These last weeks have been busy and scattered. Mostly in good ways. At the end of January I went to Washington DC for a reading at the Kennedy Center, and last weekend I watched the annual 24-Hour Science Fiction Film Marathon at the Somerville Theater in Boston. Between those bookends we were, of course, pounded by the cold. Last night it rained, and the bulk of our leftover snow washed away. Not all of it, but most.
Last night we had our first table read rehearsal for Romeo & Juliet. We'll be moving fast on this one, and in just a few short weeks it will be a whole new season out there.
This is a new key, and it should work fine. Please let me know if you have trouble with it.
Oooh interesting. What was the reading?
Since we discussed it last year, I subbed the newsletter just to see what would be on the program. Man, I wish I'd been there. I would have been on the road for hours just for a chance to see Forbidden Planet on the big screen!
I went to a production of Romeo & Juliet recently where they were mixing the original text with rap numbers. It was interesting but some of the actors had trouble wrapping their heads around the Bard's lines. Others did great with the text but were not exactly there for the rapping. I imagine the crossover acting population who can do Shakespeare justice and rap is pretty small lol
When's the first performance?
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Meant to answer earlier, but the days got away from me. The reading was called October 7: In Their Own Words, and it's a show I've been involved with on and off for a bit. It's a Gaza show, so I don't always talk about it since people tend to jump to conclusions. But the show, which is a Verbatim Play, is drawn from a bunch of interviews with survivors of the Hamas attack, and it's really very beautiful. Stories about tragedy and rescue, words from the small heroes. A man drives across the country to try to save his wounded daughter, a woman hides in a safe room and meditates about art to keep herself sane, kids escape from the music festival. An Orthodox man breaks the Sabbath to drive around all day rescuing people fleeing from the festival wreckage (that's my character). Since there's no plotting, it's just the stories - and, thus, individual versions of real truth, from a powerful and awful day. The interviews were done about ten days after the attacks.
Forbidden Planet was a treat! I had seen nearly everything on the schedule this year, on big screens and small, but it's hard to beat seeing some of them go around again. It was a particularly good program this year, though not much in the way of nuance - mostly a parade of hits.
Shakespeare can be very elastic and open to interpretation, but too often the work is sloppy. We generally do no-frills productions with an emphasis on clarity. We open, lessee, March 12. Yikes, that's soon.
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I read about the play ofc. I don't really have an opinion about it as I haven't seen it or read it but I can imagine how it could be contentious. Things are rather crazy right now about the whole thing. It's quite typical in our post-social media world to be polarized about everything but things are really out of hand right now about the whole thing. I have been called both an anti-semite and a "genocide lover" in the course of the same conversation with a group of people. Both by people who in their zeal to "stand" for others, wrote out the humans in the "opposite side".
I bet! So jealous but also so happy those movies are still being played for an audience. I miss sci-fi with a message. It seems now it's all about CGI and looking great but not so much about what lies at the core of it.
As I was saying: this is not the century for nuance. I guess they're aiming at the largest possible audience and it's ok too as long as they provide such an esteemed lineup
I love Shakespeare in every shape or form but the best productions I've seen were always the ones with original text exactly because of the clarity. When you take liberties with Shakespeare, you feel you can give yourself a pass on really understanding it but productions that work with the plays in their original form have to really understand it first and that translates to the audience.
Heh break a leg!
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thx :D
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