Forward Into Denmark

Finished the rehearsal schedule for Ian W. Hill's Hamlet today, barring any more conflicts coming in from the actors.

We have 37 set rehearsals (13 of them with the full cast or close to), plus some other days set aside for "possible" work, and a tech day before we open. Pretty good. Hard scheduling 18 actors around their jobs, other shows, etc., but it worked out better than expected.

The first reading, with 15 of us, is this Wednesday. Then I go away for a week to Maine to get my teeth fixed at my regular dentist up there (I'm looking into colored prescription contacts, too) and get completely off-book on Hamlet so I don't have to worry about lines as I act and direct (I hope). Berit stays here, takes care of the cats, and runs Rachel Cohen's show. I come back for a second reading, with all 18 of us, on Friday the 27th.

Then it's rehearsal almost every day of the week until May 31. This will be tiring. But it gets more and more exciting as it goes.

I got a great email from Jerry Marsini - "Claudius" - a few hours ago regarding some important character questions. I'm working on an extensive answer now, and should have the whole thing up here sometime soon (should Jerry be okay with that).

Berit and I have now watched 9 films/videos of Hamlet (tonight was Peter Brook's with Adrian Lester and Michael Almereyda's with Ethan Hawke), and it's been a good thing for the production. I've only really maybe liked three of them, and even those were problematic. There were good bits to all of them. But all of them were disappointing in some way as well, some much more than others, of course.

It's been good because, as I may have noted a while back, I've been thinking about this production for 18 years, and working on the text for 15. It had kind of calcified in my head. It was "smart," but it didn't burn the way it once had, with the desire to do something good with Shakespeare's play by being completely faithful to it by being disrespectful to it - that is, make it a living piece of theatre rather than HAMLET, the GREAT PLAY by W*I*L*L*I*A*M S*H*A*K*E*S*P*E*A*R*E! All of the versions I've seen were in some way in awe of the TRADITION, and even when seeming to step away from that did so in ways that were simply reactive rather than organic.

So seeing all these films has made me burn again, got me out of my head, and I'm thankful.



Meanwhile, somewhere back in the past, in a photo that has caused Berit and I much amusement, Richard M. Nixon appears to be confronting an unfamiliar concept:




"Hmmmn . . . a 'little girl,' you say?"

"I run up to the calliope to match watches with the hoghead!"

There are images and text almost every single day at Modern Mechanix that I have to restrain myself from grabbing and reposting.

This one (from a February, 1933 Popular Science) isn't the funniest or most charming, but the fact that the intervening decades have made the headline prove - unintentionally - its own point struck me bemused:





Also interesting, if you read the fine print in this article by Gaylord Johnson (and what happened to that christian name, huh?), which may be more visible at the original page on Modern Mechanix, is that you get to see that Internet-style abbreviations are nothing new -- ham radio operators were using them 75 years ago!


Meanwhile in France (and thanks to Modern Art Notes for the pointer), the Barbara Kruger aesthetic is considered appropriate for a presidential candidate (I like the comment someone made, asking what artists could you consider appropriate for the current crop of USA hopefuls - any ideas?).