Company, Shakespeare, and Life in General

[fauxklore]

And, of course, I won't write about those items in order.

Better House and Office Keeping: I am trying to do in-processing for my new job and out-processing from my current job. This is all very chaotic and stressful and threw me into a brief "why am I doing this?" moment. Then I got asked to cover a last minute meeting yesterday and remembered why I was doing it. It wasn't that it was that terrible a meeting. It's just that the only reason we needed someone there had to do with politics, not usefulness. That will, of course, never happen with the new job :)

I have also verified that Pink Martini provides the best soundtrack for office cleaning, assuming one does not mind the earworm side effect. (Which is, curiously enough, "Amado Mio" rather than "Sympathique.")

Metro haiku: Summer brings crowds and bad behavior. Hence, I feel compelled to offer this etiquette lesson.

There are 50 folks
standing in this car. Don't take
up a seat with bags.

Company: I went to see the filmed version of Company on Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed it for the most part, but I still prefer live theatre for the immediacy and intimacy. Also, Stephen Colbert is not much of a singer. My biggest quibble is that you are so close to the faces, you are forced to see where they hid the mikes in people's hair. Inevitably, I find myself thinking it looks like the actors have bugs on their faces.

Still, it is a great score and I do recognize that productions like this do provide access to shows for people who live in places lacking in theatre. Or people who think theatre is too expensive. (Although $18 for a movie version is awfully steep. I actually got $12 off by using a free movie coupon I had from some refund offer or other.)

Two other comments re: the show:
1) the theatre I saw it at stopped it for intermission several minutes too early, making an odd interruption to the scene with Amy's wedding. Very bizarre.

2) While "Another Hundred People" is a definite show stopper, it is also profoundly depressing.

Shakespeare: No, I did not go to a Shakespeare play. It may be surprising but I have seen exactly one Shakespeare play in my life. That was a production of Measure for Meaure that I saw on a particularly bad date in my undergraduate days. (The badness was entirely on my part and can be summarized as 19 year old Miriam still cared too much about other people's opinions, so did not give a fair chance to a guy who some of her friends did not care for. But she really wanted to see the play. I like to think I've grown up. Or at least stopped talking about myself in the third person.)

Anyway, what I did go to was the MIT Club of Washington Partners and Patrons event Monday night, which featured Michael Kahn, the director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, as the speaker. He gave a lively and entertaining talk about the theatre environment in Washington. Curiously, I'd had a conversation on pretty much the same subject with a couple of folks at Dulles airport a couple of weeks ago. The short version is that there is a lot of theatre in Washington, but people who don't live here don't seem to know that. In a way, I think that is advantageous, since it allows theatre companies to put on more challenging shows, instead of the splashy big productions that tourists flock to.

Another interesting point came up during a conversation after the talk. Most of theatre companies can ease their financial burden by mixing a few big shows with ones that have small casts. But all of the classical pieces that a company like Shakespeare Theatre Company does have large casts, so their finances are inherently more challenging.

Finally, during the talk Michael Kahn mentioned that their upcoming production of The Merchant of Venice is set in 1920's New York. The logic is apparently a similar ethnic mix. This made me at least somewhat interested in the show, though I have no idea where I would find time to see it.

Quote of the Day: Found in a memo in my office, was the description of a program as having "not managed to deliver anything except schedule delays."

Comments

[ron_newman]

It's very surprising to me that you have almost never seen a Shakespeare play. Do you have an aversion to his work?

[fauxklore]

I don't have any particular aversion to Shakespeare. I think it's mostly the problem of too much choice. Most of my theatre going is either musicals or monologues. That keeps me busy enough.