Category: Reviews

Movie and book reviews

Review : A Midsummer Night’s Choice by Choice of Games, LLC

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

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.

You can try the game for free, so take it for a spin and see what you think!

Review: Commonwealth Shakespeare Presents Love’s Labour’s Lost on Boston Common 2016

~ duane ~ 4 Comments
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.

Presenting Shakespeare : A Video Review

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

A little something different for Shakespeare Day!  I’ve had a copy of Presenting Shakespeare for a little while, but wasn’t really sure the best way to review it.  It’s a hardcover book full of nothing but posters from Shakespeare productions.  So how do you talk about it?  I tried taking pictures (since I did not have any from the publisher) but that didn’t work very well.

So you get a rare video review!  Enjoy.

It’s a very cool book to appreciate the more visual side of Shakespearean interpretation. Admittedly that’s not me – I’m all about the words words words 🙂

The book is available at Amazon.

Review : Still Time, by Jean Hegland

~ duane ~ Leave a comment
Storm still.

Author Jean Hegland knows how to pitch a Shakespeare geek. She told me that her latest novel, Still Time, was “about a Shakespeare scholar struggling with dementia who is trying to come to terms with his life even as his estranged daughter (an aspiring video game designer named Miranda) is attempting to reconcile with him.

I told her that the Lear/Prospero crossover was going to get me all misty-eyed even thinking about it.  The whole “video game designer” thing is just a bonus for my computer programmer life 🙂

I’m not going to lie. This is a difficult book to read.  It opens, for heaven’s sake, with a wife explaining to her husband why she has to put him in a nursing home.  It opens with that. There’s not going to be any “happily ever after” here when you start like that.

Look, I’ve always said that Shakespeare means different things to you depending on where you are in life. The entirety of human emotion is, at one point or another, played out on Shakespeare’s stage.  When we say he wrote the recipe for what it means to be human, he didn’t leave out any chapters.

There will come a time in everyone’s life when they have to experience the closing act.  Maybe it’s for your parents, or your grandparents, or yourself.  It’s never a fun topic to think about because, as I said, we know how it ends, and it’s not going to be happy. But there is oh so much Shakespeare to help us through it.

That is exactly what this novel wants to do. It strikes such a personal chord that I counted half a dozen moments (at least!) that come straight out of my life. But you have to take the good with the bad. When he complains of no longer being able to organize his thoughts clearly in his head, how brilliant large-scale theories come to him so frequently but yet he can’t seem to pull them together coherently when he attempts to write them down, I know exactly what he means and fear that it will only get worse. When he realizes that he’s forgotten the ending to King Lear, it is heartbreaking as I simultaneously imagine what that must be like while I pray that I never learn.

Structurally speaking, this is not the kind of book I usually read. One of the reasons that I love Shakespeare is that I believe in dialogue-driven character development.  I could read an entire novel of nothing but people talking to each other as long as I didn’t lose track of the pronouns.  This is a novel about the thoughts of a man alone in a nursing home, and I admit to skimming at times, waiting for a visitor to show up so people could start speaking out loud.  There is a plot – we do learn about his estranged daughter and what’s going on in her life, all mapped against musings of the theme of forgiveness and second chances in Shakespeare’s late plays.  But when you put one character who speaks in snippets of Shakespeare into a conversation with a character who actively denies them, there had better be some depth in that other character. I didn’t see it.  Maybe that’s yet another personal chord, giving me a glimpse into a future where I don’t understand what is important in my children’s lives and why what is important to me is not important to them.

That’s perhaps the most compelling thing I can say about this book – not only does everything that happens map back to Shakespeare, but it maps back to me.  Chances are, you’re going to feel the same way. Whenever people want to whine about the relevance of Shakespeare today, this is what we try to explain.  Everybody gets older, everybody has regrets, everybody wishes for the chance for reconciliation and forgiveness.  Shakespeare knew that. Jean Hegland knows that.

At the time of this writing I have not finished the book. I am honestly afraid of how it ends.  I know that Winter’s Tale and Tempest manage to pull off a happy ending, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Buy Still Time by Jean Hegland on Amazon Now

Review : The Fosters – Romeo and Juliet

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I think I would have liked this show 20 or 30 years ago.  When I was closer to high school. This just made me feel old.

Look, every sitcom in history that’s had anything to do with a high school or high school aged students, from Head of the Class to The Brady Bunch, has at one point or another done a Romeo and Juliet episode. But not too many attempt to pull off a rock musical version.  Not only that, they had alumni from High School Musical and Glee helping out (including Corbin Bleu as Mercutio).  So I wanted to have high hopes.

As always, and I think seriously this has become my trademark, my review is this:  “Needs more Shakespeare.”

I don’t know the show, or the characters, or their arcs. So I’m sure that I missed the lion’s share of the significance of what else was going on, who kissed who, who used to be a couple but broke up and are now on stage together. But you know what? This is where I feel old.  Because I didn’t care.  I just wanted to hear the text.

It started out well, singing the prologue to piano accompaniment. The song itself wasn’t that good, but I applaud the effort.  But just about all the other songs had little to no text in them, and instead were focused on this theme of being “unbreakable” and/or “unstoppable”, whatever significance that is supposed to have, and also how “love will light the way.”  There’s a token reference to jesting at scars that never felt a wound, which is a repeated lyric in one of the songs, but out of context it’s just kind of hanging there.

Meanwhile there’s a whole other story arc going on that just reminded me that these people are closer to my kids’ age than my own.  Example?  Ok, picture this.  Set against the backdrop of SHAKESPEARE, here’s some actual dialogue:

“I’m still in love with you!”
“Then why didn’t you answer my note?”
“What note?”
“I left a note in your backpack.”
“I never got it. What did it say?”
“That I’m in love with you too.”

Whoa.  I’ve got to sit down for a minute. For a brief minute there I got a kick out of the parallel of an important letter gone unread, but I couldn’t get over the overly dramatic dialogue over something so childish.  But then I suppose if I’d let my kids watch this show they would have thought it’s the greatest thing in the world.

Oh, well.  I’ll still probably try to download some of the songs again to see if full versions are available, and if they do more justice to the text than I first noticed.  But I’m pretty sure it’s not going to knock off Hamilton anytime soon.