Category: Geeklet Stories

Review: HAIR at the Seacoast Rep, Portsmouth, NH

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Take a trip with me. It’s gonna be a long one, but hopefully worth it. And there’s even plenty of Shakespeare.

I was born in 1969, so I’m not exactly “Woodstock” age. But that didn’t stop me from loving that era. My college years were spent with a lot of long hair and tie-dye (but not any drugs, in case anybody thinks that’s implied). Somewhere along the line I found HAIR, I can’t remember. I probably recognized the “What A Piece of Work Is Man” song then, but I don’t think I knew how much Shakespeare was in there.

A few years out of college, my girlfriend (whose pet name was “Starshine”) and I travel to DC at my friend’s invitation to go see HAIR live for the first time. After a microphone-wielding hippie is surprised to discover that we know the words to “Good Morning, Starshine,” we’re pulled up on stage to dance with the tribe. Core memory locked.

Fast forward a few years. I have taken myself away for the weekend, traveling to see two shows – King Lear and HAIR. The girl from the previous story is long gone, but I’m dating someone new who will ultimately become my wife. She joins me for HAIR. Hey, we’d just started dating; I wasn’t going to make her sit through King Lear with me so soon (that’d come almost 20 years later).

Years go by, we get married and have kids. I’ll tell you something about when you have kids. You will sing lullabies. You will also get sick of singing the same songs repeatedly, so you will sometimes sing anything you know all the words to. Do you know what I sang to my kids? “Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair….” But also, “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason….” because if you didn’t know, that entire speech is set to music in the show. Hey, I thought, they’re too young to understand the words. But they’re going to end up memorizing it. And one day, they’ll understand.

I have a very specific memory of my 3yr old son demanding that I sing Shakespeare one night. When I started to sing “What a piece of work is man,” he stopped me and demanded that I sing Shakespeare, not Hamlet. He wanted Sonnet 18. Who thinks I’m kidding?

It’s not a stretch to say that my children have grown up literally since birth sharing my love for Shakespeare due very much to the musical HAIR. This show holds a very special place in my heart. It represents both my youth and my journey to parenthood, all set literally to the tune of Shakespeare.

And today, we came full circle as I took them to see the show for the first time at the Seacoast Rep in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I tried very hard on the hour ride to the theatre not to bore them by talking their ears off. “Remember how I used to sing you what a piece of work is man? That’s from this show. I mean, well, it’s from Hamlet, obviously, but it’s set to music because of this show.”

Photos were absolutely not allowed during the show (for obvious reasons if you know the show). So with permission, I grabbed a few of the set before the show began.
I love the Tarot card.
I think one of my daughters has that tapestry.

Tears of joy rose in my eyes as we sat down to a 30-year flashback. Only now could I experience it with my kids. I squeezed my wife’s hand and said, “This is my youth. I am so very happy right now.”

I told my daughter after the show that openings are everything to me. I have heard “Two households, both alike in dignity” a thousand times. But still, every single time I hear it live? Lightning bolts up the spine. It’s like that first jolt that tells you the roller coaster has started. So it is with the opening bars of “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius…” I am instantly transported.

I can’t and won’t review the whole show here because it’s not a Shakespeare show. There is, however, a lot of Shakespeare in it, so I think I’m justified in talking about it. Let me hit the highlights:

  • During a hallucination sequence where Abraham Lincoln comes out, followed by John Wilkes Booth, Booth is dressed as Hamlet. He’s literally carrying a skull. I have no idea if this is usually how it’s played (I can’t remember ever seeing it before) or how many people in the audience get that reference, but I absolutely loved it.
  • I wish I had a picture to justify this next one. Work with me for a second. This show had circus acrobatics during the slower songs. There were aerial silks and the hoop. I wish I knew if it had a different name. The hoop is on the ground, and somebody (sometimes two somebodies) performs inside it. Well, during the What A Piece of Work Is Man song, the aerialist(?) who’s been working the hoop comes out in a flesh-colored speedo and poses, and I think, “Oh, shit, that’s Vitruvian Man!” So we’re mixing our Shakespeare with da Vinci? Awesome.
  • When Claude wakes up from his hallucination (immediately after this song), Berger says to him, “Welcome back, Shakespeare.” I have no idea if that’s always in there or not, but I love the direct shout-out to the man. There’s a lot of American history in this place, but I know of no overt Shakespeare references in the dialogue.
  • The finale kicks in for me as the opening does; it sends lightning bolts straight up my spine. There’s a lot of Shakespeare in it, too – the background harmony is singing Romeo’s last words to Juliet before seamlessly moving into “The rest is silence…” When you know it’s there, it’ll give you chills every time. Unfortunately, I don’t think it stood out this time, but that’s only because Claude, who was singing lead at that time, destroyed it. He’d been doing a stellar job all show, but most of his songs were high-energy numbers coupled with frantic dance numbers. The finale is just him bringing the house down, and I’ll tell you, he hit a couple of notes that there touched my soul. Damn.

I have to wrap this up it’s gone on too long. During intermission, a member of the tribe came out to chat and I told him what I said above, that this has been a 30-year trip for me that now I get to share with my kids. It would be appropriate for this show to talk about psychic powers, and my man got the message. During the finale he came into the audience to grab my kids and drag them on stage to dance with the tribe, just like I did in another life. (Unfortunately, he grabbed two out of three, probably because he only had two hands. And it was a small theatre where I think only my kids were brought up, so there wasn’t a steady stream of people my daughter could join. When I went, it was a big stage and dozens of people were pulled up. So she chose to stay in her seat.)

Thank you, Tribe, for a memory that I hope with all my heart, keeps the cycle in motion. Who knows, maybe thirty years from now they’ll be writing somewhere for their own audience, telling them about how they brought their children.

Let the sunshine in.

Hello, World. A Soon-To-Be Geeklet Story.

~ duane
And fix’d his eyes upon you?

Hello, class.

Soon I’m going to have the chance to do something I haven’t done in years. I’m going in to my son’s classroom to talk about Shakespeare. I used to do this all the time when my kids were in elementary school. But now I’ve got two off in college and he’s soon to follow them. I have no idea what I’ll do or say.

What I do know is that the class knows this, and my spies tell me that some of them immediately wanted to know about my site so they could cyberstalk me. I wish I’d anticipated that – the blog’s been a bit messy lately, for a number of reasons that I will not turn into excuses. I should do better.

That was a number of days ago at this point, so I expect that most of them got bored and forgot all about me.

But! Maybe I picked up some new followers. Maybe there are some other students in the class that are interested in the subject matter, maybe even as excited for the novelty of somebody like me coming in as speaker as I am about being said speaker. I remember high school. I remember being a nerd. I remember the joy of knowing things and the fear of showing it, lest ye be bullied. In fact, it’s part of my mission to do what I can to break that pattern. If something brings you joy, you shouldn’t be afraid to demonstrate it. I was almost twenty years out of high school before I figured that out.

So! For the secret nerds that are still reading, let’s have an easter egg:

Corambis

When I come to class, tell me that word and what its significance is to Shakespeare. I’ll have a prize for the first person to do so. (For the record, my son doesn’t know the answer, nor does he know I’m making this post. So there’ll be no cheating there.)

No comments on this post! No hints from regular readers!

It’s Exactly Like That ( A Geeklet Story )

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Today I got a text from my daughter that said simply, “Sonnet 18.”

Guess they’re learning that one in class now (along with Hamlet and East of Eden, apparently. A real mixed bag!) “Easy peasy,” I texted back. “You’ve been able to sing that since you were three.”

“I what?” she responded.

Did she not remember? Oh, it is one of my most primal memories. I went on a quest.

For context let’s start here. A long, long time ago, before we had anything like iPhones and the idea of a “custom ringtone” was something that the height of personalizing your phone, mine was, of course, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour singing Sonnet 18. I mean, I know, right? How do you know that exists and not make it your ringtone? I love Shakespeare, I love Pink Floyd. It’s like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of music.

Then one day I caught my children singing it. How do you capture that moment? They called it “the song Daddy’s phone sings.” You can’t explain to your kids, not at that age, that they just elevated their Daddy’s universal joy. Sure I’d spent the first years of their lives talking about Shakespeare and “decorating their lives” with Shakespeare, but here was the first moment when I heard it come back to me, and I knew I was changing their lives as much as they’d just changed mine. Music to my ears, in infinitely more ways than one.

Even better, I managed to record it.

I sent that off to my daughter to show her friends at school, along with some pictures of what she looked like when she was 3, because that’s how old she is in that clip.

When she came home from school today and we were talking about it, she said, “Does that make you sad?”

I looked at her funny. “It’s literally been my purpose in life, I’ve literally spent eighteen years shaping your brain the way I think is best for you to go out into the universe.”

“YA THINK?” she said.

“Moments like this, when I know the plan worked, you think that makes me sad?”

“No,” she said, “not sad like that. Sad like, looking back at those memories, that were so long ago.”

I knew what she was saying. That thing we sometimes call “happysad.” She was right, of course. But I can get happysad about a lot of things. I needed a different answer.

“You know,” I told her, wondering if my voice would break, “I honestly don’t remember much about teaching you guys to ride a bike. But you know that scene in all the tv shows and movies, right? Where the parent is running behind with a hand on the seat, and the kid doesn’t have the training wheels anymore, and then suddenly the parent lets go and they’re doing it by themselves? That pride, that exhilaration?

That is exactly what it feels like. Every. Single. Time.”

That Is The Question ( A Geeklet Story )

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

My daughter is heading off to college next year but I don’t care, they’ll all be geeklets to the day I die.

Today I’m at work (from home) when I get a text:

“Do you have Hamlet?”

It’s a new semester and she’d mentioned they’re doing Hamlet, so that was not an unexpected question. I love when the kids need to draw on my Shakespeare library, it’s why I’ve been building it over the years. Just the other day I found a Taming of the Shrew in my mailbox – my oldest had let one of her friends borrow it last semester, and she was returning it.

“Which version?” I ask, because you don’t get full dad points if you don’t drag stuff like this out unnecessarily. I honestly don’t know how many Hamlets I have. I don’t typically collect individual editions, there are too many. I do have multiple “Complete Works”, though.

David Garrick doing his impression of my son when I suggest volunteering at school.

“Uhhh,” comes the reply. “Hamlet. High school. Just Hamlet.”

“Well there’s Arden, Riverside, Folger … ” I reply, then go looking to see what’s on my shelf. I find the Arden edition, which is a bit intimidating. I fear she’s looking for one of those glorified pocket editions that’s just the text with a few glossary words sprinkled down the edges. This is very much not that. Less than half of each page is actual play text, the rest is footnotes. Great for research, but probably overkill for this assignment.

Later that evening, at dinner, I find. out that she relayed this question to her teacher. “Did your dad tell you to ask that?” said the teacher. My reputation precedes me!

I can’t wait to see how it goes. I”m probably going into her class at some point, though to do what and speak on what, I’m not sure. I’m willing to pretty much go off the top of my head, as long as I can keep the kids’ attention. That was easier when they were in elementary school.

For comparison, my son did Julius Caesar last semester. I knew this was on the curriculum. And I heard about it in the context of, “Oh, yeah, we’re doing Julius Caesar in history class.” I said let me know if you need help. He said, “We finished it.” The closest I got to any actual content was when he mentioned “some guy talking at a funeral”. Sigh. I guess I teased him too often with “I’m coming in to your history class to talk about Shakespeare when you get to that topic.” Both girls got a kick out of that, and at one point had a school reputation as the Shakespeare experts. My son, on the other hand, will bend over backward to make sure his friends and classmates never see me 🙂

Wait You What? Why? [ A Geeklet Story ]

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

It feels weird still telling geeklet stories when one of the geeklets is in college, but traditions must be followed! It’s fascinating to look at how the conversations and stories have evolved over the years.

So my daughter’s off to college (second year, actually) and last night she got to hang out with the Shakespeare club. Naturally, I had to speak with her this morning and get the scoop.

“We actually didn’t talk much about Shakespeare,” she told me. “It was a lot more getting to know each other stuff. Oh, but I did learn, the production this year is Hamlet.”

I’m of two minds. “Really?” I start with, “Of all the plays? What are they going to say about Hamlet that hasn’t been said a million times already?” But, reconsidering, “If you want to get immersed in Shakespeare, Hamlet’s going to be one of the best choices. Sometimes they’ll go off and do a Comedy of Errors or a Two Gentlemen of Verona or something, but all you get out of those is the laughs. Something like a Hamlet is where you can really spend all the time getting into the details of how you’re going to tell it, and why.”

We talk briefly about “gender-bent” productions and the difference between “a woman playing Hamlet” and “playing Hamlet as a woman.”

“I’ll send you resources,” I continue. “Sarah Bernhardt famously played Hamlet back in the 1800s. There’s even video.”

The conversation continues, and then she drops a bomb on me. “Last night I was reading Taming of the Shrew, and that ending is just …”

“Hold on,” I say, “Pause. Back up. You were doing what?”

“Reading Taming of the Shrew?”

“Before or after you met with the Shakespeare club? Something came up in conversation?”

“No, before.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to refresh myself on the story.”

I’m momentarily speechless, a rare event in this Shakespeare-related universe. “You’re telling me that, of your own accord, you said hey I think I’ll catch up on my Shakespeare and decided to re-read Shrew?”

“Well, yeah. Not the whole thing, not in one night. Mostly the ending.”

We then talk so long about the ending of that one, the ending of Midsummer, the ending of Merchant, that I eventually have to go to a meeting and put a halt to the conversation.

I think it was probably fourteen years ago? That I was tucking in a cute little curly-headed five-year-old girl who needed a bedtime story and I thought, “What the heck, never too young to learn about Shakespeare.”

Look how far we’ve come. I can’t wait to see what comes next. But I tell you right now, documented for the record, that if any of my kids end up on a stage delivering lines, I’m not sure my heart will be able to take it.