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])