Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Shout-Out No One Will Hear

Kimber gushes approval.

My family has season tickets to Hale Center Theater, a theater company located in Orem, and one of the few good playhouses in Utah Valley. Right now, the HCT is putting on William Shakespeare's As You Like It, and it's a rather excellent production. I would like to recommend that everyone should go see it, but since few people read this blog (and some of our readers are in other states), it's unlikely that my favorable review will make a difference. Still, good things deserve a good word, so here are a few.

I've seen the director of this production, Chris Clark, put on other Shakespeare plays before. Actually only one, but his work has been consistently excellent between the two plays. He understands how Shakespeare was originally performed (in a rather bawdy fashion, if truth be told), and he stays faithful to that. His renditions of Shakespeare make the plays understandable, the characters loveable, and the performances memorable (in a "oh, how marvelous" way, not a "I thought it would never end" sort of way), which is no small feat for a director of Shakespeare.

As You Like It is a neat little romantic comedy where everyone gets paired off at the end, despite a bit of cross-dressing, and the audience gets to enjoy more than a few good laughs along the way. The casting is excellent (I've seen the play twice; both sets of casts have their strong and their weak points, but they're both worth watching), and the actors have truely committed to their roles. There's singing, dancing, fighting, and even a dash of physical comedy remeniscent of Charlie Chaplin. A string duet accompanies the action of the play with surprisingly fitting music, the sets are ingenious, and the costumes are deftly crafted. All in all, this is one of the better productions HTC has put on in a while, and one of the best versions of Shakespeare I've seen, including the MST3K version of Hamlet.

I wish I had more power to get people to go to this play, but I don't, so the best that I can hope for is that someone more influential than I recognizes the talent involved (on all fronts) in this production, and forces a large group of school children to see it. If you are reading this, I suggest you go quickly, before all the tickets are snapped up by high schoolers looking to fill their Shakespeare requirement for senior English.

12 comments:

  1. Go suck an elf, Sachin.

    How long is the play running?

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  2. No Sachin needs to suck a brownie.
    I am interested in this play but I don't want to go by myself and I don't think Nolan would be interested. Who's up for going?
    -Devin

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  3. btw Grant I played your Bday present to me like 3-4 times. It was great thanks a lot

    -nolan

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  4. Sachin just needs to suck a twinky
    -nolan

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  5. When I said brownie I meant littler elf. You could probably look it up. I think they're in Lord of the Rings or something.
    -Devin

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  6. They're from Willow, the greatest fantasy adventure of all time!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-P03NGSP6Y

    It helped George Lucas satisfy his midget fetish. Seriously, did you know that Star Wars was originally conceived with Luke and his family as midgets?

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  7. Seriously? I think I'm going to have to reshoot Star Wars now with midgets.

    -Kimber

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  8. It's number 7 on my to do list.

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  9. Can we do that next nerd night Kimber?
    -Devin

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  10. Grantula will now disseminate his comments:
    1.) Shakespeare rocks. I had a hot girlfriend once who became even more infatuated with me because we went to a dance as the Macbeths.
    2.) As y'all may have suspected, Brownies were not invented for Willow, and have been seen in only that movie because George Lucas is in touch with the little people. Go MAD MARTIGAN!
    3.) Nolan, what is your fastest time at beating your bday present?

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