A thing much overlooked in most Shakespearean criticism appears to be his remarkable aptitude for show-stopping musical numbers. This weekend I went and saw As You Like It performed by the Bell Shakespeare Company, and was treated to not one, not toe, but THREE blow-out song-and-dance pieces, complete with Morris dancing and live instrumentation. Granted, the definition of "live" might have to be stretched a bit to include a synthesiser orchestra being piped in while one of the actors in a non-speaking role bashes away at a snare drum and an old Roland, but you get my point.

Really, the musical numbers were a bit much. A few of them were reasonably entertaining, especially the lower-key ones, but when things are propelled into the realm of full-on productions complete with soldiers goofily leaping over sticks and shepherdesses in stars-and-stripes hot pants tango-dancing, it can get a bit silly. I wish they'd scaled it back a bit to be less tacky.

Anyway, the performances were all quite good! Especially Sakia Smith and Lexi Freiman as the female leads. Damien Ryan's Jacques was pretty good, too, although he became the subject of a strange subplot inserted to critique current attitudes towards same-sex marriage as a way of compensating for the Happily Ever After ending. That was a little ill-considered, I thought. The cross-dressing priest and all that - they rewrote some of his lines and everything. Very strange. I thought the subtler stuff with Jacques worked much better - they made him gay, in an not-especially-overt way, and had him try to kiss Rosalind-as-Ganymede. Then, when he went into the monastery at the end, it had the weight of Implied Meaning and Back Story. So I liked that part.

Speaking of the cross-dressing priest, I must say that Touchstone started-out pretty likeable, but after a while Ed Wightman became so scenery-hungry it became sort of a alarming. I guess the play was trying to convey frenetic energy and a kind of burlesque attitude, but by the end it had lost some of the momentum of the earlier scenes, and was heading to a place I didn't want to follow it to. Which is as much Shakespeare's fault as Bell's. The play has some great lines and set-pieces, but it's a bit uneven overall.

The best "part that probably wasn't in the original" parts were probably Touchstone the fool travelling through the forest, where he is frightened by people acting like animals (including putting chairs on their heads to imitate stags), and Camilla Ah Kin's cry of "No John, we haven't rehearsed this part I don't know how to do it" as she was roped by Touchstone into doing a ventriloquism set. Touchstone is played by Ed Wightman, so I don't really understand that at all, unless she was talking to the director.

All in all, it wasn't half bad. Some parts of it were excellent (any time that Rosalind and Celia were on stage together). The crazy approach is probably closer to how it would have been played in Shakespeare's day anyway.

7/10 I guess.

As for other things, I have a 2000 word essay due today which I haven't started yet, a presentation due Wednesday which I haven't started yet, and a 200 word essay due Friday that i, need it be said, haven't started yet. I'd like to say that I never used to have this problem, but I'd be lying.

In other news, Somewhere, Anywhere by New Buffalo is absolutely beautiful. I've listened to it six or seven times since Saturday.

And I have gas.

Tags: homework, theatre, vapours
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Decoder Ring - Fractions

The problem with homework, and feel free to disagree with me here, is not in the doing, but in the getting done. By Which I mean (sacrificing clarity for pith) that I have an assignment due in two days that I could finish in no time if I could overcome the massive hurdle of actually starting it.

Learning Jacques Brel songs will not help me to pass my Australian Literature unit.

However! I have gotten my dad's Father's Day presents sorte-out, which is nice. I couldn't afford to get him a decent birthday present, and you have to buy too many different people gifts at Christmas to be able to afford to get anyone anything especially fancy, but I managed to buy him (across several weeks):

1 - The Berlin Trilogy - The three late-70s David Bowie albums, starting with Low and ending with Lodger ("Heroes" comes between them), which are all pretty great. Dad loves Bowie, but he's only really familiar with the guy's early 70s work. I a rectifying this! He will know the joys of the synthesiser and the gated snare!

2 - A bottle of Brown Brothers Riesling. Is this a good Riesling? I know that Riesling is good, and I remember my mum often speaking fondly of Brown Brothers, but I'm not sure. It'll be better than most of the stuff he drinks, anyway. My dad is of the "5 dollar mixed red" school of wine drinkers. The weird thing is, if he likes the wine and drinks it all on the day, he'll end-up tipsy and I'll be angry at him because of it. I guess I am sowing the seeds of my own destruction? I guess I will at least get a glass?

Speaking of wine, cheap or otherwise, I went to an art show on Friday, as required by one of the assessment elements in my Literature and Philosophical Contexts class. We have to take one of the paintings, associate it with one of the cities in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and write a creative response tackling both the meaning of Calvino's city and the broader philosophical theory of the unit. This is part of a journal that I have to finish by the end of next week, but haven't started yet. I guess I am usually this slack, and seem to be managing alright, but that's because I usually dedicate a straight, fevered 16 hour stretch the day before something is due towards getting it finished, thus making-up for lost time. Not working is a boon.

Anyway, wine. I was always under the impression that you got free wine at art shows. This is not the case. It probably wasn't very good, anyway. But I did get to see my tutor in a suit.

I've got a cold and a mild case of melancholia. I want to spend all day in the shower, but that's irresponsible, and this horribly modern house hasn't got a bath.

Also I picked-up a copy of Dusk At Cubist Castle by the Olivia Tremor Control. I thought it would be like Neutral Milk Hotel because it's from the Elephant 6 Collective, and called "Dusk At Cubist Castle". Instead it's a pretty interesting mix of ultra-accessible Beatles/Beach Boys/Zombies-style pop, and a bunch of crazy krautrock experimental pieces and out-there psychedelic drone. It's really good, but since I rarely get the urge to listen to the Beatles and I really wanted something messier and more twee, I'm a little miffed. I have a three disk changer so I may have to jam it between Odyssey and Oracle and Pet Sounds and see what happens.

It's kind of crazy to think anything pre-dating In The Aeroplane Over the Sea would sound much like In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, though. God I love that album.

Also, lately I have been listening to vast amounts of Shoegaze. I even made a compilation of it. I gave it to someone but I'm not sure who actually ended-up with it. For all I know it's down the back of a couch in the lecture theatre. But my point is that Slowdive are one of my new favourite bands. It's really beautiful stuff that's very heavily indebted to folk, dub, country, late My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. I suppose most shoegaze is indebted to the later two, but anyway. The disappointing thing is that, following the release of Pygmalion, this really beautiful ambient album (think a more formless, less jazzy Talk Talk) that they did with Brian Eno, the band sort of split apart and then reformed with a new name (Mojave 3 - because there are three of them, and they live in a desert?) and an interesting, but not really that captivating alt-country sound. So I guess that's disappointing.

Also "When I Die" by Lush is the prettiest song.

I should go and make a soup or something. I make pretty good soup.

Or start a music review site.

Tags: david bowie, father's day, galleries, homework, shoegaze, soup, the olivia tremor control
Current Music: the olivia tremor control - dusk at cubist castle