Category: Reviews

Movie and book reviews

Review : Commonwealth Shakespeare’s King Lear on Boston Common 2015 (Part 1)

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I once drove several hours to see a production of King Lear. It wasn’t worth the trip. It might have been before I started this blog because I can’t find where I wrote it down, but the thing I remember the most was the big moment, the storm on the heath, and Lear … bargaining with the storm.  Timid.  Instead of “Come at me, give me everything you’ve got” I got a Lear that was more “I never did anything to you, please don’t hurt me.”

This weekend I saw Commonwealth Shakespeare’s production of King Lear on Boston Common. This is their 20th year, and I’ve been to 12 of them.  This is, without doubt, the greatest thing I’ve seen them do.  (To be fair, we’re talking about Lear here.  Shakespeare’s masterpiece. It’s not like a Comedy of Errors or a Two Gents, no matter how good, is even going to be in the same conversation.)

The staging is interesting this year, showing just a backdrop of curtains (arrases?) that leave enough space for random exits and entrances, if that’s what they’re planning.  I think this is oddly basic, but I like it. In the past there’s almost always been two levels to the stage, as well as a great deal of scenery (such as a crashed airplane for As You Like It, or neon signs for Two Gentlemen of Verona).

The play starts with an interpretive dance between Lear and his daughters.  Right away I’m struck by something I did not expect — I cannot tell which daughter is which. I am fully expecting Cordelia to stand out from her sisters like black and white, but as they start I realize that any of them could be Cordelia. Soon the dance splits, however, and Lear clearly spends more enjoyable time with one of the girls while the other two plot and scheme to work together. They have a scarf that they are dancing with, and use it to get between Lear and Cordelia, dragging him away from her, wrapping him up, and so on.  Then it gets crazy dark as they pull the scarf up over his eyes and a mob comes out to torment him, before finally dragging him offstage.  Wow.

I can’t begin to describe the play in detail, because my post will be longer than the script. Instead, let’s talk about characters.

Fool.  When I first tried to read and understand King Lear, I didn’t really get the Fool.  Were his jokes supposed to be funny? Or profound? Does he love the king, or mock him? Or rather, since the answer is obviously “both”, is the line between the two? He clearly tries to show him, repeatedly, the folly of giving away his kingdom.  But to what end? It’s too late to do anything about it. If he’s just taunting the poor man, that’s hardly what I’d call love.

I liked this Fool a lot. From the minute he dances in and jumps up on the table, I knew I liked him. The way he just keeps hammering Lear over the head with variations of “Who’s the bigger idiot? I’m not the one who gave away my kingdom” despite Lear’s half-hearted warnings for him to stop really made me appreciate the scene more than I ever had. What exactly is that relationship? Is Lear even listening to what he’s saying? When he says “Careful sirrah, the whip” (or whatever the line is), it’s not delivered like an actual threat, more like a joke between them, like never in a million years would that be a possibility.

As the play progresses he has less and less to do, until he literally just stops showing up. Unlike some productions, there is no death for the Fool added in.  He just stops appearing. But two scenes really make his presence felt.  First when they come upon Kent in the stocks. Kent asks him why Lear is going around with so few followers, and we learn that his 100 knights, that magical number that is so important to him to retain his pride, have been deserting him.  All except poor Fool, who will be faithful quite literally for the rest of their lives.

The second is the storm.  Oh, the storm.  Massive wind machines appear, the dry ice / smoke starts to swirl, and here comes the rain.  It is a full on tempest right there on stage. We can feel ourselves getting colder in our seats.  Act 3, Scene 1, the storm is in full swing as a minor character forces his way on stage against the wind.  Kent, from above in a scaffolding, calls down to him – yells, to be heard over the storm, “WHERE IS THE KING?” Then, when told that he is out in the storm, “BUT WHO IS WITH HIM?” and we learn that dear Fool is the only one left to follow him.

I tell you, it’s the scenes like those that are the ones that get me all misty (and not just because of the dry ice machine!).  Kent is no fool, in a number of meanings of the word. He’s not stupid. He’s disguised himself and gotten into Lear’s ranks so that he can continue on his one mission – protect the king. All the smart characters are taking shelter from the storm. Not Kent.  Kent’s about to run right out into the middle of it. How could he do any different?

So let’s talk about Kent.  I didn’t really get him at first because in the opening scene he’s wearing glasses and a fake beard that may have interfered with his ability to deliver his lines. Or maybe it’s just that he was putting on an accent early, so that he could spent the rest of the play without it. Either way, I didn’t fully understand much of his delivery, but he certainly got his point across. He was right up in Lear’s face, letting him know exactly how stupid he was being. When Lear draws a sword and threatens to cut Kent down, Kent doesn’t back down in the slightest – instead he bares his neck and points at it, calling Lear’s bluff.

What was wonderful about his performance, though, was that in Lear’s presence he was often left having no idea what to do.  He had a plan – be near the king. Check. But when the king will not come out of the storm, how can Kent force him? When Lear ultimately carries in Cordelia’s dead body and will not let her go, what is Kent to do? Often he is left doing what appears to be cowering, stuck in this “Should I go to him? But what would I do once I got there? I have no idea what to do next” limbo that, once I recognized it, fit his character perfectly. When it comes to his final line, though, there is no hesitation in his voice. He is not merely calm and resolute in his response to Albany, he is … I’m trying to find the word. At peace? He knows exactly what comes next, and the way he delivers his last line is almost pitying, like, “Oh you silly man, don’t you see what happens next? I follow my master.”   (Reminds me of the Lord of the Rings line,  “Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo!” If it had been Kent mourning over Lear’s body, this is exactly what he would have said. And you know what? If Fool was on stage at the same time I bet he would have said the same thing.)

I’m going to have to split this post into parts because it’s getting too long.  Before we go let’s talk about Edmund.

When we talk about villains sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in seeing them as the star of the show.  Consider Iago, after all. Othello is practically The Iago Show. He is so charismatic in everything he does and says that half the time the audience is left waiting impatiently for when he’ll come back.

You can kind of imagine Edmund like this. He goes from Gloucester’s bastard son to the romantic interest of both Goneril and Regan, so he’s got something going for him. He manipulates everyone around him.

But the play is not about him.  This is Lear’s play.  Edmund is what Edmund’s supposed to be – a bastard, in multiple senses of the word. His own father gives him a note detailing the enemy’s plans and says, “Whatever you do, don’t show this to Cornwall.” So of course he runs to Cornwall and says “Look what I have!’  Bastard. I didn’t spend any time at all admiring the personality that Edmund manages to convey.  There are none of those “Ooooo, that’s so evil it’s just brilliant” moments you get with Iago.  You just spend all your time with Edmund thinking, “I hope that son of a b*tch gets what’s coming to him.” Perfect.

Wait, before I go!  Goneril.  Oh dear god in heaven did I want to see her die on stage. She played her role so perfectly that, had I come with rotten tomatoes, they would have been flying in her direction. Which is exactly how it was supposed to be. Even just standing there she could put an expression on her face that made you want to wipe it off with a length of barbed wire.  Great job.

Ok, to be continued.  Otherwise I’m never going to get this posted!

 

Pacino as King Lear? Why else would I watch The Humbling?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment


I would never have heard of “The Humbling” if Google news alerts didn’t pop it up for a Shakespeare reference. It stars Al Pacino and is based on the Philip Roth novel, which I have not read.

The play opens with Pacino, dressed in a trenchcoat and looking like something out of Death of a Salesman, practicing the ages of man speech from As You Like It. It looks at first like he’s trying to remember his lines, but we soon see that he is trying to decide how he’s supposed to deliver them. The line between his acting and his reality is becoming a blur, and he’s having trouble differentiating between what he feels and what he’s only pretending to feel. After an event at the performance sends him to the hospital there’s a funny scene where he’s moaning in pain and asks the nurse, “Do you believe that? That I’m in pain?”  When she says she does he says, “I could do that better. Let me try it again,” and tries a different delivery. It’s not that he’s faking. He just can’t escape analyzing his own performance, even when it is reality.

Now we get to what I like to call the “not Shakespeare” part of the movie. He goes to rehab and meets a crazy stalker lady who wants him to kill her husband because as an actor he’s got experience. Then he comes home and starts a relationship with the daughter of some old friends of his, who happens to be a lesbian. He’s then quickly introduced to the past loves of her life, including the department head who she slept with to get her job, and a post-op transgender man who still wants her.

Or maybe not. Scenes often play out, only to reset as if they’d never happened. It becomes obvious that Pacino’s character is losing his mind, and some if not all of the above may not have ever happened. Throughout the film he engages in regular videoconference updates with his therapist, who also has trouble distinguishing what’s actually happening from what Pacino thinks is happening.

Now, back to the Shakespeare. After vowing never to get on stage again, Pacino is ultimately pulled back for a performance of King Lear. I mean sure, why not, a guy has a nervous breakdown during As You Like It, goes to rehab, swears off acting, of course you want to just throw him right into Shakespeare’s Mount Everest.  I’m ok with that, though, because it means we get to watch Al Pacino perform some of King Lear.

It’s an interesting movie, but it’s not a Shakespeare movie. It’s mostly Pacino, but in a way that I would have liked even more Pacino, if that makes sense? He’s surrounded by this crazy cast of characters that are all trying to take the focus away from his character and I found them more of an annoyance than anything else. It might be interesting if you’ve read the book, I suppose. Or if you’re a “see everything” Al Pacino fan. But other than that it didn’t do much for me.

Review : Strange Magic

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard that Strange Magic, Lucasfilm’s new animated effort was “inspired by Midsummer Night’s Dream” I wanted to be excited. I really did. I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, however.

Good thing. Whoever started throwing around Shakespeare’s name in the marketing for Strange Magic seems to have had about a high school student’s knowledge of the subject, at best.  A C student.

The way I explained “inspired by Shakespeare” to my kids went a little something like this:

There are basically three different ways that a movie can use Shakespeare. I’m not talking about actual movie versions of Shakespeare plays, I mean original movies that say they’ve got something to do with Shakespeare. First are the movies that come right out and talk about Shakespeare and use his words. Like Gnomeo and Juliet. Then there’s movies that don’t use any of his words, but try to tell a modern version of one of his stories.  (10 Things I Hate About You is the classic example here, though my kids don’t know that movie.) Then there’s movies that just take a single idea that came from Shakespeare and throw the rest away, thinking that just because they’ve got a boy and a girl whose parents don’t like each other they can call it Romeo and Juliet, or just because a king gets killed by his evil brother you can call it Hamlet with lions.

Strange Magic sits firmly in this final group.  There’s a love potion and there’s fairies, therefore we can claim it’s got something to do with Shakespeare. No humans.  No war between a king and queen of the fairies. There’s an “imp” who I guess we’ll call Puck who runs around throwing the potion on people for fun, but entirely minor characters in a single montage, that has nothing to do with the story. There is no parallel at all for Helena/Hermia/Demetrius/Lysander that I could figure out.

In fact, as I also pointed out to my kids, this story has more in common with a completely different Shakespeare story, and I bet the creators didn’t even realize it.  The king of the fairies has two daughters – Marianne and Dawn. (Trivia for you – on the television show Gilligan’s Island, the character of Marianne was played by Dawn Wells).  Marianne, for reasons that are obvious in the first two minutes, has sworn off love for good. Dawn, the younger sister, is boy crazy. The king basically won’t let Dawn get married until Marianne does.

Ok, show of hands, sound familiar to anybody?  That’s right, it’s Taming of the Shrew.

But, again, that’s as far as it goes. The actual story is all over the place, and honestly a pretty shameful product from a name like Lucasfilm. More than once I felt it was the kind of thing that seemed like it was written in about a half a day, and felt like one of my middle daughter’s straight-to-video Barbie movies.  There’s a good forest and a scary dark forest, and along the border between the two is the only place that the primroses grow.  And primroses are used to make love potion, of course. But only the Sugar Plum Fairy can make love potion. But the evil Bog King, ruler of the dark forest, has captured her and ordered that all the primroses be cut down (the latter, by the way, is a plot point that has absolutely zero bearing on the plot as the hero finds a primrose petal as soon as he goes looking for one). So of course the meek little best friend of the younger sister, who is secretly in love with her, gets convinced by the other bad guy, who wants to marry the older sister in order to raise an army (something else that’s never really explained), that he (the shy one) should go get a love potion, and then it all just gets weird.

Oh, and it’s a musical. Of cover songs.  Like a big Glee episode. When someone gets hit with the love potion they apparently just start singing “Sugar pie, honey bunch” over and over again.

Skip Strange Magic. I can’t really find anything worth recommending. It looks nice, I’ll give it that. But even that is weird, as none of the characters have that “I wish I could get that in a stuffed animal or action figure” appeal. The fairies look so human that every time they sprout wings you think “Where did THOSE come from?” and the goblins are so shapeless and generic that there’s even a joke in the script that they can’t tell their own gender apart.

Review : “Teaching Will” by Mel Ryane

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

So the other day, the good people at Familius wrote and asked if I’d like a review copy of Mel Ryane’s “Teaching Will : What Shakespeare and 10 Kids Gave Me that Hollywood Couldn’t“. A book about an actress who starts a Shakespeare Club at the local elementary school? How could I resist?

Having gone into my own children’s classrooms since they were in the first grade (which would translate to maybe six years old, for my non US audience), I admit that I was looking for tips. All I ever do is a one time unit on some Shakespearean topic of the teacher’s choice, I’ve never had the guts (nor the opportunity) to set up a full length after school program, culminating in a performance. This is exactly what the author does.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: my POV for stuff like this is always, “I’m in it for the Shakespeare.” The Shakespeare bits will exert their force on me like a magnet. The more Shakespeare, the more drawn I am into the book.

Having said that, there’s not much Shakespeare in this. This is primarily a book about the author’s adventures in trying to teach these children how to work together to achieve something that they and most everyone else thinks is beyond their abilities. But it could just as easily have been about teaching them how to sing, or play baseball. A scene where a child finally “gets” the rhythm of iambic pentameter might as well have been the scene where the catcher finally manages to get the cut off throw to second in time to tag the runner.

Perhaps my baseball analogy isn’t completely fair, however, because that makes it more about competition. You’d expect the big climax of a baseball story to be the ragtag team of misfits winning the big game. Shakespeare is not about competing with anyone or anything, except maybe your own limiting beliefs about what you can accomplish.

The big climax of this story is the performance at the end of the year. With each chapter comes a week of rehearsal, chaos and catastrophe, and I spent the entire book thinking, “She’ll never pull this off.” Half the time it was impossible to tell who was playing each role because half her students quit and the other half refuse to play the parts they are given. It seemed like every chapter ended with the author going home to her dinner with her husband, sipping a glass of wine and pondering why she’d gotten herself into this in the first place.

A few words on that subject. The book really tells three stories. First is the attempt to put on a Shakespeare performance (A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, by the way, if that wasn’t your obvious first guess). The second is the “behind the scenes” story where we learn all about the author’s interactions with the kids, their own family situations, and basically all about life outside Shakespeare Club. Which kids hate each other, and why? Which parents are supportive of the idea and which are just using it as glorified daycare? It probably should not come as a surprise that this had to be a … what’s the politically correct term to use here … ethnically diverse, lower income, dare I say “inner city” environment? Nobody ever seems to want to tell the story of upper middle income white kids? I admit to making the comparison to Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, only with elementary school children. I hope that doesn’t sound racist of me. It comes from a POV that I can’t escape. When I walk into a classroom and try to teach Shakespeare to kids I will not have to deal with those issues. I respect and appreciate that somebody is doing it, hey, more power to them. But it makes the story less relevant to my own life. If I went into this book looking for tips about how to wrangle children into performing Shakespeare, too much time was spent hitting me over the head with “yes but don’t forget where these kids come from and the other issues they have to deal with”. That’s true of every kid. Just because their stories are different doesn’t mean that they don’t all bring something unique to the party.

The third story is that of the author’s childhood and her relationship to her own parents. I just plain didn’t care for these bits. Whose story are you most interested in telling? I would have preferred more content about the actual play rehearsals. I suppose it’s only now that I realize the subtitle of the book is “What Shakespeare and 10 kids gave *me*…” so perhaps that was really her goal all along? If so, I clearly missed it.

But, back to the story. I approached the end of the book, the performance was only a week away, students were still fighting and dropping out and chaos still reigned. Through the entire book I’d been saying, “This is a failure, and it will end.” It did not. The show must go on, and it did. It’s not a big movie scene with the whole town packed into the auditorium. On the contrary, the author goes to great lengths to let us know that some of the parents could hardly be bothered to show up at all. The performance goes exactly as expected, mistakes are made, lines forgotten, props dropped, and generally the chaos of rehearsal projects itself upon the stage, exactly like you’d expect in any other elementary school production.

“When it was over, we all cheered.”

I admit with no shame that my eyes watered and my vision became blurry the instant I read that. Hell it’s happening again just recalling it so I can write this. Good god, isn’t that what it’s all about? They’re kids for heaven’s sake. Of course it’s not perfect. It’s not about perfection, it’s about accomplishment. They didn’t quit. The author didn’t quit. As a parent I know that feeling of cheering your brains out not for the quality of your child’s performance, but for the very fact that it’s your kid up on that stage, showcasing not how well they did it, but that they did it at all. That’s something to cheer indeed.

“Hamlet’s on my nuts!”

Ok, I’m not telling where that line shows up, I’ll just say that the book is not over at the performance of Midsummer, and when I got to this part I laughed so hard I cried all over again. I’m glad I excused myself from the room to finish the book, otherwise my friends and family would have thought I’d gone mad.

I get that this was not a handbook in how to teach Shakespeare to elementary school children (though I would have liked that very much). It took me most of the book to accept that. As I said at the beginning, the Shakespeare content is a magnet to me. Every scene or line that snuck its way into the text made me want more, and it was difficult not getting that. I think that Ms. Ryane’s story is an excellent one, very well told, and I’m very glad that it had a happy ending. I just wonder how important Shakespeare is to that story.

Review : The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

When Bardfilm showed me his early review copy of The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth
I was all, “Awwww!  Want.”

Then Ian wrote and asked if I wanted a copy as well and I was all, “Yay!”

This … can we call it a graphic novel? Tells the story of animals in the zoo putting on a performance of Macbeth.  Not only do you see the audience, the audience interacts with the show in a series of inset panels, commenting on the action and making various puns and other jokes. This has been done before (Marcia Williams’ books come to mind) but I like it even more here, because it doesn’t overpower the story. The audience gets a single panel at most, in context with the rest of the flow of dialogue. You don’t feel as if one story is talking over the other.

This is a very kid safe version of the story. Macbeth, a lion, does not kill people – he eats them (apparently whole, as they keep talking to him from inside his belly). There is no blood, there’s ketchup (and lots of it). Lady Macbeth, forced to do her husband’s laundry, cannot seem to get the ketchup stains out and this drives her a bit crazy.  As people begin to notice Macbeth’s increasing waistline, they start asking questions and he starts overeating.   The best part is that somehow Lendler manages to give us a happy ending, while staying pretty true to the original story (including a nice twist on the “not borne of woman” thing).

The best praise I can offer comes from my son, who is 8. Right now we are going through a tough time getting him to read. He sees it as a chore, and no matter what we put before him, he’ll kick and scream and go through the same routine even though he knows it never gets him anywhere. It’s worse than pulling teeth.

Well, when this book showed up I brought it to him and said, “You and I need to read this book. This is a big deal, because the man who wrote this book knows that I have kids, and that my kids like Shakespeare, and he thought we might like to read his book and write a review of it so other people can decide if they might like it.”  At first, without opening the book, he gave me the same eye roll and drooped shoulders I’ve become so familiar with.  But I persisted, and said that we should sit down and read Act 1 together, which we did.

The next day, before I went off to work, I told my son, “Don’t feel as if you have to wait for me, you know. I know that story. You can go ahead and read it without me.” Fast forward to later that night when I returned?  He tells me, “I finished the Macbeth book, Daddy. I like books like that, get more of those.” Not completely ready to trust that it had been that easy, I asked him to tell me the story. He told me of how Macbeth’s friend “Banksy” talked to much and got eaten, and how Macbeth’s wife had to do so much of his laundry to get the ketchup stains out that she used up all the soap in the castle, and how “Detective” Macduff eventually solved the mystery … but I’m not going to spoil the story for anybody. 🙂

Ian tells me that Romeo and Juliet is already planned, and I can’t wait. This one may not score highly on the classic Shakespeare scale, but I’m ok with that. I’d rather have a book like this that has my kids asking for more, than a more advanced book that I feel like they’re only reading to keep me happy.