Continuing my fine tradition of two-nights-before-close reviews, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I just got back from Theatre@First's Henry IV, marking the rare performance of a Shakespearean history play outside the BBC. Cross-casting Falstaff? Works really well. Joan for John is historically suitable and less familiar than Jane; she is a big woman in a green plaid shirt and a perpetual slight hangover frown, her hair streaked with grey and her pockets full of IOUs, and the story's ending has the necessary sting because as much as she blusters and brazens, whatever else she falsifies, her affection for Hal is true. Cross-casting Northumberland would have worked a lot better if the adaptation—condensing both parts into one two-act play—had not cut most of her lines. I missed Glendower's scenes, but they may have been the price of getting out before midnight. Hotspur moves as well as he speaks, restless, roving, tensile as live steel; at the other end of the spectrum, their nearly silent Peto runs an eloquent line in count-me-out understatement—No, no, they were not bound. He does card tricks for Bardolph as they lean up against the proscenium and probably takes all her money. Something more should have been done with the chemistry between Poins and Hal; their last scene together closes on the unresolved And to thee. Anyway, two more performances and then it's all Greek tragedy until Thanksgiving. I really hope they follow it with Henry V next season. Someone who isn't the BBC should.
The rest of this post is an assortment of stuff I didn't post earlier in the week.
1. Courtesy ofhandful_ofdust: Peter Cushing hand-painting a scarf for Helen.
2. In addition to being an extraordinary account of a life and an equally fascinating lens on race in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tom Reiss' The Black Count (2012)—the biography of Alex Dumas—has marvelous footnotes. Latest in the list of things I have learned from reading it:
"Tippoo's plucky army was famous for its 'rocket brigades,' which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo's rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. ('So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,' wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo's rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan's rockets, that provided the 'rockets' red glare' when the British bombarded Washington, D.C. in 1812."
3. Carthaginian glass head pendant! (Want more?)
4. Rafael can get that fez off by himself.
5. Does anyone have the version of "The Two Magicians" where the last thing he turns into is a coverlet and the last thing she turns into is a clothes moth with an appetite? Apparently I don't.
Tomorrow we recycle a lot of seltzer bottles. It's exciting.
P.S. This vase is really cool.
derspatchel and I just got back from Theatre@First's Henry IV, marking the rare performance of a Shakespearean history play outside the BBC. Cross-casting Falstaff? Works really well. Joan for John is historically suitable and less familiar than Jane; she is a big woman in a green plaid shirt and a perpetual slight hangover frown, her hair streaked with grey and her pockets full of IOUs, and the story's ending has the necessary sting because as much as she blusters and brazens, whatever else she falsifies, her affection for Hal is true. Cross-casting Northumberland would have worked a lot better if the adaptation—condensing both parts into one two-act play—had not cut most of her lines. I missed Glendower's scenes, but they may have been the price of getting out before midnight. Hotspur moves as well as he speaks, restless, roving, tensile as live steel; at the other end of the spectrum, their nearly silent Peto runs an eloquent line in count-me-out understatement—No, no, they were not bound. He does card tricks for Bardolph as they lean up against the proscenium and probably takes all her money. Something more should have been done with the chemistry between Poins and Hal; their last scene together closes on the unresolved And to thee. Anyway, two more performances and then it's all Greek tragedy until Thanksgiving. I really hope they follow it with Henry V next season. Someone who isn't the BBC should.The rest of this post is an assortment of stuff I didn't post earlier in the week.
1. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: Peter Cushing hand-painting a scarf for Helen.2. In addition to being an extraordinary account of a life and an equally fascinating lens on race in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tom Reiss' The Black Count (2012)—the biography of Alex Dumas—has marvelous footnotes. Latest in the list of things I have learned from reading it:
"Tippoo's plucky army was famous for its 'rocket brigades,' which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo's rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. ('So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,' wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo's rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan's rockets, that provided the 'rockets' red glare' when the British bombarded Washington, D.C. in 1812."
3. Carthaginian glass head pendant! (Want more?)
4. Rafael can get that fez off by himself.
5. Does anyone have the version of "The Two Magicians" where the last thing he turns into is a coverlet and the last thing she turns into is a clothes moth with an appetite? Apparently I don't.
Tomorrow we recycle a lot of seltzer bottles. It's exciting.
P.S. This vase is really cool.
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