Last weekend, Mer and I got invited by our friends Matt and Liz to go see ***free*** Shakespeare by the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival. They offer Shakespeare for free, and they perform outdoors, which is nice during pleasant weather like we had last weekend. They do take donations to help offset costs, but you can still see the play even if you do not donate (Mer and I have the double mortgage issue, so we passed on donating this year; we’ll get them next year if we sell the house). This year, the company was doing Taming of the Shrew and Richard III. The night we went (Saturday) was the closing night for Richard III. Matt and Liz brought another friend with them, and we all sat about 25 feet from the stage. The company does use microphones, so hearing the lines was mostly not a problem. My biggest issue of the production was they added background music to the play to help set mood. That worked for one or two scenes, but I thought the music was too loud at the start of the actors’ speeches – I tended to miss the first line or two of speeches while the music was faded away. They also cut some lines from the play, which is understandable since Richard III is the longest play Shakespeare wrote other than Hamlet. There were a few lines that Our Hero Prof. Saccio (of the Teaching Company) brings up that I wanted to see on the stage, but the lines were omitted.
Still, the production was very good. The actor playing Richard did a very nice job of staying in character – he held his “withered” hand at a strange angle during the whole play, and he always dragged his “deformed” foot behind him, even when he was in a hurry. Very nicely done. This production added the ghost scene back into the play, where Richard dreams of the people he has murdered. The movie version we have of Richard III omits the ghosts, and that is too bad – they are pretty effective in cursing Richard. I had never seen the play done live, and I really enjoyed the experience (in as much as you enjoy a play full of murder and plotting).
It was very good to see Matt and Liz again. We had not seen them in a few months, and I always have a good time with them. They have an excellent sense of humor, and their friend, who is from the D.C. area, seemed to be having a good time as well. We made plans to go back to the farm for pumpkins in October, and hopefully can get together again sooner than that.
The weather was very fine for an outdoor event, and it rained hard in the areas around us, but we stayed dry. It was a good time, and I am happy to add the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival to my list of good theater to see – I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next summer.