"A sad tale's best for winter..."
Sep. 10th, 2005 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceebeegeeI ushered for Julie's play, The Winter's Tale, last night and saw it. I must say (and I told her) this is the best Lovestreet production I've seen. The cast is really strong--Leontes was fantastic as were Perdita and Camillo. Julie played Hermione which was, uh, not particularly convincing, for the same reason as when she played Andromache, but whaddya gonna do. Nora was Paulina--now, personal feelings aside, I have to say I don't think Nora has a ton of range or expressivity. A lot of her performance was just Hecuba up there. She's fine, she fits the bill but she doesn't bring much genius to the role. But--she had one great scene, when she brings Perdita to Leontes. She was quite good in parts of that scene. The costumes were SO MUCH BETTER than typical Lovestreet stuff--it looked as though Julie had actually spent money with sumptous robes and bright colorful materials. The set looked great too.
I haven't ever seen TWT performed and I haven't read it since college, when I did my junior honors project on the "problem comedies" (a term for Shakespeare's last four comedies, TWT, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Tempest, so-called because they are all technically comedies (i.e., they end in marriages) but are not always happy or light-hearted--the first half of TWT is not too different from Othello). I loved all the thematic development of seasons, and seasonal imagery, although I was thinking--first half, the "wintr'y half" when Leontes gets murderously jealous, takes place in Sicilia where it's warm and dry, and the second half when things are a lot happier, takes place mostly in Bohemia (which is in mittel Europa and much colder). There's also an incredible amount of snobbery in the play! There's a lot of talk about how unusual Perdita is, how her "bearing" and way of speech is so different from the typical shepherd's daughter--since she was raised almost from birth by the shepherd, the assumption is that her noble birth shines through. As they say, blood will out (a very Southern way of thinking).
I haven't ever seen TWT performed and I haven't read it since college, when I did my junior honors project on the "problem comedies" (a term for Shakespeare's last four comedies, TWT, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Tempest, so-called because they are all technically comedies (i.e., they end in marriages) but are not always happy or light-hearted--the first half of TWT is not too different from Othello). I loved all the thematic development of seasons, and seasonal imagery, although I was thinking--first half, the "wintr'y half" when Leontes gets murderously jealous, takes place in Sicilia where it's warm and dry, and the second half when things are a lot happier, takes place mostly in Bohemia (which is in mittel Europa and much colder). There's also an incredible amount of snobbery in the play! There's a lot of talk about how unusual Perdita is, how her "bearing" and way of speech is so different from the typical shepherd's daughter--since she was raised almost from birth by the shepherd, the assumption is that her noble birth shines through. As they say, blood will out (a very Southern way of thinking).
