I’ve had a couple of busy weeks for theater:
- Thursday July 13, afternoon: saw Romeo and Juliet at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) with my wife and son. We were lucky in our choice of weeks for our trip to Ashland this year, as there was no smoke from forest fires, as there is now. It was a bit too hot, though, particularly for wimps like us from the Central Coast (I’ve lost my Midwestern childhood tolerance for hot summers).
R&J was indoors, so heat was not a problem, but I found this to be the weakest of OSF’s productions that we saw this year. Everyone seemed to be overacting (so the fault was probably the director’s), and some of the fight choreography was clumsy. Setting the scene among the homeless of Oakland did not really fit the play, though the set and accompanying projection was probably the best thing about the production. Some of the adaptations made no sense (why would someone intent on suicide trade a working handgun for poison?) and a lot of the good lines were cut.
- Thursday July 13, evening: saw Twelfth Night at OSF. This was a fairly good production of Twelfth Night, using essentially the same jazz-era concepts as last year’s production by Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Quite frankly, I think that SSC did a better job of the play. The fight choreography at OSF was awful (silly without being well-executed, so it just looked amateurish, rather than funny), and making Feste a torch singer didn’t really fit the lines.
- Friday July 14, afternoon: saw Rent at OSF. I’m not a big fan of musicals, as I don’t understand sung speech well (I never have, and my growing deafness is not helping). At least this year the sound engineer was competent (unlike last year at OSF, when the sound engineer had to have been stone deaf, as everything was amplified to the point of pain), so I could enjoy the dancing and follow most of the story. My wife tells me that the singers were actually pretty good, and I tend to take her word on these matters (she is a long-time opera fan and is often rather critical of poor singing). From what little I can tell, it was a good production of Rent.
- Friday July 14, evening: saw The Three Musketeers at OSF. I think that this was the strongest of the 4 productions we saw (essentially the entire season for OSF—they really cut back this year, due to budget problems). The acting was reasonably good and the fight choreography (perhaps the most important element for The Three Musketeers) was good. There were some poor choices (like the fake-sounding French accent for Dumas’s father and the poor differentiation between Dumas and Cardinal Richelieu by the actor playing both). The play might have been better without so much of the framing story of Dumas.
Overall, for OSF this year, none of the productions were bad, but none were particularly memorable either. Their audiences were bigger than last year, so maybe they’ll make enough to start returning to their previous quality and size.
- Monday July 17: I saw staged reading of A Summer in Hades at Center Stage (part of the 36 North playwrights series). The play is a new one (perhaps not finished yet), but the story was a good one, well told. Most of the play is semi-autobiographical, and the one point I found a bit jarring and out of character turned out to be not based on real-world events and was added for dramatic impact (perhaps not very successfully).
- Tuesday July 18, afternoon: saw movie Asteroid City at Santa Cruz Cinema with my wife. It is a Wes Anderson film, which means it is weird and amusing. I liked it, but I’m sure I missed at least half the references.
- Tuesday July 18, evening: had last session of Shakespeare workshop with Bill Peters at Center Stage. I did my Cassius monologue, which was essentially the same as the latest version that I recorded at home.
- Wednesday, July 19, afternoon: Zoom rehearsal for Ferris Wheel.
- Wednesday, July 19, 6pm: stage sword-fighting class (had to leave early).
- Wednesday, July 19, 7pm: audition for The Thin Place at Center Stage (Actors’ Theatre). I did the Cassius monologue twice. The first time through was a bit awkward (like my early recordings), but the second time through went ok (like the one I did for Bill Peters’ workshop). I did not get a callback, but they did encourage me to audition in September for 8 tens @ 8, so it went about as well as I expected it to. This was my first audition with a monologue, so I was doing it mainly for practice, not really expecting or even to get a part. (There is only one male role in The Thin Place, and I didn’t really care that much for Jerry’s lines, so it is probably better that someone else gets the part.)
- Friday, July 21, afternoon: My last performances in Emotional Baggage and Ferris Wheel. This morning (Sunday) I recorded a monologue from Emotional Baggage, if you want to see the costume I wore and get some idea of the play. We cut Ferris Wheel so much that there were no monologues left that I could extract.
- Friday, July 21, evening: My wife and I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at Broadway Playhouse, put on by the middle-school and high-school actors of WEST Performing Arts. Some of the high-school actors are getting good—I hope that WEST can revive the invitation-only WEST Ensemble troupe again, now that they’ve had a chance to refill the pipeline after the pandemic. Shows at WEST are always somewhat nostalgic for us, as our son learned from them from 2004 (before they had the WEST name and were still associated with Pisces Moon) through 2016 (about 50 courses, so around 2000 hours).
- Saturday, July 22, morning: I took a friend to the Fun Institute drop-in improv class at the Broadway Playhouse. The class was the largest since the pandemic (and their second largest ever) with 35 people, so it was rather crowded and chaotic. Putting 20 kids on Broadway Playhouse stage crowds it, so 37 adults (including Cliff and Dixie the two teachers) was really pushing it. My friend got a bit overwhelmed, so I don’t whether they’ll want to try again in the next year.
- Sunday, July 23: I recorded the Rollo monologue from Emotional Baggage that I linked to above, plus a first attempt at delivering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (which is not ready for release—I’m not quite off-book and made two minor slips in the wording).
This coming week I have much less to do (unless I get called for jury duty—I have to call each night to check), but I’ll start getting busy again once August starts.
Gas station without pumps 