B. and I have returned from our annual driving visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The weather at the shoulder season was pleasant, warm and mostly dry but not hot, but the physical rigors - walking around the hilly and irregular grounds, slotting in meals, and the long drive there and back again - were very hard on aging bodies, and this may well be the last time we go.
Nevertheless we saw some good productions - two A's and one B among six shows, not too bad a ratio.
Best of the Shakespeare shows was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a traditional production, with the usual double-casting and undercutting, great ensemble and teamwork among all the actors. The Pyramus and Thisbe play put on by the mechanicals at the end was so goofy in its acting as to be the funniest thing in the show.
Come From Away, the musical about the passengers stranded at the former transatlantic refueling stop at Gander, Newfoundland, during the airspace shutdown after 9/11 (so there was room to park lots of planes at a small town) and the locals who hosted them, was the feelgood show of the season. This despite it beginning with a number describing the passengers trapped on the parked planes for a whole day without being told what was going on, while the locals scrambled to assemble supplies. The fact that this was both energetic and entertaining was the amazing part: like Midsummer the show's ensemble teamwork in a very complex script was outstanding. The music was functional rather than memorable, but this was a great show.
How much of Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang is as autobiographical as the text claims is not clear to me. But Hwang, known for his opposition to using Caucasian actors in Asian roles, apparently got caught up in such a controversy involving another play of his, and wrote Yellow Face about the experience. The director of this other play - Hwang himself had no part in this - hired a white actor for an Asian part, thinking he was part-Asian. Apparently while such a casting is now utterly un-woke, Equity anti-discrimination rules prohibit asking actors what their ethnic origin is. The irony in this seems to me to be the real point of the story, though the play focuses on Hwang's embarrassment. Anyway, well-performed.
The Taming of the Shrew failed to follow through on the director's concept that the script depicts sexism rather than being sexist, and ended with the usual abjectly defeated Kate. Even more unfortunately, it was slowly and dully presented. Never have Bianca's suitors been more boring to watch. The set included what was evidently intended as a topiary of the word LOVE in letters six feet high, which gave the impression that the show was set in Pepperland.
Henry IV Part One was well presented - again, excellent byplay among the actors - whenever it wasn't depicting battles. Though costumed roughly for period, the battles were accompanied by huge clanging music that sounded like minimalist rock or sometimes like alarms going off. Since the ending of the play is one big long battle, it was brutal and spoiled the experience of the better, earlier part of the play. Should have left at intermission.
We did leave at intermission for Emma, a ghastly adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that turned all the characters into juvenile nincompoops. Worse yet, it was well-performed for the conception. Watching a lot of good actors deliberately performing badly was too painful to continue with.
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