Playhouse Square in Cleveland has a partnership with Case Western Reserve where Case Western students who are working on their Master’s degrees in acting get to do two shows a year at Playhouse Square. Granted, it is usually in the very small Bialosky Lab Theatre, which holds 150 patrons, but it is still a cool space in which to perform. On Saturday, Mer took me to the matinee showing of Case Western’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Mer and I have seen Twelfth Night a lot – at least three times in the theater, and we own two versions on DVD. Being familiar with the play is helpful. Quickly, it is a comedy, which means there is a block to young love (in this case, gender confusion from disguise, and a lady in mourning), and there is much confusion because of the presence of a twin brother and sister, each of whom thinks the other is dead. Throw in a fool, a rigid butler, a drunken kinsman, and a stupid but wealthy knight, and you are good to go.
Case set this production in the Mississippi Delta region, which made for amazing music in the play – lots of slide guitar and blues and harmonica. The music may have been the best part of the play, and that is no small feat. The acting was solid across the board for all of the main characters, with the actress playing Viola/Cesario doing a very good job, and the Fool was solid actor and a very good musician. The actor playing Sir Toby did well, although I was not always on board with some of the directorial choices.
My biggest disappointment was in fact some of the direction; the play is very funny, and usually borders on slapstick in places. The director of this production toned that humor down in most places, and that was too bad. They did do some fun things with the wild hair of the stupid but rich knight, but on the whole, the humor was smile-worthy instead of laugh-out-loud.
As if that were not enough, we left the theater and headed east to Chardon. I had never been to Chardon – it has a pretty town square, where we ate at a diner. The food was good, but the service was a tad slow, so we had to skip dessert. Mer had more plans for the evening, and another play, to boot.
We walked over to the Geauga Theater, the community theater of Chardon. We were there to see The Haunting of Hill House, which is appropriate enough for this time of year. The choice surprised me a bit until Mer told me the play was based on a book by Shirley Jackson.
The play takes place in Hill House, with a group of six people investigating the supernatural. Creepy things happen throughout, like doors closing on their own, and doors shaking in the casings, and strange lights and such. It was a fun show from an effects and set standpoint. The set was two rooms and the silhouette of a tower. I did not see where the plot was going and was completely wrong about the end. My only slight complaint was there were enough hesitations and repeated phrases that it seemed as if some of the actors did not know their lines completely, and that took me “out” of the play and made me edgy. Still, I enjoyed the story, and had a good time.
On the way home, we took steps to rectify the problem of missing dessert. We were driving very close to the Cheesecake Factory, so we stopped there and each got a piece of cheesecake. As always, I thought I could plow through it with no problem, but the last four to six bites made me feel queasy. There is a lot of cheesecake in one of those pieces.
We did not get home until late, but it was a good long date day.