hamlet

This review comes out on Thursday in print.

Photo of Hamlet (Patrick O'Driscoll) and Claudius (Kato Bass) by Gretchen Drew

A Gutsy Hamlet
Or Not to Be turns the horror inside out
by Suzi Steffen

God, that Will Shakespeare was hilarious, wasn’t he? Especially around death. The final scene of Hamlet? Side-splitting!

Bad puns aside ... actually, bad puns not aside: John Schmor’s adaptation Or Not to Be, a collaboration between the UO theater department and the Lord Leebrick Theatre, distills both Hamlet’s humor and the play’s strong stench of the graveyard into a first-generation hybrid that needs tweaking but provides some spectacular moments.

Read more here.

Yes, I do know what day it is. No, I'm not linking to stories about it. Those won't be hard for you to find. (Nor are these, I'm sure.)

1. Green schools mean no snoozing! Weirdest result of "green building" ever.

2. Jonathan Franzen sticks foot in mouth again. Though actually I fully understood his Oprah thing (but I wasn't blown away by The Corrections, which is too bad). This time, he's putting the smackdown on Broadway. Money quote: I’m loath to criticize any spark of excitement anywhere.

3. Come on, U.S. women! Show the world why we have "soccer moms"!
A 2-2 draw with NORTH KOREA? That's not very patriotic. Um, or impressive. I love soccer. Soccer is, like, the best sport ever. What's that you say? Why yes, I did destroy the cartilage in my knees playing soccer as a child. I never even got to play in high school. But! I know someone who knows Mia Hamm's sister! So that's awesome. ANYWAY, I want this year's team to Step. It. Up.

4. Anita Roddick, energetic environmentalist, part II. I guess I was a bit unfair yesterday. Warm white wine, though? Really? (Also, I'm listening right now to the Guardian podcast: "She did sort of inspire a whole range of people do compassionate kind of businesses, didn't she?" "She did; she was one of the first so-called social entrepreneurs, and she gave away most of her profit.")

5. You really, really don't want to be a kid in Liberia. At least, not one accused of a crime. The war's been over for four years, and what progress is there? (Liberia is neighbor to Sierra Leone, and I'm reading Ishmael Beah's heartrending A Long Way Gone for our Winter Reading issue, and my god, the things we do to children in this world.)

On to other topics.
6. Local: good or bad? Wrong question, says this writer.
It's actually local: promotes community! (I felt the community last night when we were making strawberry jam [strawberries from Berg's]--the community of people who would want to eat the jam!)

7. Say it ain't so, John Edwards! Maybe my horse isn't as green as I thought.

8. No way! The GOP is hurting government? OK, this guy apparently missed that bit.
You know, the Grover Norquist bit? The bit about drowning government in the bathtub? If you don't know that bit, you should. It explains a lot of things about incompetence and the response to Katrina and the No Child Left Behind Act and oh, so many other things.
Things like the Justice Department, he says:
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Bush administration has made the Justice Department a political extension of the White House in the area of law enforcement, which is unprecedented and seriously dilutes the credibility of the government when it goes to court.

9. How much technology do students need? I swear, this writer is writing for a time-warped paper that published years ago. OMG, the kids, they want the iPods!

10. Is Jude Law really any worse than Mel Gibson? Hamlet can survive a lot. Even pathetic high school productions. But this theater critic says, Law's callowness, his shallowness, his sheer maddening inanity ... that might be a bit of a problem.

BONUS: How Do I Tell my Wife I Had A Sex Party While She Was Away?

Watched Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet a couple of nights ago.

One play I adored in high school and college (and should reread) is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (an excellent summary with links is here), so I found it a bit disconcerting when I figured out that my boys R&G wouldn’t be in the Olivier version. (I should mention that I was a lady-in-waiting for a production of R&G during my first semester in college. I know this play quite well; also, the Tom Stoppard movie? It sucked. See it onstage, not onscreen.)

After all, one of the many things Hamlet concerns is betrayal.

Read much more geeking out after the jump (which link says "read more" or "more" and is after all of the tags down there, so sorry, we are fixing soon) ...