madbaker | NOT the Vessel with the Pestle

The wife and I went to go see the Marin Shakespeare Company's performance of Knight of the Burning Pestle last night.
I was going to make the cut read "who didn't see the performance", but that would encompass a larger group of people. Le sigh.

Aaaanyway, it was a good time. Bonefinder went with us - he's always a riot, and it was good to catch up with him. He may end up going down to LA permanently next year, which would be sad for us but possibly a good move for him.

The play itself: quite different from our rendition. The director, before the show, mentioned that "This is possibly the only professional production of Pestle in modern times..." Bonefinder and I looked at each other, but the GSP aren't a professional troupe. We don't get paid. In spendable currency, I mean.

I'd read that they modernized the jokes. It made me afraid - but it actually worked fairly transparently. The cast of the original play, "The London Merchant", were all in clown makeup and fright wigs. The host (director) was W.C. Fields-ish; Humphrey, the dippy lover who speaks in rhyming couplets, was Jerry Lewis-ish. And Michael, the protagonist's younger brother, was basically Baby Huey. George, the Citizen who sits onstage and interferes, was turned into a hippie burnout grocer. His apprentice Ralph (and his giant and dwarf) were surfer/skater-type dudes. ~~And Lady Macbeth was played by a finger puppet.~~

So, in Resolution-type style -
What worked: Despite how the above paragraph sounds, it didn't detract from the play. I guess the idea behind the clown costuming was to telegraph to the audience that this was supposed to be zany. They opened with a quick pantomime outlining the basic plot of the (original) play - I thought that was quite good, although it helped that we knew how the plot went.

Some of the cuts worked well, too. The barber sequence was drastically cut, but as the set-up was being described to Ralph, the barber did his bits upstage so that it didn't need to be repeated. I was surprised by how much of the original humor (read syphilis jokes) was taken out, but I suppose they were trying to make it more family-friendly. (Although when Ralph makes a flinching knight "kiss his pestle", a six-year-old upfront laughed. Ralph looked at him and said "You shouldn't be laughing, dude. You're too young to understand this.")

It was the last performance; the cast really amped it up trying to upstage one another. The audience got into it, too. Ralph at one point was imploring the memory of his love Susan, "the cobbler's maid" to inspire him - while looking at a comely woman in the audience. She stood up, shook her blonde hair, and vamped at him. (I don't think she was a plant.) Later on, Pompiona the Krakovian princess, who is in love with Ralph - the actor playing Michael in drag - jumped into the audience and got into a catfight with her.

What didn't: They changed all the songs to modern references on the theory that the original ones were pop culture of the time. Sure, I suppose, but it felt self-conscious to me. Maybe someone who hadn't seen/acted the original wouldn't feel that way.

Despite what I wrote about the circus costumes, I wasn't overwhelmed with Luce dressed in a pink tutu and Jasper in a pink muscle-man outfit, complete with foam barbell.

Would I see it again? I might go back to the locale. It's a nice ampitheatre in San Rafael.