Sunday, February 24, 2008

Taproot As You Like It


I had a great time introducing “me Olives” to Shakespeare this weekend. We saw “As You Like It” directed by Karen Lund (read as a pdf at wowio). I think that the title is excellent 17th Century marketing. Taproot Theater is excellent once again.

"The result is good, good, good vibrations."
- Joe Adcock, Seattle PI

One of the devices in this play is that the banished Duke becomes a hippie in the woods (1960s music for transitions, but faithful iambic pentameter otherwise) which worked well for me.

As hoped, Olives loved the play and I found it very familiar – I had never seen this particular comedy before but if follows the formula: A woman pretends to be a man to test the true heart of the male lead. One of the characters says something amazingly profound in a brief monologue, and everybody gets married at the end.
As the Reduced Shakespeare Company has rightly observed – this never gets old.

BTW – you can always tell the difference between tragedy and comedy with Shakespeare:
Tragedy – everybody dies
Comedy – everybody gets married

“Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.”
- ROSALIND — Daughter to the banished Duke.

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
- JAQUES — A Lord attending upon the banished Duke.

I think that Orlando Bloom should make like Kenneth Branagh and try out a film version of this play. Fittingly enough the male lead is named “Orlando”. If he does a good enough job on this he could then (when he is older) play the lead in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”… as an elf… well technically a fairy.

I toyed with the idea of traveling all the way down to Ashland Oregon to see “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. I wonder if it would have been worth the long drive, and worth missing this gem from Taproot.

Thank you to: Marianne Savell (Rosalind), Anne Kennedy (Celia) and Bob Borwick (Touchstone) for genuine enjoyment of one of my favorite things – Shakespeare.

My sketch today is a caricature of the much-used device: A woman pretends to be a man to test the true heart of the male lead.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I always found watching Shakespeare on stage was always a good excuse to go back and see Strange Brew, which is actually Hamlet (with Bob and Doug MacKenzie as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

However, it's not nearly as good as watching "A Boy and His Dog," with David at a theater in north Seattle!

-c

David Juel said...

I have seen Strange Brew several times, I cannot believe that I did not catch the now obvious connection!

D