Shakespeare

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.

Paul Scofield died last week.

Don't know how I missed it when it happened. I adore Paul Scofield. Or rather, I adored Paul Scofield. It's enough to make me go put Kenneth Branagh's (stupendous) Henry V on hold at the library. For Scofield played, and played brilliantly, the French king.

On Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout's About Last Night blog (from whence I also gacked the pic of Scofield as Thomas More & Robert Shaw as Henry VIII), Teachout says that he didn't feel the same sense of loss about Scofield's death that he did about the death of British star John Gielgud. He wondered why, but realized that "Scofield made very few movies, and only two of them, Robert Redford's Quiz Show and the 1966 screen version of A Man for All Seasons, are reasonably well known to American audiences."

(Here, we can reasonably well note that I am a complete geek for knowing Henry V better than Quiz Show — though I do know, and know pretty well, all three of the movies heretofore mentioned.)

Teachout also says, "It strikes me as both revealing and ironic that most Americans under the age of sixty — myself, alas, included — will remember Paul Scofield not as one of the greatest stage actors of the twentieth century but as the man who played Charles Van Doren's father in Quiz Show."

The Brits mourn him though, or so says the Telegraph. One paragraph in that article, which recaps his career, his lack of interest in being a star and his 65-year marriage to his wife, makes me hate hate hate Laurence Olivier:
Lord Olivier, who ran the National Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, was said to have been so jealous of Scofield that he repeatedly rejected him for leading roles.

AAAAAAAH.

Anyway. Paul Scofield, it's true, I know you as Sir Thomas More, the French king, Old Hamlet's Ghost, Charles Van Doren's disappointed father. But I fell for your style in high school, and I'm sad that I never got to see you on stage.

Well, frankly, it's the enemy of getting anything done. Not that I haven't been doing anything (you know, what with the BRAVO section coming out on Thursday and all), but all the things I have been doing have been print-related. How un-journalist 2.0 of me.

But the thing is, I started to post about Portland's Time-Based Art, and I was gonna put up photos plus a cool little video of one of the artworks, and ... it all got to be too much: Making the links! Argh! Getting the pictures the right size! AUGH!

And then ... well ... I was so busy that Newsroll (TM) went on the fritz.
Which is too bad because there's lots of great info out there, and now it's theater season (officially kicked off a bit early with Willamette Rep's A Body of Water, review coming in print on Thursday), and it's also the start of the school year, and I have classes to teach.

Luckily Chuck, Molly, Alan, Ted and Camilla will be keeping you all up to date. But I'll try for a newsroll today ... just as soon as I get a few more authors interviewed!

To-do List:
1. Learn to podcast
2. Podcast something dramatically interesting something
3. Find quirky things on Interwebs and write about them
4. Remember that finished is better than perfect(ly unfinished)

Quirky non-web moment:
Today, I have eaten strawberry yogurt (organic! local-ish!), beet risotto (organic, some local ingredients), beet greens (from those beets) and peach-blueberry-raspberry cobbler (mostly organic and local, though not the cobbler part). What's the problem here? Everything is the same color. Time for some iceberg lettuce.

Speaking of dark red/maroon, gratuitous Shakespeare moment: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival puts on Coriolanus next year. Has anyone ever read this play? It awaits my free time (after all of the Winter Reading reading is finished, probably).
This is the PBS Coriolanus poster. I don't get the imagery (it's too small, really, for me to see it clearly), but it looks nice and bloody.

Here's what the PBS website has to say about this production:
Coriolanus
Synopsis:

In a time before Empire, one man will hold the fate of ancient Rome in his hands. But pride will turn his hand against his own, and make equal enemies of friend and foe.

"Coriolanus": a warrior's tale.

Rated R. some scenes of violence, and of a character's head being removed from his own backside (figuratively).

"I hope Colin Powell was taking notes."
- Timeweek

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?

1. What crazy ass fools would deny kids health care coverage? Would it shock you if I said the Bushies?

2. Maybe they had health care 14 million years ago. And now we'll be able to see!

3. Ha! Not to insult Prince Hal or anything ... Nice try, people, but we know Bush ain't no Shakespearean hero.
After the 2000 recount, plenty of us hoped - we really had no choice - that Bush would turn out to be Prince Hal in Henry IV, the layabout brat who, on succeeding to his father's throne, finds the maturity to lead. His presidency has indeed turned out to be like Henry V, but in reverse.

4. Health care in Ohio is screwed too, thanks to "the market." The profit motive runs contrary to the best cooperative and Samaritan traditions of medical practice and training.

5. Healthy food Less instantly bad for you food at the Indianapolis State Fair. Oh noes, they has to change the oil more often!

Um, dudes, that's a good thing. However, problem:
And if this meant they could indulge without guilt or have one more helping, so much the better.
No, see, the one more helping thing? You're missing the point.

6. OMG, the West Coast is so ... far ... away ... from East Coast newspapers, that is.

7. But not as far as Iowa, apparently. Not that the farmers help that myth, either.

8. Rain: It's messing with Mexico & Jamaica and killing people in the Midwest. (And freaking me out in Eugene: Give me back my sunny days! Until October!)

9. More disaster and a slow response: Peru needs help.

10. Kids these days! It's the annual Beloit list about entering first-year students, and it's a bit confusing:
62. They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said “goodbye to rusty cars.”
Me neither, dudes.

BONUS: The Remains of the Day Lily
That just hurts. Ouch. Stop it!