What Makes A Good Shakespearean Comedy?

~ duane ~ 10 Comments

I mean right now, to present day audiences.  What’s a good comedy, and why?  Is Shrew better than Much Ado?  Twelfth Night over As You Like it?  Say that you had opportunity to get all the comedies in front of a group of people who otherwise aren’t Shakespeare fans, and who were just looking to be entertained / get a laugh.  Which come out on top of the pile? Is it the slapstick?  Do people need to be falling over each other and wrestling in the mud? Or maybe it’s a “timeless issues” thing, like the battles between men and women, or everything that surrounds a “romantic comedy”?  People laugh at what they recognize to be true, so to speak.  I still contend that this is the primary reason for the popularity of Shrew. Does the writing and the dialogue count for much?  If you have one guy out on the stage saying witty things, will he carry the audience’s good favor and end up at the top of the pile?  Or most often does the witty dialogue go over people’s heads? I’m curious if we can get a discussion going on the subject.  Recently Alan was hyping the value of Shrew over in a different thread.  Having just seen AYLI for the first time, I can say that I thought a line like Rosalind’s “Don’t you know I am a woman?  When I am thinking, I must speak” (or however it was said) would have brought the house down, but it barely registered.  But the simple exchanges between Jaques and Orlando: “Rosalind is your love’s name?”
  “Yes, just.”
“I do not like her name.” and “I was seeking for a fool when I found you.”
   “He is drowned in the brook: look but in, and you shall see him.” Got a much better reaction.  The second in particular, Jaques didn’t even have to follow up with the “There I shall see mine own figure” to get the laugh, people understood it without that. 

Lorem Ipsum William Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

When marketing and design folk need generic copy to fill space, they use something called “Lorem Ipsum”, a sort of greek gibberish that pours out of generator scripts in as long and varied a length as you need it: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Sed vel nibh id augue tincidunt feugiat. Integer auctor ante at sapien volutpat ultrices. Donec congue. Suspendisse pellentesque. Proin vitae augue. Aliquam sapien metus, cursus vel, rutrum vel, pharetra eu, felis. Donec sed diam sed eros ullamcorper commodo. Duis faucibus ante eget justo. Aenean sollicitudin purus sollicitudin arcu. Nulla a turpis id tortor congue gravida. Praesent sodales cursus est. Nullam eu enim. Sed dolor nunc, accumsan ut, mattis vitae, consectetuer sit amet, ipsum. Etiam scelerisque nisi porta risus. Donec velit. Curabitur lobortis, dui quis condimentum bibendum, dui metus lacinia tortor, nec tincidunt lacus diam sed est. Cras et arcu ac nisi auctor pretium. As a software developer I tend to work more in objects and actions than in actual copy.  Right now for instance I’m doing a database of relationships between people and educational institutions, so I’ve got a database full of stuff like “Gertrude is the parent of Hamlet, Claudius is the husband of Gertrude.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are former friends of Hamlet.  Horatio is a friend of Hamlet. Horatio and Hamlet are students at Wittenberg….”  and so on, for testing the various branches of the system.  (Like, Gertrude as the mother of a student might by default be allowed certain permissions, whereas her new husband does not get those same rights.  Similarly, Horatio’s friendship with Hamlet allows for functionality that R&G no longer get…) I find it fun, and I like to think I’m educating my coworkers 🙂

Rotten Tomatoes Does Shakespeare

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/guides/greatest_shakespeare_movies/1097245-hamlet/ Rotten Tomatoes, a popular movie review website known for unapologetically telling it like it is when it comes to the movies, has put up it’s “Top 30 Shakespeare Movies.”  Fans and purists alike are sure to find stuff to infuriate :). I am only disappointed in one thing, and that is that they seem to have gone through their database and grabbed everything that mentions Shakespeare.  So for instance Lion King is on the list (and ranks relatively high), but it’s hardly a Shakespeare movie.  It’s only borderline Hamlet-inspired, at best. Also worth mentioning is Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet, which we were trashing last week.  Yeah, it’s 30 out of 30.

Review : As You Like It, Boston Common 2008

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

I tell myself every year, don’t go with people. 🙂 

The show’s been rained out for a week so the crowd is huge.  I convince our dinner dates to skip dessert so we have any chance at all of getting a seat.   Our seats are in the back, and they stink.  We can see people walking around on stage, but anything that involves sitting on the stage, or worse, down in front of the stage, we’ll have just audio.

The opening few scenes worried me a bit.  I was thinking that they’d catch the audience’s attention, what with the fight between Oliver and Orlando happening so quickly.  But, first disappointment.  Orlando throws him instantly into a quick hammerlock sort of hold, and that’s that.  No fight.  Later, the fight with Charles goes on longer, but not any better.  I was hoping for something more in the judo/grappling style, but what I got was bad professional wrestling.  Seriously.  Punching, kicking, all that sort of thing.  Perhaps they thought they were making it look like the popular “mixed martial arts” style.  These folks could have learned something from the WWE, such as “When you are going to pretend to drive your knee up into the head of your opponent, but you’re going to come short by about a foot?  Yeah, don’t be turned *toward* the audience so they all see that.”  That’s why I thought maybe more of a grappling style, because it seems to be safer to teach someone to fall realistically than to actually hit each other realistically.

Rosalind and Celia were handled much better.  For my taste, they did the “giggling school girl” thing a bit too much (complete with that clichéd “grab each other by both hands/forearms and then screaming while jumping up and down in a circle”), but if that’s what works for the audience, it won’t kill me. 

The forest scenes were interesting.  Maybe somebody who saw the show can tell me….why the plane?  The forest scene involves a downed airplane, and I think from the distance we were at, that Duke Senior was dressed as an aviator.  So I’m guessing the interpretation was “the exiled Duke was flying from his kingdom when he crashed in the forest”?  I don’t recall any specific references to it, expressed or implied. Pretty big prop to never mention.

I don’t think the crowd really got Touchstone (who was dressed in a bright yellow suit that made me alternately think “vaudeville” and “carnival barker”).  His humor, that whole sort of “I’m bored so I will play a wordgame with you”, never really seemed to get much of a laugh.

Jaques, on the other hand, got a reaction every time.  Someone had told me that the actor playing this role was Bottom last year, and once I knew that, it was hard to hear anything else.  Maybe he’s got all the funniest lines, or maybe he just delivers them better.  [Can I just admit, I would never have thought about pronouncing the name Jay-Kwees?  I just always assumed it was like the French “Jack”.  This is my first time seeing AYLI performed.]

One telling moment came when he began, “All the world’s a stage…”  and I swear, the crowd noise ceased and heads turned.  It was like people otherwise bored with the show suddenly perked up and went “Ohhhhhh!  THIS is where that comes from!”  I thought it was funny as all heck.

Anyway, the rest of the show goes pretty much as you might expect.  Rosalind’s got all the good stuff, especially in her interaction with Orlando.  Her pretending to be a man (and often forgetting) has probably all been done before, but that doesn’t make it not funny.   I think the audience, for the most part, could have done without the whole Phebe/Silvius subplot, which really seems like it’s there to flesh out the second half.

I can’t say I loved it.  It was nice, and funny in the expected places, but what else can I really say?  Sometimes the acting seemed pretty wooden, other times it seemed like they went for the easy interpretation (like all the giggling schoolgirl stuff).  Our friends left at intermission.  Not being big Shakespeare fans to begin with, the lousy seats just put it over the top.  My wife stuck it out with me (what’s she gonna do, I’ve got the keys? :)) although toward the end she was asking me to point to paragraphs in the synopsis to see how far along we were. Of the comedies I’ve seen on the Common (Dream, Shrew, Much Ado, AYLI), this one ends up fourth of the four.  Somebody’s gotta be, I suppose.