What you will
Sep. 18th, 2011 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomThere was a critically well-regarded production of Twelfth Night that closed this past weekend in Philadelphia. A couple days ago one of my roommates said she was planning to go see it on Saturday (i.e., today), and did I want to come along? I said that I'd love to, except I was going to be out of town on Saturday; would she maybe be interested in going on Friday instead? She said she'd check whether it was compatible with her other plans for Friday evening—the Friday performance was scheduled for 6pm, oddly—and she'd e-mail me during the day on Friday to tell me if she thought that would work.
I didn't hear from her all day Friday, so I had no idea what she'd decided to do about the play. But as it happened, as a result of walking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
midnight_sidhe to the bus station, that at 5:45 I was closer to downtown than I was to home, so I hopped on the subway to see if I could make it to the theater and grab a ticket before the show started. When I got there I had a brief moment of confusion when I realized I wasn't sure where the theater actually was, so I phoned my roommate, but before she actually answered the phone I found where it was and got in the ticket line.
At this point she called me back and before I could say anything she said, I'm so sorry I forgot to e-mail you, but it turns out they were totally sold out for tonight! I almost gave up and went home at that point, but I figured, hey, I'm here anyway; so I asked the ticket desk people if they were actually sold out or if it was just a nasty rumor. They said they were sold out, but there was a possibility some people who bought tickets might not show up, if I wanted to wait; it wasn't very likely, they told me, but hey, I was there anyway. So, after running across the street to an ATM, I joined the small clump of people waiting for the unlikely event of no-show ticket-holders.
In the end, we all got in! And we only missed the first scene. (They obviously couldn't designate someone a no-show until they didn't show up before the play began.) When I got home afterward, my roommate apologized again for not telling me that the show was sold out, but I can't hold it against her seeing as how if she had told me, I wouldn't have gone to see it!
This has apparently been a pretty good couple of months for me and critically well-regarded productions of Twelfth Night. I saw the Stratford Festival's production (still running! Go see it if you can!) when I was up in Ontario for Methods last month. It was supposed to be one of the official Methods conference excursions, but the excursion was canceled when not enough people signed up for it and I had to get there on my own. So indeed it's been a good couple of months for me beating the odds to see critically well-regarded productions of Twelfth Night.
The two productions had a lot in common, actually, especially with regard to their use of music. The Pig Iron production in the Philly Fringe used music in the Gypsy folk style, while the Stratford production used rock and roll, but both had full-size bands coming in and out of the stage at various times, and were filled with music even above and beyond the six or seven songs that Feste sings in the script. They were also both striking in the, I guess, sympathy with which Malvolio was portrayed—he's a funny character, of course, and the "bad guy" of the show, but both portrayals of him did a very good job of making the audience sympathize with his really nasty treatment at the hands of Toby and Maria. Also, of course, both productions had a cast of really first-rate comic actors, and a Viola and Sebastian who did a great job at actually looking similar.
I don't usually think of Twelfth Night as a play I like a lot, but that's probably just because of lingering resentment from the really ill-conceived production of it was in in high school. Perhaps it's time to revise that judgment.
I didn't hear from her all day Friday, so I had no idea what she'd decided to do about the play. But as it happened, as a result of walking
midnight_sidhe to the bus station, that at 5:45 I was closer to downtown than I was to home, so I hopped on the subway to see if I could make it to the theater and grab a ticket before the show started. When I got there I had a brief moment of confusion when I realized I wasn't sure where the theater actually was, so I phoned my roommate, but before she actually answered the phone I found where it was and got in the ticket line.At this point she called me back and before I could say anything she said, I'm so sorry I forgot to e-mail you, but it turns out they were totally sold out for tonight! I almost gave up and went home at that point, but I figured, hey, I'm here anyway; so I asked the ticket desk people if they were actually sold out or if it was just a nasty rumor. They said they were sold out, but there was a possibility some people who bought tickets might not show up, if I wanted to wait; it wasn't very likely, they told me, but hey, I was there anyway. So, after running across the street to an ATM, I joined the small clump of people waiting for the unlikely event of no-show ticket-holders.
In the end, we all got in! And we only missed the first scene. (They obviously couldn't designate someone a no-show until they didn't show up before the play began.) When I got home afterward, my roommate apologized again for not telling me that the show was sold out, but I can't hold it against her seeing as how if she had told me, I wouldn't have gone to see it!
This has apparently been a pretty good couple of months for me and critically well-regarded productions of Twelfth Night. I saw the Stratford Festival's production (still running! Go see it if you can!) when I was up in Ontario for Methods last month. It was supposed to be one of the official Methods conference excursions, but the excursion was canceled when not enough people signed up for it and I had to get there on my own. So indeed it's been a good couple of months for me beating the odds to see critically well-regarded productions of Twelfth Night.
The two productions had a lot in common, actually, especially with regard to their use of music. The Pig Iron production in the Philly Fringe used music in the Gypsy folk style, while the Stratford production used rock and roll, but both had full-size bands coming in and out of the stage at various times, and were filled with music even above and beyond the six or seven songs that Feste sings in the script. They were also both striking in the, I guess, sympathy with which Malvolio was portrayed—he's a funny character, of course, and the "bad guy" of the show, but both portrayals of him did a very good job of making the audience sympathize with his really nasty treatment at the hands of Toby and Maria. Also, of course, both productions had a cast of really first-rate comic actors, and a Viola and Sebastian who did a great job at actually looking similar.
I don't usually think of Twelfth Night as a play I like a lot, but that's probably just because of lingering resentment from the really ill-conceived production of it was in in high school. Perhaps it's time to revise that judgment.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 06:47 am (UTC)(Note: the last one is only a feature of the 1996 Trevor Nunn movie, but I really enjoy that movie.)
All told, I think it's my favorite of the comedies. Of course, it's up against As You Like It (of which I was in a fairly ill-conceived production in high school), Comedy of Errors (which is so amazingly shallow that it's written entirely in couplets to distract you from that), Kiss Me Kate (which isn't really that funny), Much Ado About Emma Thompson (which I just never took to), and, whatchacallit, Midsummer Night's Dream, which I've never seen.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 07:14 am (UTC)Come to think of it, another thing I found striking that the two Twelfth Nights I saw recently have in common, as does the movie, is the portrayal of Feste. The sort of default portrayal of Feste that one things of if one sees a lot of student theater—which I do—is for him to be goofy and quick and seemingly fairly young. Both recent production and the movie have Feste portrayed as world-weary and probably in late middle age, which is not really what the modern audience thinks of when we think of "the fool" as a character archetype.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 07:27 am (UTC)My reading of the play is probably influenced by the movie, but reading the clown's opening scene, he's quick-witted but his humor is oddly somber. He's starts by joking about hanging, and then once Olivia enters he calls her a fool for mourning a brother who is now in heaven. And lord knows his songs are melancholy. In the Shakespeare-on-the-Common production of it several years ago (some time in the early-to-mid-aughts, I forget exactly when), the setting was moved to a sort of 1950s era setting, and Feste was played as a jaded lounge singer carrying around his keyboard.
(Other fact I only just learned, searching the text: Feste is actually only named once in the text, and even the Dramatis Personae, as it appears on Project Gutenberg, refers to him only as "CLOWN, Servant to Olivia". Huh.)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 02:28 pm (UTC)I think there's a lot of Shakespeare characters whose names are never mentioned, or only once—Claudius from Hamlet certainly comes to mind. Also a decent number of Gilbert and Sullivan characters: Pish-Tush from Mikado, Cousin Hebe from Pinafore, and so on. (Hildegunde in Les Phys was named in their honor.)