Mud Wrestling and Shakespeare

So Schlub and Mrs. went off to Mordor (you know it as DC) and took in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Shakespeare Theater. Out freakin' standing. The play, I mean. Not Mordor.

And that's pretty much due to two actors: Adam Green, a national treasure, and Bruce Dow, a NYC treasure. Yes, yes, the other actors/actresses (God, how sexist) were equally outstanding, but there are two roles in Dream that make or break the show: Puck and Bottom...Puck and Bottom, hmm, sounds like an odd sexual practice, but I digress.

Adam Green was Puck, and he brought his usual combination of timing and physicality, both of which makes him one of the best comedic actors on stage. I've seen him in The Liar and All's Well that Ends Well and he pretty much stole both shows; well, at least, kept up with Tony Roach in Liar. And he stole this one, too, especially in the mud wrestling scene.

Yes. Mud wrestling, something you usually don't associate with Shakespeare, but there it was. And it involved girls, Christiana Clark as Helena and Amelia Pedlow as Hermia. Wowsers. But, before you get your raincoat and empty-bottom barrel of popcorn ready, it was quite tasteful, more funny than...anything. Tasteful mud wrestling, you query? Hey, c'mon, it's Shakespeare.

Bruce Dow is, also, one of the funniest human beings on the earth, and he played Bottom's over-the-top role so over-the-top that I was on the floor. I want to see a two-man Green and Dow show.

Must give a shout-out to Tim Campbell and Sarah Topham, who played Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titiana, respectively and brilliantly. A chest bump between Oberon and Puck was a highlight. Mention of Robert Dorfman as Snug is required because he was hilarious in a very minor role. The play within the play was even funnier than the play. The ensemble was outstanding, the set was outstanding, everything was outstanding.

 

Including the mud wrestling.

Cossacks

I went to Shakespeare Theater to see a Russian play, The Government Inspector. Now I'm not a big fan of anything Russian, especially their plays, which normally involve big strapping Ukraine boys and girls walking around the stage waving giant red flags and singing songs about Lenin and the undying war against eeevil capitalism. You know, like an Obama cabinet meeting.

But I am a fan of Russian writers, and that Gogol guy was a pal of Dostoevsky and Puskin and some other crazy Russians (a repetition of terms, I know). And since I consider Dostoevsky the leading madman writer of all times, whose prose and thought and sentence structure can just knock you down, beat you senseless, turn you inside out, and then hang you up on a meat hook, then, well, Gogol can't be all that far behind.

Boy, was I wrong.

Five minutes into the first act, I was going, "What the hell is this?" You've got a stage full of people dressed in the most outlandish, over-the-top costumes (including two guys dressed like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, I kid you not) making 1st grade-level jokes and put downs while over-mugging and over-acting. Yikes. I turned to Mrs. Schlub and said, "What do you expect from Cossacks?" and made ready to leave.

Ah, but then there was the second act.

Tom Story as Hlestakov, the title character, with his servant Osip, played by Liam Craig, put on one hilarious attempted suicide scene. "Well, then, I'll give you a painful wound and beat you to death with a rock," is now one of my favorite phrases. So, I stayed, and glad, was I, doing so, because it was a very weird play with very weird phrase turns thereof, and those all, were funny.

Osip was, by far, the best character with the best lines but, sadly, had few appearances. Tom Story more than made up for that, especially during his drunken scene at the mayor's house. The rest of the characters were, well, weird. Just weird.

So, overall a good time, but not for what I expected; more because the play underscored my conviction that we shoulda nuked 'em when we had the chance.  

All's Sort of Well

Schlub had taken a bit of a theatrical hiatus this past year, but went back to it last weekend. I attended Shakespeare Theater's Free For All performance of All's Well That Ends Well.

Not being overly familiar with the play, I didn't have big expectations. There's no memorable soliloquies in it like "St. Crispin's Day" or "All the World's a Stage," at least, not one your average Schlub knows. So, I wasn't prepared to be wowed.

And I wasn't. "Workmanlike" would be a good one-word description. Everyone hit their lines and did their steps and there was even some singing and it was all pretty good. I was laughing throughout the entire thing because there's some funny stuff in there, especially Parolle's attempt to convince Helena that virginity is wrong. But, overall...eh.

Marsha Mason played the Countess of Rossillion. Yes, that Marsha Mason, and, ever since The Goodbye Girl, Schlub is somewhat of a fan. But she played the role like Marsha Mason playing a role: once you've seen her in something, you've seen her in everything. Cameron Folmar played Parolles in a distressingly flamboyant manner that was one mincing step too many. And poor Tony Roach. He was absolutely outstanding in The Liar, but, in Bertram, he's got a character so friggin' nasty there's no saving the guy.

There were some outstanding performances, of course. Miriam Silverman, who I just love, and who was equally outstanding as Lucrece in The Liar, did a great job with Helena. Adam Green, another Liar alumnus (and Miriam Silverman's husband), was hilarious as Lavatch, but had a tendency to overdo it a bit. The best performance, though, was Paxton Whitehead as Lafew. Oh man, he killed it, especially when he and Parolles were going at each other.

So, overall...eh. But a good eh.

  

 

Culture vulture

The Schlubster has been a bit remiss with his reporting on the local theater scene, but shall remedy. The  Schlubs attended both Shakespeare Theater productions of Henry V and Richard II, in repertory (I have no idea what that means, it just makes me sound edumacated). I can sum up both productions here:

Eh.

It seemed more like going through the motions than real effort. The two more famous soliloquies, the St. Crispan's Day speech and the This England spiel, respectively, were just a point in the play, barely delivered with any of the passion either requires. Indeed, the play was halfway through both before I realized we were there. As I said, eh. Workmanlike, standard, nothing to write here about.

By contrast, Corneille's The Liar. Absolutely hilarious.

Now, you don't usually see 'absolutely hilarious' paired with a French play, but a doff of the toque to Shakespeare's production because this one had me in stitches. Yes, a bit of a brush up on the text, with a reference to cell phones here and there, and those elicited the necessary chuckle. But what made it a riot, the whole thing was in verse. Oh, man, the timing, the timing.

Go. See. It.

As You Like It

Well, Schlub is back from his Thanksgiving vacation, which involved a trip up 95 with about 750,000 of my closest friends, turning the normal 3 hour drive to see my brother, Piney Schlub, into an 8 hour one. Eventful, it was, including a fistfight between Mrs. Schlub and a McDonald's manager. Film at 11.

Made it back in time to see Shakespeare Theater's production of "As You Like it" on Friday night. Oh boy, classic comedy with the best of Shakespeare's soliliquoys, that "7 Ages of Man" rap, so Schlub was all a'twitter. We met one of the cast members, Charles Francis Murphy, getting on the elevator from the parking garage. How did we know he was a cast member? He asked if we were going to the play, betrayed, no doubt, by the fact we had both taken showers, and then said he was in it. "Ah," Schlub is pleased, "what part?" "Ensemble," he replied. Not the whole ensemble, of course, member thereof. We would know hm because he would be wearing a silver suit in the opening scene. And he was, allowing the Schlub's to nudge people on either side and say, "Hey, we know that guy. He's Charles Francis Murphy. From Carnegie-Mellon, doncha know." That fact was ascertained on the elevator.

And although his role was small, I gotta say that Charles Francis Murphy did a good job with it. He played the banished Duke being banished in a stage setting like the opening of an old silent movie, replete with flickering lights and melodramatic gestures and the sound of an old projector. I'm not kidding, he really did a good job and I predict a succesful career. Then I can nudge others and say, "Charles Francis Murphy. Know the guy."

Thus the play started. The director decided to keep the movie motif, and we were subjected to these scenes where makeup artists and clapboard guys and directors and camera men would mill about with the cast members shortly before action began. Yes, the director yelled "action." A bit odd, but, okay, keeping it relevant, yo, so the youngsters could get hep to this Shakespeare dude. But, then, well, the movie or play or moviethatwasaplay turned into "How the West Was Won," with each scene a different American era. The Forest of Arden became Valley Forge, then we were in the pioneer days, then the Civil War, then the Wild Wild West (where's Doctor Loveless?) then the 1890's and I think we ended up in the Roaring 20's. By that time, I figured the characters were around 200 years old, so not only a comedy but science fiction, to boot.

Most unfortunate was the director's insistence that the characters adapt accents befitting the period portrayed. So, Civil War, suddenly everyone's speaking in a southern drawl so atrocious Scarlett O'Hara would be going, "Huh? What?" I could not understand a word. Bad enough, but when Francesca Faridany, playing Rosalind, turned into Calamity Jane from the "Deadwood" series, well, Schlub slipped into a coma. I was not conscious until the final wedding scene, which was saved by a pretty hilarious Jon K. Reynolds playing Hymen, and everyone resuming an accent I could understand.

Directors, do me a favor, stop trying to make it relevant, yo. You end up making it incomprehensible.

Best scene was Silvius (Aubrey Deeker), Phebe (Anjali Bhimnai), and I think Orlando (John Behlmann) playing a scene like a bunch of Holy Rollers. Not sure of the third member of this little vignette because I was still somewhat lapsed into unconsciousness. Big hint there, director.

The Alchemist

Schlub and the Mrs. drove through the horrible rain-terrified traffic of DC last Friday to attend a showing of The Alchemist, a Ben Jonson play. I swear, let one bit of precipitation or falling leaf hit the roadways and 95% of the drivers around here get the vapors. At any rate, the Schlub's did their usual thing: enter a restaurant with barely 35 minutes to spare, no reservations, and demand great food at McDonald's speed. Oyumel could not accomodate us, but Cafe Atlantico did, thanks to the delightful French bartender whose name I never caught but who I tipped a whopping $5, dude. Don't spend it all in one place.

At any rate, I'd never seen a Ben Jonson play before, he being the also-ran to that guy from Avon. Interesting character, though, bit of a thug with a murder he managed to avoid swinging for because he could read a Bible verse in Latin. Ah, the judicial proofs of the Elizabethan Age.

The play was...good. I hesitate because it wasn't The Taming of the Shrew good, but tweren't the fault of the actors, 'twas the material. Jonson relied on a lot of sight gags, a la costume changes, for his chuckles and those were amusing, but, you know, c'mon. The first time the hippie pharmacist (named Able Drugger. That Jonson, funny guy) and the guru came on stage was good for a laugh, but only once. There were some acting standouts: Robert Creighton played Ananias as a crazed, Bible thumpin' Holy-Spirit-jigging deacon, which is a bit of an inside joke, given that Ananias was the first in a long line of greedy Jimmy Swaggart types in Christianity . David Sabin was Sir Epicure Mammon (again, that Jonson, funny guy) and he cracked me up with his Donald Trump get-up and his Leo McKern mannerisms.

So, overall, a good night. Just not great.

Phedre

On Friday night, Schlub and the Missus got all gussied up and headed on down to F Street and the new Harman Hall for opening night of Shakespeare Theater's "Phedre." The Schlubs grabbed a curbside table at Rosa's Mexican Food a mere four doors down, drank wine and ate Rosa's truly ambitious guacamole dip wondering what the poor people were doing tonight. I ordered the prawns on rice, thinking, you know, lots of big shrimp draped over a bed of white and it was big shrimp, all right, three full grown prawns, shells intact, standing on a bed of black rice (odd, that) staring at me with just the slightest bit of malevolence. Prawns, once you get to tearing them apart, don't really have a lot of meat. Think of skinny lobsters. Mrs got the poblano, but her chicklen was ground, not shredded, greatly offending her delicate culinary sensibilities. It was a somewhat cool night, enough of a breeze to take the edge off and make sitting there in a wool suit and too-tight tie not such a bad proposition. Across the street from the Verizon Center, a New Orleans Jazz Band formed up and started playing and, my, those guys were good.

The play? Oh, yes, there was a play. Helen Mirren was the lead, yes, that Helen Mirren, my favorite role of hers being this one:



Tanya Kirbuk







And there's other things she's done, Excalibur, the Queen, all that.

But, this was Phedre, a 1677 French translation/adaptation of Euripedes by Racine. Probably rousing stuff back then, but, well, times change. Do not get Schlub wrong, he is quite enamored of Greek plays, thinking Aristophanes one large hoot, but, hey, this was Phedre. And Greek plays, by and large, consist of several characters standing around talking. And talking. And talking. All. In. The. Most. Breathless. Declaiming. Overexerted. Method. Possible.

Now, not taking shots here- the play was well done, good acting, especially John Shrapnel (what a great name) as Theramene (which sounds like an anti-depression pill). And it was a pretty complicated story to pull off: Phedre has the hots for stepson Hippolytus who has the hots for Theseus' enemy's daughter Aricia (played by sloe-eyed babe Ruth Negga) while Theseus, Phedre's husband and king of Athens, is off doing whatever (bedding thousands of nubile Greeks, according to the Therameister) but everyone thinks he's dead so Phedre makes a play for Hippolytus who must be gay because he rejects her (it's Helen Mirren, dude, she's got that older babe thing going) but maybe he's not because he really, really likes the Aricia chick and then, of course, Theseus shows back up and everyone's in big trouble. We learned all the nuances of this cross-currented-plot-subplot-subsubplot of who wants to bang who by everyone standing around and talking. And talking. And talking.

About the first hour into it, I concluded Phedre just really needed to get laid. Would have saved a whole lotta grief and dead people if she'd just boinked one of her guards. But, then, we wouldn't have had three hours of people standing around talking. And talking. And talking. Would we?

The Taming of the Shrew

Schlub is a connie-sewer of the arts, and Saturday night went to the Shakespeare Theater's Free-for-All, an annual event where they stage a play for the Great Unwashed, free of charge. Previously, they held it in Rock Creek Park, which meant your bodkins and verily's were under mosquito and weather assault. This year, they held it in their brand spanking new Harman Hall, a nice venue replete with the most uncomfortable seats ever conceived by an ergonomics engineer. Guess they don't want you dozing off.

Anyhoo, it was Shrew, of which I wasn't the most familiar, my only exposure being that quite hilarious Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor movie which bears only a passing resemblance to the play. Started reading the play myself but went into a coma about the third or fourth "verily." So, wasn't expecting much, but Schlub must bow towards the tyranny of culture.

It was freakin' hysterical.

Schlub started out chuckling and was pretty much in full fledged belly laugh about five minutes into it. Shakespeare is the most dry of reading, except if you're a pretentious snob, and the only way to get full appreciation of the Master's Art is in production, and, my, what a production. All the actors were great, but Petruchio, played by Ian Merrill Peakes, was clear and above outstanding. Ah, hells bells, they all were outstanding, including Louis Butelli, who played Grumio, and Sabrina LaBeauf (yes! Sabrina LaBeauf, of Cosby and Dead Like Me!). Must give a shout-out and a well done to Aubrey Deeker as Hortensio, John Shuman as Gremio (yeah, I know, Shakespeare and his naming conventions), the gorgeous (and hilarious) Christina Pumariega as Bianca, and Drew Eshelman as the Pedant. Did I miss anybody?

Schlub ran into Peakes and Butelli in the Metro afterwards, and they were just as hilarious off-script.

So, good time had by Schlub and the Mrs, a much better time than at the perfectly awful Stacy Keach King Lear they put on last month or so. I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing Keach's bare bottom flapping around the stage.