from Two Gents. Comedy, love, and a bit with a dog. 

Check here to see when/where the RSC's Two Gents broadcast will be playing near you! 

(Also, my apologies for not posting anything yesterday. I was busy lying on the couch, recovering from a rock-climbing road trip. It turns out it's very hard to get anything done while lying on the couch.)

The 2014 Stratford Festival: The Musicals

I was intending to have the rest of my Stratford Festival season reviews done by today, but I only had time to do the musicals. Let's start with Man of La Mancha, a musical based on the life of Miguel de Cervantes and his famous novel, Don Quixote. At the end of the show, the leading lady, Aldonza, who has basically spent most of the last two hours being angry, ground into the dirt, and angry that she is being ground into the dirt, finally embraces the new identity that Don Quixote has given her. It's quite a powerful moment, and when I saw it at Stratford, this happened:

Now, I've seen Man of La Mancha several times before, and, as a cynical and inherently frivolous person, I must confess that it's not my favorite musical. However, it is very effectively designed to push people's emotion buttons, and one can't argue with an entire theatre of people who have clearly been profoundly moved by it, especially the gentlemen behind me who felt the need to audibly praise Aldonza's moment of self-actualization at the end. 

Crazy For You, a musical written around some of Geroge and Ira Gershwin's best songs, is much more my style - totally frivolous with a ludicrous plot, lots of catchy songs and fantastic dance numbers. Stratford does this sort of thing very well, especially with director/choreographer Donna Feore at the helm. If any show rivaled the sheer, unbridled joy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was this one. The definition of a toe-tapper. 

I will be back on Monday, although Monday's comic might be a bit late as I am embarking on a weekend road trip to go rock climbing with some friends. I might be posting sporadic updates on Twitter, if you feel like cyber-stalking me. If not, I'll see you on Monday! Have a simply lovely weekend. 

The 2014 Stratford Festival: The Plays, part 1

In my last post I outlined some of the fun adventures I had at the Stratford Festival this year. Today I'm going to take a closer look at four of the Shakespeare productions I saw, starting with King Lear, starring Colm Feore. 

I am a very technically-focused and analytical theatre-goer, so I very rarely lose myself entirely in a play. This doesn't diminish my enjoyment (in fact, I think it enhances it) but it does mean I am rarely moved to tears by what I see on stage. And I'm not going to go so far as to say Feore's Lear made me cry, but there was definitely something in the air that made my eyes a bit itchy.

If I am slow to cry, I am quick to laugh, especially when an actor finds humor in a line or situation that I otherwise would never have considered humorous. The cast of King John, especially Graham Abbey's wry and swaggering Bastard, managed to unearth every latent laugh in what, on the surface anyways, appears to be a somewhat dour history play. I enjoyed myself tremendously, much more than I had anticipated. 

The joy of going to a repertory company like the Stratford Festival for numerous years is that you see each actor in numerous different roles, and become familiar with different facets of their talent and stage presence. One of things that has always enamored Geraint Wyn Davies to me is his propensity to utilize his native Welsh accent. (As a proud, if somewhat diluted 1/32nd Welsh patriot, I am particularly susceptible to Welsh accents.) I hasten to point out that Mr. Wyn Davies's excellent Antony showed few signs of hailing from across the Severn... but I kind of wish he had. 

Director Chris Abraham's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream could have been expressly designed to push every single button possessed by Shakespearean purists. It plays with the text, adding lines to establish a framing device setting the play as an entertainment put on to celebrate the wedding of a gay couple. Lysander is played by a woman and as a woman, making Hermia's father's objection to his daughter's marriage a comment on marriage equality. Titania is played as a woman, but by one of two rather muscular men.

There are cell phones, pop songs, food fights, sight gags, and an on-stage pond that numerous people fall into. It's cluttered and overwhelming and OH MY GOODNESS IT IS SO MUCH FUN. I have never been a particular fan of A Midsummer Night's Dream, apart from the Pyramus and Thisbe bit, but this production instantly won a place in my heart. It is so full of joy, so full of fun, and is such an open celebration of love that, appropriately enough, I fell in love with it.

If you want "traditional" Shakespeare (whatever that might be), this is probably not the production for you. But if you want A LOT OF PURE, UNADULTERATED FUN wrapped up in a Shakespeare-shaped package, I can't think of a better thing to do than to see this show. 

.....

Is that enough gushing for now? Check back on Friday when I'll take a look at some of the non-Shakespearean productions. Also, take a look at my other Stratford Festival comics! 

The 2014 Stratford Festival: My Experience

I'm back from the Stratford Festival! Wow, those are six of the saddest words in my vocabulary. As anyone who followed my adventures on Twitter can attest, I had a simply marvelous time. Here are the comics I posted on various social media thingummys last week, with added commentary:

I love walking along the river in Stratford. Appropriately enough, it is called the River Avon, and, also appropriately enough, it is full of swans. And ducks. And geese. And seagulls. One of my favorite things to do is to find people who are engaged in feeding the birds and watching the subsequent swarming and panicked retreat. 

Right before the first show of my season (The Beaux' Stratagem), the Festival's director of communications, David Prosser, invited me to the administrative offices up to say hello. He treated me to refreshments on the green room patio. While we were chatting I saw several of my most revered Stratford actors appear on the patio, people whose work I have adored from afar (or at least from Row H) for decades. Naturally, as is my wont in such situations, I tried my best to pretend they were not there.

I'm such an idiot. 

This marked the halfway point in my Stratford sojourn. Let me just go through them one by one....

1. The Festival copy machines looks pretty much like any other copy machines. But imagine the cool stuff they get to copy!

2. Going to Stratford is like having a free licence to buy any Shakespeare-related books I can get my hands on, either from the excellent Fanfare Books downtown, or from the Festival's various theatre stores.

3. Having communicated with the estimable Ladies of Angiers on Twitter, I finally plucked up the courage to go to the stage door and meet Actual Actors in person. To my relief, surprise, and delight, they turned out to be wonderfully warm ans generous people, and were very patient to put up with my endless gushing. On this occasion the third Lady of Angiers had scarpered off before I reached the door, but I caught her later on in my visit.

4. The jelly bean assault happened halfway through a production of Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which cast members romped up and down the aisles, hurling packets of jelly beans into the audience with great force and accuracy.

5. Appropriately enough, the skies opened up on the day I saw King Lear. I got drenched once, while fetching lunch from York Street Kitchen, and then, after a change of clothes, got partially drenched again while walking to the theatre. I had wet socks through all of the first act.

6. During the same performance of King Lear, one of those "live theatre" things happened and a speaker went haywire, filling the auditorium with static. It was the scene when Lear is confronting Regan and Goneril right before rushing out into the building storm, so for a while the audience wondered if it was just very poor sound design. Fortunately it was only a few minutes before intermission. The actors soldiered bravely on, not batting an eye or missing a beat, and the techies fixed the issue during intermission.

I think this comic best sums up my relationship with theatre. I'm a very analytical and self-aware theatre-goer, with the result that I hardly ever cry during performances. However, I often get itchy-eyed after a particularly good show, when I realize that I will never, ever see it and experience it again

This season's A Midsummer Night's Dream was such a fantastic show, so fun, vivacious, and brimming of joy, life and happiness, that it made me extremely miserable for the rest of the day. That's just about the highest praise I can have for a show.

In recent years the Stratford Festival has organized a season-long Forum with numerous theatre-related events, including question and answer sessions with actors, a variety of workshops and demonstrations, and readings of plays both new and old. The result is that I spent 80% of my waking hours in Stratford sitting and watching fantastic performances, and the other 20% rushing from one performance to another. It's hard work, going to the theatre, but somebody's got to do it. 

This was probably one of the best Stratford Festival seasons that I can remember. It was so good that this next week is bound to be totally miserable for me as I suffer theatre withdrawal. 

Special thanks to all the actors who took the time to chat with me at the stage door, especially Brigit Wilson, Karack Osborn, Carmen Grant and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, with whom I've exchanged random tweets and about ten minutes of real-life conversation, which I'm pretty sure makes us Best Friends Forever in this day and age.  Also, thanks to Scott Wentworth and Seana McKenna, for putting up with my starry-eyed gushing when I finally did meet them. Cheers especially to the Tom Patterson Theatre cast, most of whom had to put up with me ambushing them outside the stage door and garbling incoherent praise at them when I'm sure they'd much rather have been elsewhere.

Stop by again on Wednesday, when I'll be reviewing the plays themselves in more depth. 

A Valid Question

"What about going home? Going home sounds like a feasible option."

'I'm spending most of next week at the Stratford Festival. In order to decompress (as well as get caught up on several massively overdue projects - I'm hoping the two are not mutually incompatible), I will not be posting new comics here next week. However, I'm planning on uploading random sketches and observations to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, so if you're not following me on one or the other already, this is a good time to do so. 

Have a good week! I'll be back on August 25th, simultaneously recharged by a week of excellent theatre and disconsolate that it is over. 

Theatre Withdrawal

This has been my last seven days...

The great thing about going to theatre festivals for an extended period of time is that you can totally immerse yourself in the theatre-going experience. The bad thing about going to theatre festivals for an extended period of time is that, eventually, you have to leave and return to the real world. This is never a pleasant experience.

Fortunately I only have one week of real world to tolerate before I escape to the Shaw and Stratford theatre festivals. Watch out, Canada, I'm coming for you!

The Ohio Light Opera in 3 Panels, part 2

I have just returned from my annual jaunt to the Ohio Light Opera. Last Friday I posted three-panel summaries of the first three plays I saw there, and today I am inflicting four more of them on you.

Everybody knows My Fair Lady, right? Right?

This is possibly the weirdest and most hysterical operetta I have ever seen - and I've seen a lot of weird operettas. Composed by Victor Herbert, the first act is a pretty disjointed collection of comic scenes and songs. However, the real pay-off is in the second act, when, for no apparent reason, the entire cast puts on a half-hour spoof of Wagnerian grand opera, complete with magic swan, ponderously self-important music, and totally inane lyrics. 

Take it from me: you haven't truly lived until you've seen an entire operatic chorus bellow "TAN TA RA TA TA TA TA BING BING!" at full volume. 

That was one of the best half hours of my life. I am in mourning now, because I will, in all probability, never again see such a masterclass in egregious over-acting again in my lifetime. It was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. 

You might have seen the 1953 film version of this musical, starring Ethel Merman. If you haven't you ought to. It's a lot of fun, and has some classic Irving Berlin tunes in it, such as "The Hostess with the Mostes'" and "You're Just In Love". 

Incidentally, the alternate version of this strip is as follows:

1. Kenneth sings "It's a lovely day today".

2. Kenneth sings "It's a lovely day today" again.

3. Kenneth sings "It's a lovely day today" and the audience members have to have the tune forcibly removed from their ears.

Seriously, the guy will not stop singing that song. 

With music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse, this prime example of early American musical theatre relies heavily on a non-stop stampede of hijinks, misunderstandings and mistaken identities. You know... like most Shakespearean comedies.

Anyways, if you're in the Midwest I highly encourage you to check out the Ohio Light Opera next summer. Because it's SO MUCH FUN.

The Ohio Light Opera in 3 Panels, part 1

I'm on vacation this week, partying it up in Wooster, OH at the Ohio Light Opera! As I've mentioned before, I am a lifelong fan of light opera in (almost) all its forms, and I'm having a grand time indulging in a solid week of abnormal people singing very loudly about things that normal people wouldn't sing loudly about.

For those of you unfamiliar with light opera, I am summarizing this season's performances in my now-traditional three-panel mode. 

Emmerich Kalman's Der Kleine König  tends to take itself a bit seriously for my tastes, and is sadly lacking in the glorious Kalman gypsy csardas that we all expect from him, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that the main plot point involves an opera singer attempting to assisinate the King of Portugal with a bomb hidden in a bouquet of roses. I mean... how awesome is that?

I had this entirety of The Pirates of Penzance memorized when I was about four years old, and would run around the house singing "WITH CAT-LIKE TREAD" over and over again. Surprisingly, I was not disowned.  I eventually fulfilled my childhood ambition to be a pirate by sneaking into the underpopulated men's chorus of my college's Gilbert and Sullivan society's production, where I sported the most charming penciled-on piratical beard ever seen on stage.

Seriously, I am in love with this show. It was, I believe, the first thing I ever saw in a theatre, at the tender age of three. I then watched the Covent Garden video of the gala performance with Kiri Te Kenawa over and over and over again. To this day, the only German phrases I know come directly from the libretto of Die Fledermaus.

Tune in again on Monday, when I will inflict four more three-panel operetta summaries on you! But just you wait. They'll be worth it...