except it's played in theatres that I get very weary in

Packing out now, and will have to find something to do with myself between leaving the B&B and going in for The Winter's Tale. In the lobby on Tuesday afternoon an usher approached me with an economic impact survey, so I've spent the last few minutes collating my receipts, and good grief I've spent a lot of money on the past few days. But on the other hand, I am on vacation, and as week-long vacations go, it's probably actually not as pricey as it could be.

Next year's season is announced: in the big house, The Merry Wives of Windsor, which I will probably be in favor of, depending on the cast; Camelot, which I saw some years ago and have no reason to suppose this isn't a remount of the same production, so there's no need; Twelfth Night, which I'll probably see no matter the cast; and The Misanthrope, which I may need to be talked into, because I do have to be in the right frame of mind for Molière. In the proscenium, Jesus Christ Superstar, which I love, but no, thank you; The Grapes of Wrath, which I have mixed feelings about; and The Homecoming, about which I know nothing. In the barn, Richard III, which I will probably see, and Titus Andronicus, which I will not. And in the black box, The Little Years, which I imagine is a new Canadian play; Shakespeare's Will, which I imagine is just what it sounds like; and Hosanna, which I imagine is a one-man or -woman show of some kind. This is a season in which I am grabbed by three shows, maybe four (Twelfth Night, Richard, Merry Wives, possibly Misanthrope or Grapes of Wrath but not likely both and possibly neither). Especially given that this year's costs include finally finding the DVDs of the Gilbert & Sullivan productions from the 80's that I haven't been able to buy separately before, it looks like next year will be a much less expensive trip. :-D

(much later)

Well, The Winter's Tale was outstanding. The guy we saw as Brutus last year was Leontes, and he was just so good - the standout in an all-around excellent cast. Best bit of all: at the very end, as everyone has left, Leontes and Hermione are left alone at opposite ends of a bare stage, and they step towards each other and as they're reaching for each other the lights go to black. It was so perfect, after the whole play making such a row about his accusations and her trial and death being so public, that finally at the very end of the play they get a moment that's private. ~love~

but I did find the yarn shop.

The trouble with this town is that it takes less than one day to exhaust everything there is to do that isn't live theatre. (It may take a little longer if you throw in the various tours they run - backstage, costume warehouse, and so on. I've done these, and they don't change.) There are two streets with shops on them. The most determined shopper can go out after breakfast and only be done with one of these by the time the house opens for the matinee; but then there's time to kill between shows, and that means you'll have done all the shopping before the evening performance, and then what will you do tomorrow? I got in yesterday just in time for the matinee, but I foolishly looked in a couple of places after dinner, which meant I had used up some of today's diversion. Thank god I'm leaving tomorrow, although I have no idea what I'm going to do between checkout time and the 2pm curtain. Last year I was traveling with a pregnant woman, which meant (a) everything happened slower and (b) there was enforced rest time. This year - I don't remember what I did with my free time the last time I traveled alone, is the trouble.

It was a full day in the Big House today, and what did I tell you about the big splashy productions? In the afternoon it was The Tempest, one of the marquee shows - arguably the marquee show, as the poster shot for the whole season is of Mr. Christopher Plummer as Prospero. And it was fine - well-executed, good-looking, etc., etc., but it didn't really grab me. Well, it didn't grab me the way I wished it had done. It's not a play I'm nuts about, but I wasn't nuts about Pericles, either, to take one example, and I liked that one better. I have come to conclude that this may be in large part Des McAnuff's fault; I've liked the big splashy marquee productions under other artistic directors (with the signal exception of Richard Monette's Hamlet with Paul Gross, which I feel like I liked better than this, but it may have improved with the passage of time), but this had a lot of choices in it that I wouldn't have made myself and, more importantly, didn't especially care for once he'd made them. In fairness, the more I think about it, the more I think these were design choices rather than directorial ones, so okay, but again, artistic director!, I'm sure he's a more powerful member of that artistic team than the director of some other production is w/r/t his or her designers; and also, this is more true of As You Like It, about which more below. I just - I don't know, maybe it's the play, which is kind of a mess, when you really think about it, a mess held together by a couple of good lines and the dream speech and the epilogue. It also didn't help that seated behind me was an elderly couple of the sort that talks to each other during the play because they seem really to believe that other people can't hear them. (Either that or they don't care, but they were whispering, so I think they thought they were making an effort.) Example: Prospero has some lines about how Miranda was three or four when they left Milan, and they've been living on the island for twelve years. From behind me, the husband to his wife: "That makes her fifteen." Later: enter Trinculo. From behind me, the wife to the husband: "This is the comic relief." Fortunately they shut up with enough glaring and an even worse violation from someone another row or so behind them. (Prospero: "... so take my daughter." Boor in audience, not quite out loud: "Please!") Oh! But listen, the thing I liked most about this show was that Mr. Christopher Plummer's first real entrance was up the center aisle during a speech of Miranda's, which he answered immediately, meaning there was no chance for the audience to applaud him the moment he appeared! He sneaked right in and cheated them out of it! It pleased me immensely. He did get an immediate standing ovation when the thing was over, just for being Christopher Plummer, but that's easier for me to forgive - particularly as he had the first curtain call, which meant the standing O persisted for everyone in the cast, which was nice. Side note: Ariel was dynamite, and got a big roar of applause when she came out between Miranda and Prospero Again, and I was glad. And the last bit of the curtain call was everyone else was gone and just when you think it's going to be Prospero left alone on a bare stage, it turns out to be him and Ariel, which also pleased me. Back to the play: Prospero has a good epilogue, and Plummer did a nice job with it. This shouldn't be a surprise, but I think it's worth noting.

In the evening was As You Like It. I think this is my favorite of the comedies - have I said that before? or have I said it about the Dream? If I did, I shouldn't have, because it's this one - and this was at least the fourth time I've seen it here, along with at least two other productions that I can think of off the top of my head. This may have been my least favorite of the half-dozen, which is a little disappointing; it's not that there was anything seriously wrong with it, but as I said above, that wretched McAnuff makes or allows other people to make choices that not only would I not have made, but that once made and executed I found (variously) odd, unsatisfying, and even distracting. This one was set in a sort of twenties style, which I wouldn't complain about at all as far as costume choices. So Duke Frederick's henchmen were all in military-style uniform (Frederick himself appears to have done his usurping in a military coup - again, so far, no complaints), and some of them had their faces covered in featureless masks. Why? No idea. It may have been for some mundane reason like those actors were going to be used later as forest lords attending Duke Senior, but that's highly unlikely, as actors in nameless roles are reused all the time - and even in named ones, as when the actor playing Charles the wrestler, whose face we could see fine, appeared later as William the dude who's in love with Audrey, whose face ditto. So the faceless-henchman thing was odd. There were also, from time to time, people standing in decorative places on the stage with flowerpots for heads. I mean they had flowerpot headdresses - flowering bushes, actually, when they were in the forest - that covered their faces and rested on their shoulders like Lion King puppets. One of Duke Frederick's uniformed henchmen had the head of a wolf. (Or a fox. He wasn't prominent enough for it to be easy to tell.) In the forest there were people with animal heads as well. A person with the head of a stag. Why not? When Oliver comes to tell the girls about Orlando's tussle with the lioness, out came a woman, wearing a slinky dress - and with the head of a lioness. I think the idea must have been that the random-headdress people were supposed to illustrate themes, but it seemed incompletely conceived to me, this ... well, this surrealist concept, and I wish if they weren't going to be able to do it in a way that made sense (at least some sense - surrealism, after all), they wouldn't have done it at all. In other execution issues, an awful lot of this cast had enunciation issues an awful lot of the time, which really is disappointing in the Other Marquee Production. This show had Ms. Lucy Peacock as Audrey - twenty years after I first saw her as Rosalind, holy crap - and the difference between her projection and articulation and that of a lot of the younger cast members was really startling. And some of the older ones! Mr. Brent Carver was very good as Jaques, but he's got quite a soft voice these days, and I'd like it if he sang out a little. It was a good thing I already knew the play, I mean to say, or I'd have missed a lot of it. The two guys sitting next to me were respectively bored and very frustrated by this production, and left in the second intermission. Which brings me to the two directing choices I was baffled by: first, they killed Adam! Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally, doesn't Orlando bring Adam to the forest court and the forest lords feed them both and Adam is revived and this is, you know, a happy play? Yeah, no, tonight, Orlando brings etc. etc. feed them both and then Adam dies. They wrap him up in the picnic blanket as a shroud and a minute later Orlando comes in and scatters his ashes (or scatters some dirt in his grave; it wasn't clear what he was scattering, but it was very clear Adam was dead), and ~intermission.~ What?! And second, by ~intermission~ I mean ~first intermission~. The second one came after the bit where Orlando and Rosalind-as-Ganymede fight. 'Twas a puzzlement. So okay, the first baffling choice, I don't actually have a compelling reason to disagree with, and I didn't disagree as much as boggle at the unexpectedness of it. So, well done there, in fact, Des. But the second one? FFS, this thing was a decent length with one intermission; why did you need two? The Tempest got by with one. Two Gents got by with one. Maybe this play ran longer and collided with some sort of union regulation? Maybe because of the musicians, who are in a different union than the actors (presuming they're hired as musicians, and not as actors playing musicians, because after all many actors have musical training)? Peter Pan had musicians, and they only had one intermission. If this play was longer than all the rest and had to have two intermissions for union-rules reasons, doesn't that maybe make you think that some of the singing and dancing could be cut back a bit? There was really a lot of it. I'm just saying.

(Rosalind has a terrific epilogue, too, and this actress's delivery of it left me sort of meh. Again, probably not entirely fair, because I loved the epilogue in the 1996 production so much. It's not just the actress in either case, of course, but the director who tells her how he wants it done; in 1996 (wow, I didn't realize it was that long ago), she gave the speech exactly right as far as I'm concerned, and Orlando was still on the stage waiting for her, and the whole thing was just beautiful - so it's probably not fair to compare other productions' epilogues to that one, because I'll always find them wanting. Nevertheless! This one was only medium. She did make a lovely curtsey. And, hey, one of the things she does is charge us to like as much of the play as please us. So I have. [g])

not forgetting the Ontario Pork Congress

Found town of Stratford much as I had left it. Am booked into single room in B&B, to be honest only slightly larger than the room I grew up in - which tells you how small my room is at my parents' house, really.

Two plays today. In the afternoon it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I'd never seen, in the Studio Theatre, where I'd never been. I liked them both very much. The older I get (I think that's the variable), the more I like the small, cozy productions. Not that the big expensive splashy ones aren't well done (and not that the tiny ones aren't expensive, come to that), because they are, but it doesn't seem to matter as much. There's even a degree - and this is completely unfair, just let me say that up front - to which I can occasionally suppose the casts of the bigger marquee shows don't care as much. Like I said: totally unfair! Last year's Cyrano de Bergerac was enormous and stupid expensive (I haven't seen the balance sheet, but knowing what I know about the production values* up here, you know what I'm saying?) Anyway, Two Gents pleased me greatly. There was a bit in it where one of the servants had a speech that I remember almost word for word from the Comedy of Errors; I'll have to look it up and see if it was these guys borrowing material from another play, or if Shakespeare himself reused some of his own stuff.

This evening was Peter Pan, and it was pretty good. The audience was full of kids, which is as it should be. (For all productions of Peter Pan, that is, except the one I saw at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake a number of years ago, in which Peter - as played by Tom McCamus, who you will agree is not and cannot pass for a little boy, and who didn't try - rather than being a boy who refuses to grow up, was a man who has refused to grow up. Put a whole different spin on the thing, which I'm a little sorry I can only remember in vague snatches of detail and what my parents remember more clearly, because I was only about twelve at the time. I remember that the scene where Mrs. Darling comes into the nursery and finds the children's beds empty was not charming at all; she screamed, and ever since then I've really been much more on her side than anyone else's from that point in the story onwards - a nice moment in the most recent Peter Pan movie, incidentally, for values of "nice", I suppose, remember?, when the children are flying away and the voice-over is talking about how wonderful it would be if the parents could get there in time, and the film cuts to a slow-motion shot of the parents running hell-for-leather down the corridor because Nana has told them Something Is Happening, and the looks on their faces are, if you ask me, exactly right - anyway. I also remember this broad-shouldered, deep-voiced Peter Pan, and how strange that was. And I remember the scene at the end, when Peter comes back to the house and finds Wendy's daughter in the nursery instead of Wendy; Wendy says "I grew up, Peter," and he says "You promised you wouldn't," and I can still hear him saying it. And when Wendy is gone he pulls a knife and only just stops himself from killing the daughter in her bed! This was a dark play.) This one - tonight, not the Niagara-on-the-Lake one - seems to have been the Barrie original? With a Barrie-character narrator, as well, who doubled as Hook, which I liked fine. (A nice moment, for many more values of "nice", when the action returns to the nursery and Mrs. Darling is waiting for the children to come home, and Barrie-the-narrator says "Some people like Peter best, and some people like Wendy best." [nods toward Mrs. Darling] "I like her best." I mean, on the one hand, of course you did, J.M.; on another hand, did you really?, now, be honest; but the point is, see above re: my being on her side.) It was kid-friendly and hammy as all get-out, and while there was singing, it was not the musical, which is just as well.

A thing I always wish about Peter Pan, and probably always will, is this: I wish we didn't actually know the family name. I really wish the kids only thought their name was Darling, because that's what they were always called - "Wendy, darling", don't you see? It even works with the parents, because of course they'd call each other George, darling and Mary, darling. But, alas, the (more or less omniscient?) narrator calls them Mr. and Mrs. Darling, and I think George is called George Darling in some work-related capacity, so I'll have to live with the fact that this really is their name and not further evidence of how young these kids really are and how they're confused. Too bad. (I know it's my inner child getting confused between Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians, where - isn't that the one? - the humans are named Darling and John Dear. Maybe it's Lady and the Tramp? Anyway, some other Disney movie with a dog. I'd still like it if it were true.)

*Method costuming, for example, which is to say authenticity is essential and money is little if any object. (When they did The Mikado they sent their costume buyers to Japan to buy silk which they then had hand-painted. And then a guy danced and sweated and got greasepaint all on it for thirty-nine weeks (or however long). Could the audience tell it was real hand-painted Japanese silk? Of course not. But, darling, guess what? Balenciaga it was. [Extra points for getting that reference.]) Fortunately, this attitude - toward props and sets and decoration as well as costumes, by the way - that everything is better if you throw more money at it does not lead them to neglect things like blocking, pacing, and other performance elements that can't be as tangibly improved by a bigger budget. Put another way: of course one would much rather see excellent performances in a show with insufficient funds than mediocre performances in a show with unlimited funds. Around here, nine times in ten you get excellent or at any rate very good performances in shows with more or less unlimited funds; it's just that the more of those I see, the less sure I am how I feel about the unlimited funds, no matter how good the performances are.

dear everyone

AD NAUSEAM.

Really. "Ad nauseum" is wrong. It really is. This is not a matter, for once, of getting too prescriptive for one's own good, or usage determining correctness, or anything like that, because Latin? is not a living language. *AD NAUSEUM. AD NAUSEAM. I swear I'm not lying to you.



This has been brought to you by YET ANOTHER professionally-published article with "ad nauseum" in it and my wondering why the everloving $@#! copy editors aren't doing their jobs anymore.

post hoc

My apartment has many outlets and switches, of course, and thus many fuses. But these seem to be divided into two zones. The northern zone includes both bedrooms and half the living room; the southern zone includes the rest of the living room and "dining room" and the kitchen. Last night the power came back on in the northern zone, and only halfway or so in the southern zone. I unplugged the refrigerator and ran a heavy-duty extension cord to an outlet that was working, in the interest of at least getting the contents cold again as soon as possible.

But this morning, my internet is working, which is the standard for brownout-vs-full-power in the northern zone; and my kettle boils water, which is the standard in the southern zone. I'm going to tentatively say my power is back on to stay.

Course it's only now that I discover my cable is down, but shockingly, that bothers me a lot less.

pepco had the gall to send me a bill today.

Oh, let me tell you about my summer.

Three weeks ago Sunday, there was a forecast for a storm to come in, with a tornado warning. About 3:00 in the afternoon, the winds picked up a bit; and then the power went out; and then it rained like hell, with the dark sky and the blowing leaves and everything. That night I stayed in my own apartment (as did my house guest, who was on his way to take the bar exam - fortunately not the next day, but two days later); Monday night, I took refuge with a friend across the street, who had not lost power at all.

The lights came back on Tuesday morning.

(Look, I know it was a fast-moving and very nasty storm. Four people were killed in that storm. I went to the funeral of one of them. I'm not losing perspective here: there are things that suck much more than the power being out for two nights. In fact I didn't even lose anything in my freezer - they said the contents of a full freezer are safe for up to 48 hours, and my power was only out for 38 hours, so. I'm just saying.)

This was, mind you, after this past February, when Snowmageddon deposited two and a half feet of snow on a Friday and then another ten or so inches the following Wednesday. That time, I lost power while I was asleep Friday night, stayed with one friend Saturday night and another Sunday and Monday before my power came back on Tuesday.

And before this morning, when another even nastier (but smaller and evidently less dangerous) storm came in and knocked out the power again. This time they hope to have everyone's power back on by midnight tomorrow, but last I heard they hadn't even assigned a crew to my particular outage, so who knows.

My issue is this: why is EVERYTHING a multi-day event with Pepco? It's because there are so many trees in Montgomery County, apparently. The trees fall in the storms and knock down the wires and cleaning up the fallen trees and the downed wires takes all kinds of extra time that BG&E, DelMarVa Power, Dominion Virginia Power, et al. don't have to deal with. Fine. But what I don't know is, why do the trees always fall on the same lines? I get that it would be prohibitively expensive to bury all the wires. (Bury ALL the wires?) But if we could bury the ones that persistently get knocked down and take whole days to restore, that would be a huge step, wouldn't it? That's if we can't get someone to trim the damn trees to a point where they won't knock down the lines in the first place.

Tonight, my neighbors who have previously taken me in as a refugee are variously without power themselves, or are not at home, or are already hosting company, or still have cats. So I thought about it and wrung my hands for a bit and finally said SOD IT and have checked in to a hotel. (Paying for parking, too.) And I was planning on walking out for some dinner, but now that it's raining again I think I'll order a pizza and let someone else deal with it. (And with the fact that only one elevator in this joint is working.)