Rewriting Shakespeare's Histories

I dislike Shakespeare.

Glad I got that off my chest.

I understand the reverence in which he is held to an extent. He is, for an early modern playwright, remarkably accessible. And his writings cover a range with more talent than anyone else in the era. If you want one many for histories and tragedies and comedies and sonnets, well, you can do no better than Shakespeare.

But, and I know this is not a new or original critique, if you want one thing executed perfectly, never look to Shakespeare. None of Shakespeare's tragedies can touch Marlowe's Edward II (which I suppose is more properly a history) or Faustus. I prefer Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle and Johnson's Alchemist for comedies, and I favor Donne and Milton as poets.

So maybe the proper thing to say is not, "I dislike Shakespeare" but "I disagree with the notion that he is the greatest playwright of his era, let alone the argument that he is the greatest ever."

All the same, I'm always a little appalled when someone tries to re-write Shakespeare, and especially appalled when that person is a homophobic whacko. It has been demonstrated time and again that the internet was specifically designed to mock people like that.

But the Scott Lynch piece I linked above reminded me that just a couple weeks ago, a friend and I were working on a five act adaption of Henry IV 1, IV 2 and Henry V.

Pippin: Fixing a Musical

I was enthralled by the Broadway revival of Pippin I saw a few weeks ago. The chorus of Players formed an acrobatic miniaturized Cirque du Soleil.

But why pay $150 bucks to see Cirque du Soleil, Jr. on Broadway when you could just go to see the real thing? The answer, of course, is that you shouldn't.

It's not really the performance the impressed me about Pippin, but the imaginativeness of the reinterpretation. Pippin is one of my favorite musicals; it's the one musical in which Stephen Swartz's lyrics live up to the promise of his music, and it features my favorite kind of character- the narrator who can talk to the audience while interacting with other characters onstage. Pippin is the sort of meta-musical that keeps me interested in theatre. It winks at the form's shortcomings and makes full use of the strengths.

The one flaw the show could not wink away is the cast. As a soundtrack, Pippin is a sequence of solos and duets, punctuated by three choral numbers. But the show needs a big cast; even double casting the leads into chorus parts when they're not "on stage" leaves you with a cast of nine or ten, and I've never seen a production with the ensemble that small.

The Fantasticks and Rotten Musicals

A couple weekends ago I dragged my friends to a local production of The Fantasticks.

I'd never seen it, which is most of why I wanted to go. I wouldn't claim to have seen every musical that's worked its way into community theatre level repertoire, but I've seen most of them. The Fantasticks is probably the most famous one that comes immediately to mind (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is now the frontrunner).

At this point, I want to say "It was fantastic," but that would be punny, and I wouldn't do that.

It was joyous. The first act was deft: a musical about the tropes of musicals in the way that How I Met Your Mother is a tv show about sitcoms. Maybe that wasn't the way it was written back in 1960, but that's the way it plays to me in 2013. The impossible happens; really it's expected and accepted, and we're going to sing about it. The actors mostly covered their fault with enthusiasm and clear diction, but the show really drew me in.

Seeing the Strings

It's no secret I dislike Dickens because Dickens hates a loose end, so everything ties up nice and neat.

And that's the worst, when you can see the strings that connect the characters to the author. Michael Crichton was guilty of it, too (it seemed like his novels were thrilling for 280 pages, and then he remembered that he promised his editor he'd wrap it up in 300 pages, so the novel just stopped).

Saturday night I saw a one act play (For the Record by Bernie Appugliese at the Oakland Center for the Arts) that was all loose ends. And it was fantastic.

The Worst Community Theatre Production Ever

It wasn't, of course, the worst performance ever. I probably shouldn't even call it the worst production of my life.

I've been in a version of Guys and Dolls with a Sarah who couldn't sing, and in a 42nd Street where we didn't run the entire show uninterrupted until opening night.

But a show I've been a part of the past few months, one that has taken my evenings and my energy away from this blog, crossed a line tonight.

Background: the show, which is not your typical musical, which does not end on a happy note, was great. Our best performance to-date. In the showstopers the audience was engaged, enthusiastic, and in the heart breaking moments at the end of show, when turn arrives and we slip from dark into tragedy, you could have heard a pin drop.

That's the magic. Theatre does that, and I don't think any other art does, except perhaps dance. Music can transport and inspire, and painting and sculpture can make profound, provocative statements. But only theatre, really only musicals, can bring together all the other arts and then add the response of the audience to completely overwhelm your emotions.

I love this show. I would not have spent the last 3 months working on it otherwise. And I auditioned- I decided a year ago that I had to do this show- and I took a part in the chorus, because I really do believe that I would rather be in the chorus of a show so brimming with talent that we can break the audience's hearts, than to be the lead in a mediocre show.

And we could have broken their hearts tonight, until the curtain call and the final bow. And we had to sing a verse of Happy Birthday to someone in the cast. And I could feel the magic slip- this was just another community theatre again, just another show.

It broke my heart.

First Friday and The Water Children

First Friday did as First Friday does, so of course, I've needed the entire weekend plus Monday to recover from the hijinx.

One different, and enjoyable thing about this past First Friday was taking the trip up to campus to see the senior thesis production of The Water Children. (NYTimes review from the original production here, playwright's notes here).

I love live theater. Most art measures the audience; a movie, a photograph, a book always functions the same way. This makes it a returnable experience in that we can watch a movie once a year (more on that in a day or two), and measure our new observations and reactions as changes in us. Theater (and for me, to a lesser extent, live music) measures the work and the performers.

I haven't seen a drama in years, probably not since I lived in North Carolina.

The Water Children's central topic is grief and guilt, focused through a lens of abortion. This abortion topic loads the debate in a certain direction. For me, abortion is a Catch-22: I've never been at a point in my life where I've wanted to have/ felt I could support a child, so at the logical level, if a girlfriend had become pregnant, how could we have kept the child?; at the same time, my personal beliefs are built around the concept of "Where there's life, there's hope," so a properly lived life demands accepting the unexpected, coping and overcoming.

I spend a lot of my free time lost in the back corners of my mind, pondering those what ifs. It's a part of why I write and what I write about: the fictionalization of life. At different points I have given a lot of myself to regret over missed opportunities and unexplored forks in the road.

That feeling, it seems to me, is what The Water Children mined most effectively. The main character's unborn child follows her through every scene (whether the child is unborn past tense or unborn future tense, or some hybrid of the two, is for the audience to decide). I've had that own feeling for most of my life: if I had spoken up, or not; if I had gone out this night, or hadn't.

It's this haunting feeling that I'm left with as my dominant impression of The Water Children, beyond the show's success and weak spots (there were a few of each for both the actors [tempo, characterization and subtext] and the script [credulity and emotional content]). Maybe it's just my reaction to a very fun night, the kind of night when the laughter just pools around you, but The Water Children made me more acutely aware of it. It made me appreciate the night a little more.