A Midsummer Night's Dream: the avant-garde version

[madbaker]

Well, sort of. It wasn't the stereotypical avant-garde project; no black berets, giant vaginas, or people throwing excrement. (For which I am thankful.)

We went to see this at San Jose Rep last night; one of my few keeping-in-touch friends from high school was running the sound board and gave us tickets for Xmas. A very cool idea, I thought. Even if we didn't get to spend more than 10 minutes with him.

I didn't hate the show. OTOH, I'm glad we didn't buy tickets for it. The people sitting next to us walked out after intermission.

Let's see... they didn't cut much from the script, as it ran 2 hours 15 minutes. The original concept was "Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath" staging, but they apparently jettisoned that (keeping the costume style) a week in. Then they went to interpretive ballet (while keeping the spoken parts). Eight-person cast.

It coulda been much worse. The actors were talented. Bottom and Puck were both nicely underplayed - usually the actor in those roles goes waaaay over the top.

Let's just say it was a New Yawk acting company, I'm sure this production will be very well received in the NY art scene, and leave it at that.

My wife the art student probably thinks I'm a stick-in-the mud, but I prefer traditional staging. That doesn't have to mean period-style costumes, although I admit that's my preference, go figure. For example, the vaguely Japanese-oid staging of Henry IV a few years back worked all right.

I dunno, I guess alternate staging for the sake of "putting your own stamp on it" generally leaves me cold.

Comments

Re:

[corva.livejournal.com]

Nodnod, I was listening to fie things about it yesterday. The thing that stuck in my in my brain was something like "how wonderfully feral the fey where". I'd like to have seen this I think.