Double, double, toil and trouble...

Shakespeare in Delaware Park presents Macbeth

Shakespeare in NYC, 2011

The Royal Shakespeare Company comes to Lincoln Center in 2011.

Can't wait!!

Hath not a Jew eyes?

Maureen Dowd on Shylock

The Quilled Crusader

Stratford, Day 02

Ex post facto... I did not review The Tempest in my earlier post. The artistic direction and set design nicely established the setting and the emotion of the first scenes, although I found the swaying of the sailors in the "tempest" a little overly done. It was also very hard to hear the lines in the first act. Choosing to set Miranda and Prospero at points around the theatre was a good choice, however her cries of "Father" were distracting. Julyana Soelistyo as Ariel, however, expressed the mischeviousness of the sprite with energy throughout the five acts.

Peter Hutt, as Alonso, King of Naples, appeared unaffected throughout much of the performance. His lines were devoid of emotion and bordered on monotone. One wonders if he was feeling under the weather but decided to perform due to the recording of this performance. Trish Lindstrom's Miranda felt too rushed and boisterous to portray a girl marooned on an island with only her father for company. In all, Christopher Plummer, as Prospero, and Lindstrom presented a father-daughter pair all too complicit in their laughter and thoughts. I felt no tension between the 15-year-old girl and the overly aged Prospero.

Caliban (Dion Johnstone), Trinculo (Bruce Dow) and Stefano Geraint Wyn Davies) made amicable companions in the play's comic (and subtly tragic) sub-plot. As a "fishy" Caliban, Johnstone's diatribe against Miranda and Prospero deftly countered what they argue is their island utopia.

An odd bit of staging was the wedding masque in Act IV. The three goddesses appeared to threaten more than bless and used opera as the vehicle for their lines.

In all, the play was a success, mostly due to Plummer's charismatic presence, the comic actors, and the sub-plots of usurpation from both Antonio and Caliban.

So, apparently no camera came with us around Stratford our second day except the one on Turner's cell phone. We took Bella to a dog park and had a picnic lunch on the banks of the Avon. It rained in the evening but cleared up just before we went to the evening performance of As You Like It, which I liked very much, although again some of the stage design seemed frivolous and disconnected from the action in the play.

Shakespeare's Flowers

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;

Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,

And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.

Sonnet 35

I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,

Than such a Roman.

Julius Caesar

Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant Nettles or sow Lettuce, set Hyssop, and weed up Thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

Othello

There thou prick'st her with a thistle.

Much Ado About Nothing

...from the gardens in Stratford.

Stratford, Day 01

The town of Shakespeare, Ontario is located just outside Stratford. Coming from Buffalo, we saw this sign first so I made Turner pull over so we could take a picture. Imagine living in Shakespeare. "Where do you live?" "Shakespeare." "No, really, where?" The town is not much to see, a few dusty roads and some lonesome shops. It clearly has not benefited from the theatrical boom of its neighbor down the road.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival was the idea of an entrepreneurial young man, Tom Patterson, who wanted to get the town out of the depression following the dissolution of much of the area's industry. The town was already named Stratford, an etymological discussion Turner and I had in the car (which came first? Stratford or Shakespeare?), and a Shakespearean Theater Festival seemed like a marketable idea for this out-of-the-way place.

Patterson convinced British actor and director Tyrone Guthrie to take on the festival's inaugural season. On July 13, 1953, Alec Guinness spoke the first lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent." An ironic beginning for a summer festival that would play for four years in a steamy tent outdoors on the bank of the River Avon.

In 1957, the festival moved to the Festival Theatre, whose exterior was designed to resemble the original tent and whose thrust stage is modeled on a classic Greek amphitheater and Shakespeare's own Globe.

The festival has seen its fair share of stars cross the boards, from Alec Guinness the first season to Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer (who we saw play Prospero in The Tempest). The festival has long maintained a reputation nationally and internationally for its contributions to the arts.

And oh, the gift shop. A whole store dedicated, more or less, to Shakespeare. I was like a kid in a candy store. I bought three t-shirts, some small items, a book, and a Shakespeare action figure. Yes, that's right. A Shakespeare action figure.

Check out that grin. Shakespeare loot!

Cleaning Out the Fridge

Today was get-everything-done day. We are leaving tomorrow morning for our road trip west to Minnesota, via Stratford, Ontario and northern Michigan. I had some vegetables left over from our weekly CSA haul: beets, summer squash, and lettuce. The fridge also needed cleaning out before we left.

We also took it upon ourselves to spend time sweating profusely in the berry bushes near our house in order to make more jam. Eleven cups of berries and 5 1/2 cups of sugar later and I have four pints of blackberry lime jam.

The cleaning-the-fridge dinner consisted of a salad of local ingrediants, including the boiled beets from above, and Israeli couscous with garlic, onion, summer squash, and feta.

To drink, Rogue Shakespeare Stout, a fitting send-off for our trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival tomorrow. We are seeing The Tempest with Christopher Plummer and As You Like It. A trip to Canada also means no cell coverage and chancy wireless, so the blog posts may be postponed until the road tripping is complete.

Stay cool!

“Nothing, I see, is good without respect.”

Review of Merchant of Venice in NY Times. Played at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Al Pacino plays Shylock, the maligned, misunderstood Jew, in what I imagine is a very poignant critique of our money-hungry world.

Photo courtesy of Sara Krulwich/The New York Times