Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park opened on Thursday night. This year it’s Marie Farsi’s production (adaptation?) of Romeo and Juliet. It’s given a Southern Italian setting in the 1930s/40s though any reference to Fascism or the war escaped me. It seemed largely an excuse to introduce some singing and dancing and some slightly forced humour into the opening scenes. That’s not the big problem though.
HOUSE + BODY’s production of Measure for Measure currently playing in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s is Shakespeare with a twist. It’s an adaptation written and directed by Christopher Manousos. The schtick is that it’s part of a radio series of live Shakespeare and we are watching the goings on in the studio where five actors play all twenty characters with commercials, sponsor messages and the rest of the baggage of radio broadcasts. There are also some “off stage” shenanigans involving the actors; principally the two women who engage in wistful glances and then have an almost steamy scene in the “interval”. I’m going to speculate that this is a sort of nod to Isabella’s ambiguous nature in the actual play.
This year’s Dream in High Park production is Hamlet directed by Jessica Carmichael. Now Hamlet is an interesting choice for this format because it is, notoriously, a really long play and the High Park format demands something that comes in around two hours. A full blown Hamlet, as in the Branagh film lasts over four hours and even with the usual stage cuts it’s a three hour plus project. So getting it down to two hours rather meands that it’s almost as much Carmichael’s Hamlet as Shakespeare’s.
Driftwood Theatre’s Bard’s Bus Tour touched down at Withrow Park yesterday evening in near perfect conditions for their lightly updated musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. D. Jeremy Smith’s production is cleverly constructed to cover off all the bases with a cast of only eight and with the minimal staging possible for an outdoor touring production. The updating makes the Mechanicals into Oshawa auto workers. The music is largely integral; parts of the text being set to music by Kevin Fox and Tom Lillington further adapted and performed by Alison Beckwith with support from various members of the cast. There are cuts and the whole piece runs about an hour and forty five minutes without an interval.
Ahmed Moneka as Puck
So the Toronto Summer Music Festival continued last night with a Shakespeare themed show called A Shakespeare Serenade. Curated and directed by Patrick Hansen of McGill it fell into two parts. Before the interval we got Shakespeare scenes acted out and then the equivalent scene from an operatic adaptation of the play. After the interval it was a mix of Sonnets and song settings in an overall staging that was perhaps riffing off The Decameron. Patrick Hansen and Michael Shannon alternated at the piano.
I really struggle with early Verdi. I want to like it. I want to like anything by the guy who wrote Don Carlo and Simon Boccanegra. Also, there’s so much of it about that avoiding it is tedious. But, and it’s a big but, I really struggle with the combination of deadly serious stage action and upbeat, bouncy music. There are all these arias that go something like :
We’re going to murder you,
Rum, tum, tum, tumpty tum.
We’re going to chop you up
Rum, tum, tum, tum.
Cognitive dissonance is killing me and that’s my thought for the day brought to you by Giuseppe Verdi, Francesco Plava and a very puzzled William Shakespeare.
operaramblings 