mewling and puking
Saw the Riverside Theatre production of As You Like It last night. Because el cheapo is el besto, I got a free ticket by ushering; meaning I had to wear tan pants and a black apron, fold inserts into programs, and scrub chairs dry of the perennial drizzly not-quite-rain that happens out here in the summer. I was also in the play, sort of, as the guy who gets knocked out of his chair in Act I, Scene ii so that Charles can use the chair to whack Orlando upside the head.
As for the rest of the show: I'm iffy on many of Shakespeare's comedies, since they can conform so closely to formula as to seem like practice pieces for the more adventurous comic plays (Midsummer, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night.) Plus it always irks me when the courtiers start using their wit to mock the manual laborers. But this production was a lot of fun, with some truly inspired costume design (lime green Doc Martens matching a lime green tie) and startling incidental music. The ditty in Act V, scene iii was replaced by a downtempo duet version of the Magnetic Fields' "Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits," and the quadruple wedding at the end segued into a dance party featuring Blur's "Girls and Boys." Everyone onstage seemed to be having an infectiously good time, which is probably what you want in a comedy. In my experience, theatre people are much more upbeat and energetic than writers. Something about spending all day at your computer with the coffee and the Wild Turkey just sucks the vim out of you.
Links from alert readers: Grumpy Doug reveals that the Oxford English Dictionary has made "Doh!" an official part of the English language, and Felisa sends in some musings on repulsive food.
Pimiento loaf is also very, very wrong, in a way that you can't understand the word "wrong" until you've seen that part of the Sgt. Pepper movie where George Burns does his soft-shoe routine, and you realize that you've come into the presence of a thing that, while composed of recognizable and seemingly innocent parts, resembles nothing as a whole that you've ever seen before, and is therefore so subtly bizarre and terrifying that the hairs on your forearms stand all the way up.
And today is sunny and sublime; and I'm listening to the Abduction from the Seraglio overture and ready to go out for some abduction of my own. Grr!
