My regular readers know that I’ve been waiting for this show for a year.  You see, I quite literally work across the street from Boston Common now.  So last year, after less than stellar seats at Taming of the Shrew, I told my wife, “Next year, for one night, I want to just walk over here after work and camp out.  Get myself a nice spot.” Then I found out that the show would only be a week this year, limiting my flexibility somewhat drastically.  Worse, the location they chose on the Common meant that they would be jamming 3x as many people into half the space.  A space, mind you, strewn about with park benches (facing the wrong way), trees,  and a big ol’ gazebo. On top of that, the play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which most of us have seen more than any other play because it’s basically the safest, “all ages” play there is. Just got back. I LOVED IT. Loved the costumes, loved the acting, loved the music, loved everything about it!  I am thrilled to have seen that.  Ok, fine, it was a little “Circ Du Soleil”, like another reviewer said.  Everybody was dressed in colors that looked like the play was performed under a black light.   But how is that a slight against it?  The whole idea is that once the main characters have entered the forest, you need something that signifies they’ve entered a whole new world.  Dressing the Athenians in pure white, and then dressing all the fairies in day glo yellows and oranges, certainly does that. The bare stage concept worked stunningly well.  Back to basics, as it were.  The fairies carried balloons with them wherever they went, which I am assuming were supposed to represent the trees.   And there was a massive trapdoor right in the middle of the stage from which people could appear as needed.  Puck even managed a trick or two of his own, “disappearing” off the edge of the stage by what appeared to be quite literally just diving off the edge.  Tomorrow morning I’ll have to see if I can sneak over and see how he did that, I’m guessing some sort of mat or cushion he was diving onto. The mechanicals were excellent, but how can they not be?  They’re so over the top in their badness that it’s almost impossible to do them badly.  Helena stole the show for me, but doesn’t she always?  I have to admit I was more distracted than anything else by Oberon, who looked and sounded like a character out of the Lion King (complete with African headdress).  If I have to pick a fault, I’d have to say that the performance itself was nothing stellar.  Theseus goofed his opening line.  The dancers were not in sync, and the singers were out of tune.  The music was excellent, and the dancing fit well where they put it, I’m just saying that as far as performing goes they didn’t come off like professional singers and dancers, you know? I’m going back on Saturday.  

http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news-cms/news/?dept=4&id=45827&template=7 Well, I just found out that the guy doing QA on my team here at work used to teach Hamlet.  Nice.  After a lengthy discussion of Shakespeare, and specifically A Midsummer Night’s Dream that begins tonight, he sent me the above link to an interview with William Carroll about the play’s appeal, popularity, and underlying themes.   

Here’s a question that occurred to me the other day, and I don’t know the answer.  Shakespeare had a son, Hamnet, who died as a child.  He also had two daughters, Susana and Judith, who got married and had families of their own.  Interestingly, Judith named one of her children “Shakespeare” as a first name(*), which leads to my question… What happened to the Shakespeare family name?  How long did it last after William, since he had no heir to pass it down? A little bit of searching turns up Shakespeare’s Family Tree which shows that although Shakespeare did have several brothers (Gilbert, Richard and Edmond), it appears that none of them married.  His sister Joan married, but again, same problem, what happens to the Shakespeare family name?  Was William it?    (*) I know at least one couple who had a similar issue – she was an only child, and while she did want to take her husband’s name, she wanted to do something to recognize her father’s family name.  So she posed the idea of having her current last name be the baby’s first, or at least middle, name.  They didn’t go through with it.  Judith’s Shakespeare, by the way, was her first born, who apparently only lived one year.  Sad, but common in the day.  Don’t worry, Judith.  We remember your dad’s name.

Hurray!  Free Shakespeare returns to Boston next week!  They’ve begun setting up the stage, and my path to work each morning walks me right past it.  I don’t know when I became such a geek for this stuff (never stood on a stage in my life), but part of me each morning wants to walk over and just kind of touch it a little bit.  In just a few days there’s going to be something beautiful there.  I may be pissed off that it’s such a short run this year, and I may be bummed that it is Midsummer’s again, a play that’s done in every high school in the land.  But you know what?  It’s Shakespeare, and it’s free, and it’s so close I can touch it.  I do so love this stuff. My wife and I have already worked out the plan, I’m basically going to just camp out one night next week on my way home from work.  I mean, come on, I’m going to walk right past it, how can I not take the opportunity to just plunk myself down on the grass and get a choice spot?   Ooo, maybe I’ll bring a camera?  We’ll see if we can arrange a sitter during the weekend so that she can come in and catch a performance as well.  The only thing I haven’t figured out is getting home, I’m not thrilled about walking back to the train station at 11pm or so.  But I’ll worry about that later.   

My father in law is a lawyer.  As such he tends to be a very good debater, and is rather forceful in his arguments.  In other words, when he talks I basically listen.  As I’ve pointed out to my wife, “Your dad is a defense attorney, and defense attorneys don’t win cases by saying Hmm, you know, you’ve got a point there, I never really thought of it that way.” Anyway, we’re hanging out in the pool over the weekend and discussing family trips to Disneyworld.  I point out that there’s lots of other places in the world I still want to see, such as, “Going to England to do the whole Shakespeare thing.” “There’s a Shakespeare theatre in Connecticut,” he counters.  “You can go down there, see the recreation of the Globe, all that stuff.” “Not good enough,” I said.  “I’d want to visit the church where he’s buried.” “Where somebody is buried,” he said.  “They don’t even know who he was.”  Pause. Disbelief. I’m sorry, did my father in law just say what I think he did? “I’m confused,” said my mother-in-law. “I thought Shakespeare was Shakespeare.” “They think that some nobleman of the time wrote everything,” he continued, “And just signed the name Shakespeare.” “You’re probably thinking of the Earl of Oxford,” I said, “And there are just as many theories that it was Francis Bacon or even Queen Elizabeth. ” Mother-in-law : “So there’s no such person as Shakespeare?” Father-in-law : “Not really.” “Not true,” I said, “There most definitely was an actor named Will Shakespeare, he was born in Stratford and is buried there.  We know that.  The question is whether there’s evidence that he wrote the plays.  People believe that because there’s no evidence of his education that he couldn’t possibly have written was most people consider the greatest literature of the last 400 years.  You don’t really want to get into this with me.” I then gave my mother in law a crash course in Shakespearean history while my father in law got bored and hung out in the pool.  Man, I enjoyed that.  Beats the holy heck out of arguing about George Bush any day.