Lazy Weekend

This seems to be the first weekend in a while which has nothing on either Saturday or Sunday. We'll have to see what gets done with it - probably some fussing with book inventory, and more painting.

The Kids finale for our half of the run was Thursday. It's sad to have that come to an end, but the genre was definitely one for which a short run makes more sense than going on for half a decade. We mostly avoided combat, being terrified of the bad guys - Jelom was kinda apologetic that we didn't get in a fight (because I guess what's the point of using Champions if you're not going to have combats) but I think we felt pretty victorious about avoiding it. I'd go into more details (especially about the things that really amused me) but I don't want to give too many things away to the other run.

Shakespeare Ensemble's King Lear was SaturdayFriday. I really liked Lear's actor - he could make me believe in the switches between lucid and mad - and justom as the Fool, and everyone else was pretty good if not so memorable. Some of the directorial choices were a little surprising - Kent being female I could take or leave, but Edmund being female (not cross-cast, but actually female) was a little odd, since talking about lesbian marriages seemed a little out of genre, and there's too much language calling him a "fellow." The color-coding worked for me almost but not quite. The audience laughed at what justom termed "inappropriate places", which I admit, being one of the laughers ("Great thing of us forgot!- Speak, Edmund, where's the king?"). I'm not sure why a lot of things seemed funny - maybe there wasn't quite enough gravitas to turn everything into Horror, and so forgetting where you put the king just seemed comically inept. Dunno.

Amusingly, this is apparently not a play that as many people are familiar with, so there were many briefings going on during intermission. Who is Gloucester and how is he related to these people? What happened to Lear's hundred guys? The combination of people-in-disguise and people-playing-multiple-roles also helped confuse the easily confusable. (Is that Kent, or some other guy with the same actor? Answer: that's Kent in disguise. Is that the King of France, or some other guy? Answer: it's some other guy. The thing to keep in mind is that if they're wearing a Brown Vest, they're A Random Guy, except for Kent, who puts on her vest on stage and thus you can tell it's still Kent.)

And, for maverickseraph, I leave you with harrock's observation: "Produce their bodies, be they alive or dead - I want their spleens!"