Last night my parents are over for dinner.  My 3yr old, Elizabeth, holds her hand up and says, “Everybody listen!  I’m a Capulet, and you have to be quiet, because we’ve having a party.”  She then turns to everybody at the table and says, “You’re a Capulet, and you’re a Capulet, and you’re a Capulet too.” Cue my mother to ask, “What’s a capulet?” I love moments like this.  “That’s from Romeo and Juliet,” I tell her.  “Capulet is Juliet’s last name.  Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.” Elizabeth catches our attention again because of the face she is making.  “You have to do this,” she tells us, and I realize that she has covered her upper lip in grated cheese.  And then I get it.  In the movie we just watched, Sealed With A Kiss, the Capulets are having a party on board a ship.  The Capulets are the white seals, the Montagues are the brown seals.  So the way that Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo get into the party is to roll themselves around in the white sand until they look like the Capulet seals.  My daughter has figured out how to use the grated cheese to camouflage herself. “Are any of us Montagues?” I ask.  “If there are Capulets, there should be Montagues.” She thinks about this, then turns to her little brother.  “Brendan can be a Montague.” “So is he Romeo?  Do you marry him?” “No, Daddy, I marry you.  You can be Romeo.  The Prince wants to marry me but you come to the party and take me away.”   And so on.  That’s what dinner at my house is like :).

I’ve said it before, but hearing certain bits of Shakespeare spoken aloud makes lightning bolts shoot straight up my spine.  It’s like my brain suddenly tells the rest of my body, “Listen up!  Something good’s happening!  Get on the edge of that seat!” This makes the opening lines particularly special, as those mean “You’re about to get that feeling for the next 2-3 hours.”  I’ve heard it said that the opening sets the tone for the whole play.  The simple “Who goes there?” in Hamlet turns it into a great ghost story once you realize that the wrong guard says it.  Macbeth’s wyrd sisters start the play by confusing audience expectations, asking “When shall we three meet again”, as if we’ve just been dropped into the end of their discussion rather than the beginning.  I think my favorite, though, might be Romeo and Juliet, because I can really bring it all the way back to the first two words:  Two households.  Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I like things binary.  Shakespeare starts out the play by taking the universe of what’s about to unfold and dividing it right down the middle. You’re gonna have the X’s over here, and the not X’s over there.  Everything else is irrelevant, they are effectively the same thing in all variables except for one.  In this case their name, although it dawns on me that decades of directors portraying the conflict as a racial thing seems to diminish the value of the “What’s in a name?” series of speeches.  (For some reason that makes me think of the Star-Belly Sneetches.) What’s your favorite opening scene, and how fast does it hook you?  Do you have to wait for the “good stuff” or is it lightning bolts and edge of the chair action from the first time somebody opens his mouth?

Last thing I watched before dozing off last night was Slings & Arrows season 3, the one where they do King Lear.  I’m still early on, where they are rehearsing.  But sure enough didn’t I dream about being in the audience and watching those rehearsals? One crucial difference, though –  my brain had Patrick Stewart playing King Lear.  I like my brain.

No, not a hint of a new production coming…or maybe it is?  This morning while waiting for my commuter rail train (at the Anderson/Woburn station, for the locals), I noticed that somebody had slapped a Macbeth sticker over the word INBOUND, so that one of the billboards read MACBETH TO BOSTON.  I was intrigued, but the sticker had nothing on it other than the one word, and a little double triangle symbol like you might see on a train or airplane logo of some sort.

You know, all yesterday I tried to think of some reason to post about 3/15, the Ides of March, without being cliche and doing it just because. Well, I have no heat in my house now.  Something broke on the burner yesterday night.  It’s snowing, and the repairman tells me that we might not be able to get a part until Monday.  We’re in the process of packing up to spend the weekend at the in-laws as I speak. Beware The Ides of March!