Love's Labors Lost at the ART tonight -- a review of sorts

[xiphias]

The Actor's Repertory Theater is a theater troupe associated with Harvard, and tonight was the last performance of a show put on by some of their students.

"Love's Labors Lost" is generally considered to be one of Shakespeare's "lesser comedies", and sometimes is even classified as a "problem play.” This is how Shakespeare scholars say, “waitaminute -- this play sucks.”

I mean, there’s a lot of good stuff in the play, but, on the whole, not much happens, and there’s a whole lot of boring bits in it making fun of Elizabethan scholars, which is apparently really funny if you know a lot of Elizabethan scholars.

So, modern productions, recognizing these facts, take the basic setup, characters, and outline of the play, and all the good scenes and lines, throw out the boring bits, and then fill in the rest with whatever they want.

When Kenneth Branaugh did it, he filled it in with 1930s musical numbers.

This production used mainly 1950s musical numbers. Oh, and Don Adrieano was Chico, Costard was Groucho, a couple of the minor roles were Harpo, and Jaquenetta was Marylin Monroe.

In general, I think this was a very good idea. Get rid of the dull bits, add in funny bits to make up for it. If a set of jokes fall flat in the modern world, replace them with better ones.

Before I start talking about this play too much, let me take a moment and talk about the ending of the play. The ending is probably one of the best parts.

See, the whole play is this wacky screwball comedy about a prince and his three buddies who swear off women for three years, forgetting that the Princess of France and her three buddies are showing up and wacky fun ensues. Naturally, everyone falls in love, and there’s all sorts of hijinks, and, at the end, everybody is just about to have their light, frothy happy ending.

You know, screwball comedy romance. Meet cute, end up marrying. The kind of thing that you KNOW, in real life, would never work out, because it’s not ACTUALLY based on anything, and people haven’t shown any REAL emotional depth and the relationship would crumble as soon as an actual problem showed up.

And just as they’re getting ready for that ending, the Princess’s secretary comes in with a message. Her father just died.

This is EXACTLY what the ending needs. Someone on my friends list was talking about the concept of “tragic relief” -- that you need something serious to cut the fluff in a comic piece. And all of a sudden, these eight wacky kids have to face something real, for at least a page or two. They have to agree to take time off and mourn, and deal with serious things for a year, and come back afterward and see if they are actually in love.

So what about this performance of the play?

Well, Lis liked it better than I did. I liked it quite a bit, but I was very aware of its weaknesses. To start, when you’re doing a musical, it’s noticible when only one or two of the actors can sing. Everyone else DOES sing, but only a couple of the voices are any good. I mean, nobody was painful or anything, but there wasn’t much there vocally.

Then there was the comedy. It was generally good, but not great. And, well, if I see someone dressed as Groucho, well, I feel like they are setting up a very high expectation. If you put on a greasepaint mustache, you’re making a pretty extravagant boast: that you think that you can do Groucho. And that’s a very high bar to set for yourself.

Did they hit it? No, not quite. But they didn’t miss by much.

They replaced many of the set pieces in Shakespeare with either musical numbers or Marx Brothers bits -- for instance, when they decide to put on the play of the Nine Worthies, Chico decides he doesn’t like any of the Nine Worthies in the script, and they do the “party of the first part” routine from Night At The Opera, leaving them, at the end, with no worthies. . . so they have to put on a performance about the Tenth Worthy -- Captain Spaulding. Given that the Play of the Nine Worthies in Shakespeare’s text is actually pretty lame, and they did manage to keep the two good lines from that section and put them into the “party of the first part” routine, it worked out pretty well.

A note about the costuming is perhaps in order: they color-coded the lovers. And it worked. The men, throughout the play, wore tuxedoes, suits, Russian costumes, and so forth; the women, sundresses, evening gowns, swimsuits, and so forth. In each case, the Princess of France and the Duke of Navarre wore purple, Rosalind and Biron wear yellow, Logaville and Maria, blue, and Dumain and Katherine, red. Makes it easy-peasy to tell who ends up with whom.

And, for that matter, given that each lover, when he or she writes love-notes, uses statonery in the matching color, and each lady’s luggage is in the same color, it helps kieep track of what is whose and what’s going on. It’s stagey and artifical, but fine for screwball.

So, all in all -- it was fine. I thought the comic timing could have been better, and that a lot of the stuff was played over-broadly and the actors aren’t quite as talented clowns as they think they are, and that the singing could have been better, and that some of the staging and blocking was rather amateurish. But I did enjoy it, anyway.

Comments

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I think the ending is...

It's clearly the right ending for the play, but it's also one of the problems with it.

The thing about comic relief (in a tragedy) is that it creates a break in the tragedy (and highlights it by providing contrast) before returning to the main theme. That only works if you return to the theme - you don't end a tragedy with comic relief.

And, you don't end a comedy with tragic relief... or at least Shakespeare didn't manage to do it sucessfully. It leaves the dramatic tension of the play too unresolved. That's... interesting... but it isn't good.

Kiralee

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Branagh color-coded, also. I think that movie is sitting right at the top of my favorites list, at the moment. I could watch it repeatedly. I do watch it repeatedly!