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Ashland, part one
Sep. 24th, 2011 01:24 amWe are a little more than halfway through the Oregon portion of the trip. Ashland is delightful, as always, even if it is full of hills that must be walked up.
Getting here was largely uneventful, save that we arranged dinner to make sure CJ got to stop at Jamba Juice, and then CJ was obsessed with getting as much driving as possible done while it was still light out, and refused to go the three extra blocks to Jamba Juice. Men are very, very frustrating.
Tuesday was History Day -- Julius Caesar and Henry IV, Part Two. We had heard there was a "surprise" with Julius Caesar, and were steeling ourselves for something overly weird. Caesar is played by and as a woman, but this is Ashland and specifically the New Theater, so we both kinda shrugged and figured it wasn't that big of a deal-- Ashland does things with plays, and the New Theater is where they tend to show the more experimental plays anyway. At the end of the play, we looked at each other and asked "Did we miss the surprise?" Email confirms that the surprise was the female lead, and snippets of conversations overheard from other patrons later on indicate that we're the weird ones for not thinking it weird. Which I find weird.
It was not until I was reading the program much later that I understood why Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar. I hadn't realized how much government censorship he faced; a "historical" play was how he made points about current society without getting into trouble with the censors.
We had seen Henry IV, Part One last year, and I found it dreadfully boring and difficult to follow. What's more, I dislike the Elizabethan Theater because the seats are tremendously uncomfortable. I begged off on Henry IV, Part Two, and sent CJ off on his own for that performance. Had I had the better understanding of why the Histories even exist, I might have decided to go anyway, but probably not. The seats are still really uncomfortable.
Wednesday was Measure For Measure and Pirates of Penzance. Because it's Ashland, Measure For Measure was set in the 1970s (but still with exactly the same dialogue that Shakespeare wrote), and I confess that I did not like the story one bit. The main "good guy" is an ass, the main "bad guy" is a hypocrite (though in fairness, his hypocrisy is the point of the story), and the female lead is annoyingly faultless (until the very end, by which time it seems out of place). Plus, I hate the bed trick (in which a man is tricked into having sex with a different woman than the one he thinks he's bedding.)
Pirates of Penzance, on the other hand, was wonderful. Again, it's Ashland, so in addition to the music that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, they added some snippets of modern music, and it worked very well.
Thursday, we had no matinee performance, so we drove up to Crater Lake. We went last year, but it was chilly out, and we'd stopped a lot on the way up to look at and take pictures of other things, so we didn't spend much time up at Crater Lake itself last year. This year... see, I got a new camera, and it's much much better than the one I used last year, and the river and the gorge are still very pretty, and by the time we got up to Crater Lake, we had about a half hour before we had to leave in order to catch the evening play. As it was, we managed to get into our seats with 10 minutes to spare, which is not really a lot of wiggle room for a two-hour drive plus dinner (which was Del Taco, because we didn't have time for non-fast-food).
The evening performance was Love's Labors Lost (1950s-inspired dress, same Shakespearean dialogue), and I mostly liked it but found the ending unsatisfying. This is where CJ and I differ, because he likes that they don't rush into marriage after only knowing each other a short time, whereas I like my comedies to have not just happy endings, but also loose ends tied up.
Today was The Imaginary Invalid, a re-imagining of Moliere's play. Fabulously done, with a nice mixture of staying true to Moliere's themes while bringing the play up to date-- this is probably going to end up being the highlight of the season for me. We popped into the Member's Discussion afterward, where one of the actors took questions and told us some background about the play-- including how little of it was actually changed.
For the evening, we made our traditional pilgramage to the local movie theater and saw The Debt, which was excellent until the last ten minutes, at which point the writers had a fight about how it should end and finally just agreed to throw in everything except the common sense.
Still to come is Willful (which is "site-specific", which basically means it travels around the campus and the audience has to follow it around... which I am a little nervous about, but we shall see how it goes. Hopefully slow enough that I don't feel like I'm constantly "catching up" to the play.) and The African Company Presents Richard III, which I know very little about.
Getting here was largely uneventful, save that we arranged dinner to make sure CJ got to stop at Jamba Juice, and then CJ was obsessed with getting as much driving as possible done while it was still light out, and refused to go the three extra blocks to Jamba Juice. Men are very, very frustrating.
Tuesday was History Day -- Julius Caesar and Henry IV, Part Two. We had heard there was a "surprise" with Julius Caesar, and were steeling ourselves for something overly weird. Caesar is played by and as a woman, but this is Ashland and specifically the New Theater, so we both kinda shrugged and figured it wasn't that big of a deal-- Ashland does things with plays, and the New Theater is where they tend to show the more experimental plays anyway. At the end of the play, we looked at each other and asked "Did we miss the surprise?" Email confirms that the surprise was the female lead, and snippets of conversations overheard from other patrons later on indicate that we're the weird ones for not thinking it weird. Which I find weird.
It was not until I was reading the program much later that I understood why Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar. I hadn't realized how much government censorship he faced; a "historical" play was how he made points about current society without getting into trouble with the censors.
We had seen Henry IV, Part One last year, and I found it dreadfully boring and difficult to follow. What's more, I dislike the Elizabethan Theater because the seats are tremendously uncomfortable. I begged off on Henry IV, Part Two, and sent CJ off on his own for that performance. Had I had the better understanding of why the Histories even exist, I might have decided to go anyway, but probably not. The seats are still really uncomfortable.
Wednesday was Measure For Measure and Pirates of Penzance. Because it's Ashland, Measure For Measure was set in the 1970s (but still with exactly the same dialogue that Shakespeare wrote), and I confess that I did not like the story one bit. The main "good guy" is an ass, the main "bad guy" is a hypocrite (though in fairness, his hypocrisy is the point of the story), and the female lead is annoyingly faultless (until the very end, by which time it seems out of place). Plus, I hate the bed trick (in which a man is tricked into having sex with a different woman than the one he thinks he's bedding.)
Pirates of Penzance, on the other hand, was wonderful. Again, it's Ashland, so in addition to the music that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, they added some snippets of modern music, and it worked very well.
Thursday, we had no matinee performance, so we drove up to Crater Lake. We went last year, but it was chilly out, and we'd stopped a lot on the way up to look at and take pictures of other things, so we didn't spend much time up at Crater Lake itself last year. This year... see, I got a new camera, and it's much much better than the one I used last year, and the river and the gorge are still very pretty, and by the time we got up to Crater Lake, we had about a half hour before we had to leave in order to catch the evening play. As it was, we managed to get into our seats with 10 minutes to spare, which is not really a lot of wiggle room for a two-hour drive plus dinner (which was Del Taco, because we didn't have time for non-fast-food).
The evening performance was Love's Labors Lost (1950s-inspired dress, same Shakespearean dialogue), and I mostly liked it but found the ending unsatisfying. This is where CJ and I differ, because he likes that they don't rush into marriage after only knowing each other a short time, whereas I like my comedies to have not just happy endings, but also loose ends tied up.
Today was The Imaginary Invalid, a re-imagining of Moliere's play. Fabulously done, with a nice mixture of staying true to Moliere's themes while bringing the play up to date-- this is probably going to end up being the highlight of the season for me. We popped into the Member's Discussion afterward, where one of the actors took questions and told us some background about the play-- including how little of it was actually changed.
For the evening, we made our traditional pilgramage to the local movie theater and saw The Debt, which was excellent until the last ten minutes, at which point the writers had a fight about how it should end and finally just agreed to throw in everything except the common sense.
Still to come is Willful (which is "site-specific", which basically means it travels around the campus and the audience has to follow it around... which I am a little nervous about, but we shall see how it goes. Hopefully slow enough that I don't feel like I'm constantly "catching up" to the play.) and The African Company Presents Richard III, which I know very little about.
