What Wouldn’t I Do For Shakespeare on the Common? Part 1

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I have been attending Commonwealth Shakespeare’s Shakespeare on Boston Common show pretty much since I knew it existed, in 2003 (they’ve actually been doing it since 1996). I have seen their Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Shrew, Dream, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Othello, Coriolanus, and All’s Well That Ends Well.  The only show I missed was the 2005 Hamlet, and as I’ve joked in the past, it haunts me to this day.  

This year thus marked my 10 year anniversary!  The show? Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Ok, I suppose.  On the one hand I’m all, “Eh.  Really?”  But on the other, I’ve never seen the show, so I can add it to my collection.
 My wife and I were supposed to go last week.  The kids were staying over their grandparents for the night anyway, so the timing was perfect.  But when my wife asked what time the show was and I checked the calendar I discovered that they were dark that night, because of some other festival that was sharing the stage.  Drat!
So we arrange to go this past Friday.  It’s been raining off and on all week, but the weather report for Friday says “Early showers” with nothing for the evening. Great.  We pack a picnic.  I’ve got a raincoat with a hood, my wife chooses a fleece.  She figures it may not rain but it will definitely get chilly. 
We hit the road at 5:30pm.  Granted we’re north of Boston and there’s going to be traffic, but still, we should be where we need to be within an hour.  Nope!  Two hours.  Raining the entire time.  It was awful. The things I screamed at the drivers around me, I’m still ashamed of.
The whole time I’m dialing the hotline, checking to see whether the show is still on.  “Still on!” it keeps telling me, despite the fact that we’re coming up on 7:30 for an 8pm show and it’s been raining steadily.  Still, we keep telling ourselves that maybe it’s clear where the show is, so we continue.
We make it all the way in to town, now seriously convinced that the show’s got to be cancelled.  We don’t even bother bringing the picnic basket out of the car, having decided that plan B will be to wander over to a bar/restaurant and get out of the rain.
We get to the Common at about 7:45, still raining.  People standing around with umbrellas.  None of the VIP chairs have been set up.  There’s techs up on stage squeegeeing puddles away.  I ask what’s up, I’m told that they won’t cancel the show until the very last minute, possibly even “doing like they do in baseball” and delaying the start.  I make small talk with the fans around me, trying to decide whether it will be a good or a bad idea to cancel this show.  There’s two shows on Saturday but I am entirely booked for the day, which would leave me only Sunday night as a fallback.  “I’ve only  missed one show in ten years,” I tell the woman I’m talking to, “And that was because I waited until the last weekend and got rained out. And that was Hamlet!”
“We did get to see the Hamlet,” she tells me.  And then, after a pause, “Oh, yeah, that one was really good!”
Son of a ….!!!  Didn’t I tell you it still haunts me?
For the next 45 minutes we sat in the rain.  My wife’s miserable because she doesn’t have a raincoat, so I give her mine.  We haven’t brought our picnic so we have no drinks or food.  All we can do is listen to the conversation around us, most of which consists of, “It’ll clear up any minute, I just know it!  Look on the horizon, it looks clear over there!”
We watch the actors come out and discuss.  Two of them, who I soon learn are Proteus and Valentine, practice their stage combat to see if they’re going to literally kill themselves.
I start offering to my wife that we can leave.  Provided that she understands I simply must return on Sunday, no ifs ands or buts.  She’s a trooper, though, and playing the “We’ve waited this long” card, argues that we can wait until there’s at least a decision.  “We’ll just leave at intermission,” she tells me.  I give her what may have been a pitiful look or a murderous one, I’m not sure.
Then, around maybe 8:30….the rain stops. The show will go on!  Now they have to setup all the stuff that they didn’t setup in the rain, so it’ll be just a littttle bit longer.    I’m dispatched to the car to get the picnic basket.
The show did not start until after 9 :(.  Normally wouldn’t trouble me, but we’ve got a baby sitter at home and now we’re not going to be getting back until approaching 1am.
How was the show?  You’ll have to wait for Part 2! 

Is The New Romeo & Juliet Movie Going To Be As Bad As It Looks?

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

There’s a new trailer up for the Hailee Steinfeld Romeo & Juliet movie, and I was very excited to see it.  I’m of the believe that that DiCaprio Romeo + Juliet movie may not have been high art, but was an important step in bringing Shakespeare to young “MTV” audiences.  So when I saw the trailer posted by MTV News I had high hopes.

There’s a soundtrack, and it’s a cool trailer, I’ll give it that.

But … oh, oh god.  It’s not Shakespeare. They just went ahead and wrote their own dialogue.

Let’s play a game.  Watch the trailer, and mark two points – the first time you hear dialogue that is so very clearly NOT Shakespeare that you can’t stand it … and the point at which you hear so much of it you can’t watch anymore.

For me the first time is the bit at the ball where somebody says, “The Capulets and Montagues are mortal enemies!”

REALLY?  What genius script writer felt the need to add that little bit of exposition?  Show me don’t tell me, isn’t that what they teach in writing 101?

As for the second, my finger was hovering over the STOP (for the love of god, STOP!) button when Tybalt shows up, uttering such Shakespearean classics as, “Don’t let that name be spoken in this house!”  and my favorite, which I knew was coming from an earlier trailer, “Come settle with me, boy!”

But out of my love for Shakespeare and for you my loyal geeks, I had my coworkers tie me to down to the armrests of my chair and forced myself to watch through to the end.

The trailer ends with Hailee doing a voiceover of the “Give me my Romeo” speech that just sticks a fork in the entire thing, because it’s just plain bad.  It sounds like somebody handed her a complete works (perhaps the No Sweat version) and told her, “Read this.”

Am I overreacting?  Will we be talking about this one 20 years later like we do with Luhrman’s version?  Maybe by then at least Hailee Steinfeld will be old enough that I won’t look at her like a babyfaced child when she flops herself down on the bed under Romeo. Ewww.

Shakespeare’s Voice

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

File this one under, “I’m surprised I never wondered about this before…”

When Daniel Day Lewis portrayed Lincoln last year he gave the president a high, nasal voice that sent many into hysterics.  It’s simply not done that way!  Everybody that’s ever portrayed Lincoln has always given him a deep booming voice.  But Lewis (or is it Day Lewis?), known for the depths of research into the character, decided that his version would be the more realistic one.
What’s that got to do with Shakespeare?  Well, I’m wondering – what do you think Shakespeare’s voice sounded like?
I was thinking of a game.  Not a blog game or a hashtag game, but a video game.  And in this imaginary video game, when you finished a level, a little animated ghost of Shakespeare would tell you “Job well done!” or something more linguistically appropriate.  My first thought was, “I’ll consult Ben Crystal on the subject of original pronunciation to learn how it would sound.” 
But then I thought, no, that would tell me how the characters on stage would sound. And that’s not the same thing.  I’m curious what Mr. Shakespeare himself sounded like when he spoke.
The idea is weird to me.  I simply never think about him speaking.  We think about him writing, to be sure.  Earlier today Bardfilm made a reference to just how tired a man’s hand can get after writing out the plays in long hand.  We have the image of the man working in front of his parchment, quill in hand, often by candlelight, churning out the words as we have them today.  But when he went to work and talked to his actors … what then?
If Daniel Day Lewis decided to play William Shakespeare, what do you think he’d do with the character?  You know what, I’ll even open it up wider because I like that idea.  Seriously, what would Daniel Day Lewis do with the character of Shakespeare do you think?  Any attributes are wide open for discussion.  Would he bring Shakespeare’s rumored syphilis into the portrayal, and if so, how might that show itself?  What about his rumored marijuana habit?  What do we think Shakespeare weighed during his life?  We so often only see the headshot, after all.  Would Mr. Lewis have to put on some pounds, or lose some?