I first heard about Wool in the same context as The Martian, one of these self published runaway hits that is already fast tracked to become a movie. It’s a pretty standard dystopian story of people living in an artificially constructed society where the worst crime is to express a desire to go “out”. What’s outside and why are they in? The answers seem pretty obvious if you’ve read any of a dozen other books with this same premise. I guess this came out back in 2011 and was originally eight books, now it’s been republished as three bigger ones.
So why are we talking about it here? Because for some strange reason it’s loaded with Shakespeare references. There’s even a character named George Wilkins, and I challenge casual fans of Shakespeare to recognize that reference!
The main character’s name is Juliet (or Juliette, I have it on audiobook so who knows), and I keep waiting for a Romeo to appear and the longer he doesn’t the more I’m thinking, “Oh, good, we can actually have a character named Juliet without it requiring the Shakespeare story.”
Soon enough, though, we’re flashing back to when she’s a kid and sees a production of the play. She’s even given a script that she then carries around for the rest of the story. Once the explicit R&J connection is made, the different sections (chapters? again, audiobook, hard to tell) suddenly become quotes from the play.
I don’t get it. There’s no Romeo and Juliet story here, and I’m stretching to come up with one. I’m wondering if there’s more Pericles in it (see George Wilkins, above ;)). I’m not nearly familiar enough with that play.
So, surely others out there have already read this one, and probably the whole series. Is it right in front of my face and I’m missing it? I once read a Hamlet story told from the perspective of super-intelligent dogs, and I managed to figure that one out (eventually). Does it come up more in later books? Or did the author just feel like sprinkling around some Shakespeare? The latter seems unlikely, but you never know in the self-published world, things don’t have to stay strictly to formula. Besides, there’s no way that he drops George Wilkins into the story and expects anybody to recognize the Shakespeare connection!
UPDATE May 2023
As originally mentioned, the book is now a series on Apple TV+ called Silo. I’ve only just started watching it but we’ve met the Juliet character. Maybe I’ll learn more about where all the Shakespeare references lead us!
Sorry, I should probably spell the man’s name correctly if for nothing else than the SEO I might get, but it just amuses me to no end to spell it differently every time.
Last night, after months of waiting, I got to see the encore performance of B.C.’s Hamlet, presented by NTLive.
While I have some major issues with many of the directorial choices and was often making my Picard “WTF have they done to my Shakespeare?” face, I think that old Ben himself might individually be the best Hamlet I’ve ever seen.
Should we cover the good first, or the bad? I’ll start with the opening, and you tell me. We open with Hamlet, sitting in what I presume to be his room (although it felt like it could have been an attic), listening to old records and looking through photo albums, presumably of his father. I *loved* this. When I try to relate the play to people I always start by saying, “Hamlet is about a man whose father died.” Here we actually get a glimpse of him in mourning, not just in his inky black cloak, but actually going through the motions that you could expect anyone to go through that lost someone dear. Before the scene is over he will go into a trunk of his father’s clothes and don one of his father’s blazers – but not before smelling it, once again to remind him of his father. It’s about 30 seconds into this 3+ hour play and you already know exactly what’s going on in Hamlet’s head. Ever wonder what his relationship was like with his father? No questions here.
I figured ok, awesome start, lights out and we start the show, right?
Nope. Knock knock knock. “Who’s there?” says Hamlet. Says HAMLET. SAYS HAMLET. “Answer me, stand and unfold yourself!” And I’m in bizarro world because Horatio enters and we’re catapulted briefly to … scene 5, was it? Horatio’s original meeting with Hamlet? But but but but but but…. where’s the ghost? So confused.
It’s a bold move to do stuff like that because you have to follow up with it and have it make sense and flow smoothly. I don’t think that did. First of all, there’s no reason to introduce Horatio there at all. He doesn’t do anything. Second, we’ll later be treated to Marcellus and Bernardo entering with, “My lord I saw him yesternight.” It’s like they just cut the context and shuffled it around and didn’t even attempt to smooth it over. Boo.
Couple words on casting? I hate hate hated Horatio. If I could think of a way to blend the two words together I would. Horhatio maybe. Imagine five minutes before showtime, somebody runs up to the director and says, “Bad news, our Horatio’s been hit by a bus!” “No problem,” says the director, “Run down to the local Starbucks and grab the barista, he told me this morning that he played Horatio once in college.” Boom, done. Checkered flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a backpack that he never takes off, which gives him this hunched over sort of snivelly, groveling sort of character like he’s afraid to look Hamlet in the eye. All of his lines are delivered with a constant shaking of his head. He’s also got some sort of speech impediment or something going on, which becomes more pronounced at the end of the play, where he sounds like he’s got something in his teeth. It became grating after awhile.
I also hate the ghost. They deliberately cut all the dialog about describing the ghost’s warlike appearance – I was waiting for the line about “wore his beaver up” because I like to see how Hamlet plays the “Then saw you not his face?” line. But that’s all gone. When we eventually see the ghost he’s dressed in normal kingly attire, not any sort of armor. Fine. But then he starts talking and oh dear god out comes this heavy accent….Irish, I think? It was so horribly distracting I didn’t know what to do with myself. No attempt to make it booming or ghostly or anything. Or regal for that matter. He sounded like a cross between somebody’s crotchety old grandfather, and the school janitor yelling at kids for running in the hall. I found it just laughably out of place. Bardfilm liked it and suggests that he was channeling Olivier. I don’t remember Olivier’s ghost well enough, so if he was, I missed it entirely. He sounded entirely like he was chastising his son. Didn’t get much of a loveable father/son relationship, as I think about it. Remember this is a Hamlet who was smelling his father’s scent on his old clothes a minute ago. Now he’s getting yelled at.
Those are my two biggest casting complaints. Claudius I liked – and I could swear I recognize him from other works? Have to check that out. Kind of doing that big, puffed out chest thing, like he’s “on” all the time and deliberately trying to present himself like a king. Even in his delivery, which is why I mentioned above how different the ghost’s was, because the ghost was supposed to be a king as well. Having said that, he’s pretty one-note the more I think about it. I did like the paranoia that was coming off of him, though. Especially after Polonius is killed, all his thoughts turn to “How do I make sure this isn’t pinned on me?” I don’t recall that from, say, Patrick Stewart’s Claudius. He was all business and had everything in control up to the end. This guy seems like he’s always walking a tightrope with it all just falling apart.
I agree with Bardfilm that the first half of this production was significantly better than the second. Perhaps that’s because we saw all the tricks once and then they didn’t work multiple times. They do this cool “everything goes in slow motion” thing during Hamlet’s soliloquies, and the first time you see it it’s very neat. But it’s not as shocking the next couple of times. One scene I loved was the “chase” to capture Hamlet after he’s killed Polonius. I don’t know that it’s always done this way, but this was a full-on “mobilize everyone in the castle, find Hamlet” manhunt, and it was awesome. The lighting changed, the sound changed, everything. You really got the feeling that, whether they loved Claudius or not, the whole castle jumped when he said jump. More importantly, you realize that Hamlet was truly alone and that literally everyone in the castle was against him. This was brought home (though perhaps accidentally) when he’s captured and I noticed that Marcellus and Bernardo are the ones holding guns on him. Bardfilm wondered if that might not just be a case of doubling “generic soldiers” but I like my interpretation better, like they are soldiers forced to do their job because the king said so, whether they’ve got personal feelings about it or not.
So, let’s talk about Hamlet as a character. I absolutely loved it. I believe that the key to understanding the entire play is to get inside Hamlet’s head. His father’s died, his mother’s remarried, he’s had the crown stolen from him, his girlfriend won’t talk to him and won’t tell him why. I think that there’s this gap that modern audiences often fail to leap between “I understand the words and know what they’re supposed to mean so I get what Shakespeare wants me to get”, and, “I feel something for that dude, I know what he’s going through.” You *bought* everything Cumberland Bendybits was putting out there. You really felt like he was going through the anguish. All of my favorite “minor” scenes hit just the notes I’ve always wanted to see hit:
* “Mother, you have my father much offended!” It’s not “I’m exchanging word games with you because I’m a smartass,” it’s the tiniest of escape valves to let off the fury he has for her and his complete inability to understand how she could have done what she did. This is where it’s all going to come out, and that’s just the start. He’s not superior at this moment, he’s not going to put her in her place, he’s a son desperate to understand how his mother could have done what she’s done.
* The flute scene. It’s a simple enough scene where he makes R (or is it G?) look like an idiot. But you feel how truly alone he is in that moment. These are supposed to be his friends. Sometimes I see R&G interpreted as schoolmates who weren’t really that close because Gertrude doesn’t really have a feeling for who her son’s friends are. But here they really do look like old friends. So when he asks “Then what makes you think you can play me so easily?” it’s not “Aha, caught you in a trap!” It’s a real question. You were supposed to be my friend, but you too are in the employ of the guy that killed my father.
There are some overacted bits to be sure. His emoting often comes out as screaming, particularly during Ophelia’s funeral. I still bought it, I just wasn’t as sympathetic to it. Sure, he’s mourning Ophelia’s death – but he’s also the guy that crashed a funeral unexpectedly and is now trying to story top everybody that he’s got more right to mourn than everybody else.
The ending is so rushed, it made me so sad. I could have used another 15 minutes, easily. It goes so fast you can barely tell when somebody’s been wounded. Horatio’s the one to say “The drink is poisoned!” which was a little weird, I broke out my WTF face again, how does he know? At least Gertrude (who is supposed to deliver the line) is in a better position to realize it. But here, she dies as soon as she drinks it. It’s all chaos.
Overall I loved it and I want a DVD so I can watch again with my kids. I want to pick apart all the individual delivery of every line. Many times they tweaked words here and there, which I suspect will make people insane, but for the most part, I was ok with it. What frustrates me most about that is not always being able to tell when they’ve changed a line, and when I’ve merely forgotten the original line. I think this was a very approachable production. People laughed in the audience. Often, and not in high brow academic chuckle when you’re the only few people who got the joke. Everybody got the joke. Most of the time it came from Bibbityboo’s delivery of key lines.
Go see it if you can. No question. It’s one to discuss. Will it become the standard for classroom learning? Unlikely. Too much stuff changed. But will it be a popular choice among larger audiences? I definitely think so.
This review is all kinds of late, given that the app was released back in April for Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. But an app this complex takes time to review properly, and.I wanted to do it justice. I really, really wanted to like this app. I just don’t, and it makes me sad.
I’ve imagined an app like Heuristic Shakespeare forever. A true multimedia creation that allows you to explore Shakespeare’s work in the way that works for you. Do you want to read, or watch video? Do you want it paraphrased and explained to you, or do you want the original text? How about both? How about actors like Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen reading the text to you? I think that alone is part of the genius of this app. They’re not acting it, this is not a performance. They’re reading it like an audio book – but, this being an iPad, there’s still video. So it’s like the greatest Shakespeare talent of our generation is your own personal tutor, reading alongside you.
The problem that there is just oh so much packed into the app, that the interface is a mess. Half the time I find myself just pressing random buttons, never sure what comes up next. Sometimes I’ve got the text, sometimes I’ve got a character map telling me (with little thumbnail faces) which characters appear in which scenes. Oh, wait, now it’s a modern English translation. Hold on, now I’ve got essays and videos *about* the play.
I love that all of this stuff is in there. Imagine it, you’re on a particular scene you’ve always liked. First you have Sir Ian reading it to you. All the hard words are highlighted and footnoted so you an always pause and make sure you understand what’s being said. Do you understand what’s happening in the scene? Flip to the modern translation and get a quick refresher. How has this scene been performed? Click somewhere else and you get a historic list of famous performances, complete with images. If you’re into the academic side (maybe you’re doing your homework), there’s also a mode where you can learn all about character development and themes and all that fun stuff your teacher requires that sucks the life out of just sitting back and enjoying the show 🙂
I have a perfect example of my frustration. I’ve mentioned several times that our greatest Shakespeareans can read the text along with you, in video, right? I lost that. I cannot find it, and I want it. I can get audio, but my video has disappeared. I don’t know if it’s a bug in the app where it’s legitimately no longer showing me an option that it’s supposed to, or if I’m doing something wrong, or what. And I think my regular readers probably know that I’m not exactly a newbie at this stuff. If I can’t figure it out, something’s wrong.
[UPDATE – I found it! The videos only appear when the app is in portrait mode. I was reading in landscape. Very happy to have found my videos again. Of course, my iPad is in a keyboard case so it’s much more convenient to keep it in landscape but I guess I’ll live.]
This app needs to exist. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to the ideal Shakespeare browser. If I recall it’s on the expensive side for a mobile app — did they want $5.99 for it? But if you told me that’s the “player” price and that I can add content for additional plays at a lower amount, it’s a no brainer.I just hope that they rethink large parts of the interface. I don’t know how, exactly, but it needs something. This is an app that even has a built in “What level of detail would you like?” feature so that it can be enjoyed by amateurs and scholars alike, so you’d think that a great amount of effort went into the design of the interface. Unfortunately I think it all went into trying to cram in as many trees as possible, and they lost track of the forest.
Everybody remembers “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, right? Always told in the second person, you read a few pages, then it said “If you choose to open the door, turn to page 74. If you choose to jump out the window, turn to page 123.” I loved these things as a kid. Not only would I read through all the different combinations (and really, there weren’t that many as no matter what you picked you eventually ended back up in the same spot), I’d hack them backwards by opening to random pages and then trying to figure out what decisions I would have had to make in the story to get to that page.
It was an easy jump for these stories to make it to the digital medium, and Shakespeare’s always a great source. Back in 2012, Ryan North pulled off an ultra-successful Kickstarter with To Be or Not To Be : That is the Adventure. Truthfully I think I’ve got that one kicking around someplace, I’m pretty sure I’ve never reviewed it and I probably should.
But! This is not about that. This post is about an entire company dedicated to the medium called Choice of Games, and their latest offering, A Midsummer Night’s Choice (or, Frolic in the Forest). These folks have actually got a content management system designed for creating these kinds of stories, and their library (user generated as well as their own stuff) is gigantic – I lost count at 50+ titles.
What I find cool, as a programmer, is that these “books” are really small interactive apps that can be read as part of the web site, but also treated like apps for your mobile device. This is a game changer, because now you can bring things like variables and character attributes into it, and make all of the choices that much more complex. In other words, whether or not the king has you executed for speaking your mind in chapter 7 is going to be directly related to whether the king is 90% angry with you, or only 10%, based on your previous choices in the story. (That example is totally made up.) In the iPad version (the one that I played), you see all the key status bars while you’re reading the story, and several times I’d make a decision, watch one of them go in the wrong direction, then silently curse that I’d made the wrong move. What’s also cool is that there doesn’t appear to be a back button, so no cheating – you play the hand you’re dealt.
The story itself, an original concept by professor Kreg Segall, consists of over 190,000 words that tell a mashed-up novelization of a number of Shakespeare stories. To quote from the site:
When your father, the Duke, tries to force you to marry, you’ll leave civilization behind as you flee in disguise, cross-dressed, into the enchanted forest. Mistaken identities, inexplicable bears, and tiny but fearsome fairies await! (Seriously, they wear little walnut shells for helmets, and ride armored baby bunnies into battle.)
Will you fall into the mysterious Faerie Queene’s clutches? Will you (or your identical doppelganger) find true love? Or will your father’s spies find you first?
I haven’t finished it yet – the thing is *huge* – but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would. It doesn’t play like an old fashioned text adventure game that’s light on story and description and really just wants to walk you through the action. It also doesn’t feel like one of those old fashioned ones I read as a kid that comes across like a 50 piece jigsaw puzzle, where you may think that your 10 choices result in 1000 different paths through the story, but really they all converge (typically in an awkward an unbelievable manner) down to a dozen endings. As I work my way through this one I honestly can’t tell how I’m affecting the story because it just continues to flow smoothly as if my decision was the one the author had in mind all along.
One of the absolute best things, to me, is that for the most part the decisions are not of the “turn left or right” variety, but get at more of the character psychology, instead asking questions like, “You realize that your friend is looking at you like he wants to be more than friends, how do you feel about that?” and then you’ll have choices like, “I’d be open to exploring that relationship,” or “Absolutely not.” If this engine is complex enough to factor in evolving character relationships and still work through the plot in a believable manner, I’ll be quite impressed.
As I mentioned, the various status bars are a neat touch – but I’m not fully sure what to do with all of them. I have a charisma score of 23%, ok, now what? Is that good or bad? How is that changing the story? Which of my decisions is changing that? One UI feature I’d like to see is that when something you do changes a status bar, it should flash to let you know that. Since I couldn’t figure out how my choices were changing those, I basically started to ignore them.
However, some of them detail your relationship with the other characters, and those are interesting and easy to follow. The story starts and your father is angry with you. Depending on your decisions you can make it better or worse. I made it worse :).
I’m very impressed, a bit surprised that I hadn’t heard of these folks before, and hopeful that they’re doing well for themselves. Wired magazine isn’t writing up efforts like these that just continue to plug along at their craft, churning out a good quality product on a regular basis. It’s hard to even describe it well enough to market it. Is it a book, or an app? Is it a game? Educational? Sure, it’s all of those things.
There’s a few UI things that I’d change. As noted, I think the status bars should flash or something. I think there should be a back button so I can return to previous parts of the story to see how my decision would change things (although, full disclaimer, I know that I’d use this to reverse engineer how all my options stack up against the changing status bars and then optimize my path :)). Although the text of the story is put on the right half of a landscape-mode iPad, it still uses vertical scroll, which meant that sometimes (often) I’d have to scroll just a tiny bit to get to the Next button. That was a little annoying and disrupted the “page flipping” flow. In fact, knowing that iPad offers a “page flip” layout, I’m wondering if that wouldn’t be better than the vertical scrolling.
How’s the story? It’s compelling enough. It’s got plenty of Shakespeare elements, and is self-referential enough to have fun with it. It’s only a matter of time before you’re cross dressing and lost in the forest, for example.
What I wasn’t thrilled with was how much it tries to force a love story. The site claims that you can play as gay, straight or bi — which basically means answering questions about what gender you want to play as, what gender your friends are, and how you feel about them. I made it pretty clear that I was interested in playing it “straight” :), but found myself having to answer questions repeatedly about whether I wanted to do anything to encourage this other guy’s advances. If you want to play the game that way I suppose go ahead (note – I did clarify with the publisher that this is not erotica and there are no choices that will get you sex scenes), I just wasn’t interested in that. I was here for the Shakespeare.
I’m going to keep playing through to the end, because I’m genuinely interested to see how much Shakespeare they’ve thrown into the soup, and how the story works out.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been to see free Shakespeare under the stars courtesy Commonwealth Shakespeare. I’ve been telling people 13 years, I’m pretty sure that’s right.
This year we’ve got Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is one of those “Really?” kind of choices because no one other than existing Shakespeare geeks is going to know anything about it. But I suppose by that logic they’d just rotate through Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet every year, so they’ve got to dip into the other works regularly. (This company has also recently done Two Gentlemen of Verona and All’s Well That Ends Well, so they’re not afraid to explore the canon. Both of which I saw, by the way.) At least I can add this one to my list, having never seen a production. Technically I saw half of one once, but that’s a story for another day (actually it’s a story from years ago that I no doubt posted when it happened).
Anyway, here’s how I’ve tried to explain LLL to people when they inevitably say, “ooo, I’ve never heard of that one” …
The play opens with the king and three of his followers deciding to swear off women for the next three years. They’re going to do nothing but study, no women in sight. So, of course, four attractive single ladies immediately show up on the scene and you can imagine that antics that follow. Each of the guys falls in love with one of the girls and goes about trying to woo her, without letting his fellows know that he is breaking the oath that they all took. Love notes are written and secretly passed, the messenger gives the wrong note to the wrong girl, and silliness follows. It all gets straightened out at we end with the promise of a wedding, as all the comedies do.
It’s not one of Shakespeare’s greatest, which is probably obvious given that nobody’s heard of it. If it’s famous for anything it is for the complicated word games all throughout it where Shakespeare was showing off exactly what he could do, including an appearance by the word “honorificabilitudinitatibus.” So it can be hard to follow, and productions will rely on over the top physical comedy to keep the audience interested and laughing.
Kenneth Branagh made a movie version, but it didn’t do so well. I couldn’t tell you whether that’s because it wasn’t a good version, or it just reinforces the fact that nobody recognizes this play. I didn’t see it.
A coworker saw the play before I did. I asked him, “And were you able to follow it?”
“Mostly,” he said, “But my wife and I weren’t paying all that much attention, we were just having a picnic with our wine and dinner and enjoying the evening.”
Another coworker didn’t even realize that’s how it works. She thought this was a closed, ticketed event. “Oh no,” I tell her, “This is Boston Common. People will be walking around right through the crowd. People on their bikes, walking dogs … people will just stop and take in the show for a little while.”
I asked for more details about the show from the coworker who’d seen it. “I was surprised by just how … bawdy? it was. *Lot* of penis jokes in this one. Is Shakespeare always like that?”
I didn’t recall this one being especially over the top, so I said, “He can be. But it’s also the kind of thing the director will play up to get a laugh out of the audience.”
“Even my wife said, ‘I thought this was family friendly, there are kids here!'”
I later learn that one of my other coworkers was in acting classes with Remo Airaldi, one of the clowns in the group who will be playing Don Adriano de Armada. That should be interesting!
So, that’s what I had to work with going in to the show. My wife and I decided to skip the picnic this year and just get dinner beforehand, so we grabbed some lawn chairs and found a nice spot house right, under a shady tree, and hunted Pokemon while waiting for the show to begin.
I thought the scenery was excellent this year. Most years they go with some sort of “decorated scaffold” sort of thing where it’s obvious that there’s a center exit, and some sort of upper level. I don’t even know what they were trying to go for here – is it a castle? a forest? A wall? All the above? It looks a bit like the Emerald City. But I like it!
The play opens with a dumb show that gets the point across quite nicely – three gentlemen sit studying a growing pile of books, while random people dance in and out, constantly swapping the book or adding more. Every time a pretty girl goes by, the men are distracted from their studies. Pretty soon the random people are wandering in with food and pillows and it’s a blur – we’re studying too much and not eating or sleeping enough, which is pretty spot on.
It’s obvious that Biron (or Berowne, if you prefer) is going to get all the stage time, while Dumain an Longaville are basically just sycophantic yes men who literally trip over themselves to do whatever the king wants. That’s not their fault, though – that’s all Shakespeare gave them to work with. But Biron carries the opening scenes nicely. He makes a good lead.
Enter the princesses, and I have a question. I don’t usually get into racial issues and color blind casting, but it bothered me, so why not bring it up? It just so happens that the actor playing Biron is black. Fine. But when the four ladies enter, wouldn’t you know it, one of them is black as well and of course she’s Rosaline, who is matched with Biron, and I’m left thinking, “Really??” I thought these days we’re beyond that simplistic “gotta match the black guy up with a black girl” logic? I want to give them the benefit of the doubt here, though. After thinking more about it, each of the princesses is a physical match to the gentleman each is paired with, which is certainly not a coincidence. So to have both Rosaline and Biron be African American makes sense. I just wonder if I’m the only one in the audience that found it strangely racist, and whether that was the reaction the director thought he was going to get. He’s literally saying “judge these books by their covers and match the girls up with what guys you think are appropriate, based entirely on their physical appearance.”
It gets weird later during the masquerade where, if you don’t know, the ladies all pretend to be each other to play a prank on the young men. So now we’ve got the one black actress pretending to be one of the others, and now we’re supposed to do the color blind thing and ignore that. Maybe it’s making a mountain out of a mole hill, but I call it like I see it, and it was distracting, what can I say.
I wanted to laugh myself silly at Don Adriano. Sometimes I did, but not much. I wish I could say otherwise. Everything was delivered in a heavy lisp where you could see the spittle spraying in the lights. He reminded me of Hank Asaria’s character in The Birdcage, if you remember that one. At some points I thought his servant Moth was more interesting – but maybe more exciting is the better word. Don Adriano just lolled around the stage moaning, while Moth was always bouncing around the edges, ready to run off and do something exciting.
A quick word about the bawdiness? I get what my coworker meant. I didn’t think it was bad – I’ve seen worse. There’s a particular dialogue in The Comedy of Errors that has more sex jokes than I think this whole play has. But there were a couple of instances where, unless I’m drastically misreading the move, a male character has a moment to describe the woman he loves, and halfway through his speech he grabs a pillow or book to hold in front of his crotch, like a middle school student called up to complete a math problem on the whiteboard in front of the class right after the pretty girl that sits next to him dropped her pencil. If you get my drift. When I saw that move twice I was rolling my eyes. Shakespeare gave you so little to work with?
Anyway, back to the good stuff. I thought all the character casting was excellent (racial worries aside). Rosaline was excellent. I wanted to make some Beatrice/Benedick references, but this Rosaline would have sent Beatrice home whimpering. She brought some serious attitude and it did work. The Princess was equally good, verbally sparring with Ferdinand. Even Boyet was spot on.
All in all I just didn’t love it, compared to many of the other shows I’ve seen here. I think the material has a lot to do with that. The only real laughs came from the physical setup — Biron’s reveal when he discovers Ferdinand, Longaville and Dumain have all broken the oath is perhaps the funniest moment in the entire play. I laughed a little at Holofernes – a little. Which is a shame, because Fred Sullivan, Jr has always been the comic star of Commonwealth Shakespeare and having seen his Jaques, Malvolio and Nick Bottom, I hate to see his delivery reduced to just yelling and repeating himself. Oh, and occasionally whacking people with a ruler. Funny gimmick, got old fast. I didn’t even really laugh at the Nine Worthies. I spent too much time thinking, “Well, this is like a light version of Midsummer.” And then *bam* right in the middle the scene just stops, we learn that the princess’ father has died, and it switches over to a funeral as all the characters don black robes and the whole mood just goes right out the window. I realize that this is how Shakespeare wrote it, but I don’t get the point of sending the audience home depressed. There’s one funny line to wrap up, where Biron says something about waiting a year and how “that’s too long for a play”. People laughed at that. But that was it, time to go home.
Going into an evening like this, and coming out of it, I can say the same thing: Shakespeare makes life better. This evening is one of the highlights of my year, and it doesn’t matter whether they performed LLL or Merry Wives of Windsor or Two Noble Kinsmen. The fact they perform it is what matters. Every year they give it their all and I appreciate the hell out of it. It’s free for heaven’s sake. Do like my coworker did, go have a picnic and drink some wine with your significant other, and if you want to laugh at the dirty jokes, go for it, that’s what they’re there for. Shakespeare as backdrop makes for a lovely evening.
