Some of the best theater in the area (probably among the best in the west) happens at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City. I love to attend the festival. It has been several years since I've gone, but I've been thinking about catching a few shows this summer.
The festival produces 8-9 plays per year, usually 6 in the summer and 3 in the fall. Don't be fooled by the name, "Shakespearean Festival." Although the Bard's works are plentiful, they are balanced out by modern works and musicals as well. The festival even features time where they do workshops with new plays.
Because I've been thinking about attending this year, I've been reading the early reviews as they come in, trying to decide which plays to see. (I wish I could see all of them, but that would be too costly, and take several days, so...)
Today, I read the Deseret News' review of the Shakespearean Festival's production of "Othello."
Here's a snippet from it:
"...it is a tragedy in every sense of the word--at the end of the play, one woman left the [theater] saying, "Well I wasn't expecting that!"
I thought this was strange, not just for the woman to say, but for the reviewer to highlight. What was she expecting from Othello? Does she not know *spoiler alert* that there's a lot of deceit, hate, rate, jealousy, and murder?
You don't really have to know Shakespeare's works very well to know what a work is defined as. You can actually look it up on the website before you buy tickets. Even if you know nothing about Othello, you could easily discover that it is classified as a tragedy. And it is.
This brings me to the point of this blog post. Perhaps some people aren't familiar with Shakespearean works, and it'd be a shame to miss out on some great plays this summer, so I have a few tips.
- Be prepared - they will not speak regular English. Reading a synopsis of the play ahead of time will help you to understand what is going on and will not spoil anything. These works are not still known hundreds of years later because they rely on a surprise ending...
- Give it some time - it's not like attending a play in regular English. Give yourself a few minutes at the beginning of the play to adjust before you give up.
- Know what you're in for - if the play is not categorized as a comedy, expect people to die. Lots of people. Seriously. Pretty much everyone.
- Careful with children - if it is not a production specifically performed for children, be prepared for a lot of that death to happen on-stage. Seriously. Lots of death. Can't stress that enough.
- The fact that a play is labeled as a history does not mean that it is 100% historically accurate.
- The death thing that I mentioned? Be prepared. Lots of death. Seriously. In fact, even people who seem like good guys at the beginning of these shows will kill other people, and not in self defense.
If you can keep these tips in mind, you should head out and see some great Shakespeare. If Shakespeare isn't your thing, you should try to hit some of the other plays at the festival. Everything they do is top-notch. They use the best actors from all over the country, amazing set designers, exquisite costumes, etc...
Now I REALLY want to go. :)
5 comments:
You and me, let's go. We'll leave the baby with his dad. :)
I'll help his Dad.
Amen to the knowing about the play beforehand. We drove down one year, and our mom forced us to listen to A Midsummer Night's Dream on tape all the way down.
"But we're going to see the play... why do we have to listen to it?" we complained.
Thank heavens she did that! That was the best play I've seen... I was literally (I mean literally in the literal sense, not the sense we often use today) rolling in the aisles.
I hope you make it down there!
You left out one Shakespearean tip: also be prepared to see at least one man masquerading as a woman, or woman as a man, or man as a woman pretending to be a man, etc. Not sure why, but the guy loved cross-dressing. Or at least he loved making other people do it. I don't know if he cross-dressed himself...
That IS an excellent point, LL. There will ALWAYS be a man dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man.
Perhaps that was because the women were all played by men back in those days, so maybe it was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of inside joke.
Or good ol' Will was a cross-dresser. One or the other. :)
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