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Sep. 21st, 2009 05:35 pmVacation round-up:
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fine, solid, B-plus production. The black leather and spike heels were, well, a choice a person makes when it's Dream for the nine millionth time and you have to think of something. Best Nick Bottom I've seen. An absurd curtain call; line-dancing? But fun nevertheless.
Phèdre: I give the performances an A and the script a B-minus. That Racine does go on, doesn't he. And this is a translation that preserves a lot of the French interpretation of the classical language, okay, so lots of epithets, no problem; but it also preserves a certain amount of the French language style, so there were places where I thought, huh, I'd have had that sentence with all those words in it but in a different order; and then there were a fair number of times when a sort of modern English turn of phrase crept in and was really jarring.
Julius Caesar: A-minus. Best Brutus I've seen, and I've seen some good ones.
Bartholomew Fair: Very silly. Good fun. I'd had some wine with dinner, which seemed to be exactly the way to see this play. :-)
Cyrano de Bergerac: A+++ would see again. The translation kept a lot of the original French, which I suppose would have been tiresome to audience members who didn't understand French. Sure enough, I wanted to smack Roxane and Cyrano upside the head, but I loved them anyway. Ragueneau the baker broke my heart, which surprised me, as I tend to forget that character is even there. Colm Feore as Cyrano got a standing ovation I haven't seen equalled in enthusiasm and unanimity since William Hutt played King Lear. I was totally right to plan the weekend so this play was last. :-)
My shoes tore the crap out of my right foot, though. Boo.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fine, solid, B-plus production. The black leather and spike heels were, well, a choice a person makes when it's Dream for the nine millionth time and you have to think of something. Best Nick Bottom I've seen. An absurd curtain call; line-dancing? But fun nevertheless.
Phèdre: I give the performances an A and the script a B-minus. That Racine does go on, doesn't he. And this is a translation that preserves a lot of the French interpretation of the classical language, okay, so lots of epithets, no problem; but it also preserves a certain amount of the French language style, so there were places where I thought, huh, I'd have had that sentence with all those words in it but in a different order; and then there were a fair number of times when a sort of modern English turn of phrase crept in and was really jarring.
Julius Caesar: A-minus. Best Brutus I've seen, and I've seen some good ones.
Bartholomew Fair: Very silly. Good fun. I'd had some wine with dinner, which seemed to be exactly the way to see this play. :-)
Cyrano de Bergerac: A+++ would see again. The translation kept a lot of the original French, which I suppose would have been tiresome to audience members who didn't understand French. Sure enough, I wanted to smack Roxane and Cyrano upside the head, but I loved them anyway. Ragueneau the baker broke my heart, which surprised me, as I tend to forget that character is even there. Colm Feore as Cyrano got a standing ovation I haven't seen equalled in enthusiasm and unanimity since William Hutt played King Lear. I was totally right to plan the weekend so this play was last. :-)
My shoes tore the crap out of my right foot, though. Boo.
