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