It’s been a while, and I have an excellent reason: my Mom passed away in mid-June, and since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout.
To be fair, Mom made it as easy on me (an only child) as she could: she left a list of usernames and passwords, account information, and the like, and my name was already on her bank account.
Still, notifying utilities, doctors (who hadn’t attended her in her final days), and other relevant parties took a while. Last weekend, we held the estate sale to clear out as many of her belongings as we could after taking the few things we (Hubby and I) could fit into our own home. The only steps left are to call charities to pick up what’s left, and I’ll do that this coming week.
All that as background to our visit to Cedar City for the Utah Shakespeare Festival this weekend. The trip had been planned since we received notice that the Festival would re-open after missing the 2020 season thanks to the ‘Rona, and it could not have come at a better time.
We’ve been going to the Festival almost every year since we got together. We missed a few back in the early Aughts when we bought our house. (A word to the wise: *ALWAYS* set aside a few thousand more than your down payment, because you *will* hemorrhage money in the first few months after you move in on things you won’t think about. Things like curtains, for example.) And of course, there was no season last year.
This year’s season was modified: they didn’t offer backstage tours or props/costuming tours as those were indoors, and they had far more limited concessions than usual. Masks were required for indoor performances regardless of vaccination status (an Actors Equity Union requirement, as the State of Utah had removed all restrictions), though not for performances in the open air.
On Friday, we first saw CYMBELINE, one of the more rarely-produced plays, as part of the Festival’s Complete the Canon Project. The Project was intended to produce all thirty-seven of the Bard’s plays within a ten-year span. The ten years were 2012-2023; I can only assume they’ve bumped that out to 2024.
CYMBELINE has to be one of the most mis-named plays ever, as Cymbeline has a minor role in the story; at the play seminar Saturday morning, the dramaturge leading the discussion noted that in many productions in the early modern era, the play has been known as IMOGEN, which is far more accurate, but was named CYMBELINE because at the time of composition (about 1610), naming a play for a woman wouldn’t have gone over well.
For this play, the director set the stage up like an old trunk show performance and narrowed the cast to eight actors, each of whom doubled up on parts. In the interest of gender parity, the director also changed two characters from male to female: Belarius, a soldier, and Pasanio, a protector and servant of Imogen.
I’m generally not a fan of historical revisionism, but in this case, I really can’t argue with the changes. Cymbeline the character is based on the ruler of a Celtic tribe during Roman times, and it’s known that some of the British Celtic tribes had female warriors (Boudica, anyone?), so my only irritation with Belarius is that sounds more like a Roman name than a Celtic one.
Pasanio likewise makes sense as a woman; a female traditionally had female servants, after all.
The actress who played Imogen, Constance V. Swain, was fantastic, easily the best part of this play. She brought intensity and emotion to the role and I look forward to seeing her in something else. (She was also in INTIMATE APPAREL this season, but we didn’t have tickets for that.)
Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was … adequate. Competent, even. They just didn’t move us the way Ms. Swain did.
Our second play on Friday was RICHARD III, chronologically the next-to-last of the Bard’s history plays. (The last is, of course, HENRY VIII.) The titular character was played by Aidan O’Reilly with an evil glee that fit the character as written quite well. That the character had little to do with the actual King Richard III is irrelevant, of course.
Saturday, we had tickets for two plays. The first was THE COMEDY OF TERRORS. Yes, Terrors, not Errors. It’s a two-person riff on THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, of course, involving two sets of twins (well, technically, one set of twins and one set of triplets) who keep mistaking one for the other and have a farcical romp as a result.
We’d seen one of the actors before…well, we REMEMBERED seeing him before. He was in THE FOREIGNER back in 2018 (a lifetime ago, it seems), and he’d stolen the show then in a lesser part. Seeing him as a co-lead was a delight. I can only hope he returns to the Festival next year.
We were also supposed to see THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. We’d seen it before, but it’s a delightful farce, and after the hell that was 2020, who didn’t need a little cheering up? Then we heard from other Festival-goers that this production was staged with a 70s disco vibe, and we were really looking forward to seeing it.
Unfortunately, when we woke up Saturday morning, the Cedar City air was full of haze and smoke that, we later heard, was from wildfires up in the Northern California/Pacific Northwest area, brought to Cedar City thanks to the Jetstream. By the time the orientation to the evening plays came around, the air quality was bad enough that the Festival had to cancel ERRORS (it was running in the open-air Engelstad Theatre), so we didn’t get to see it.
The one bright spot that came out of this was that, during the Saturday morning play seminars (discussions of the plays produced the day before), we heard so much about THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE that we bought tickets for it on a later weekend.
We’ve seen PIRATES at the Festival before, waaaay back in 2001, when Fred Adams (the Festival founder, who passed away in 2020 – not, as far as I know, due to the ‘Rona) played the Major General, and that performance was so memorable that we haven’t really wanted to see it again.
This year, though, everyone who saw it had great things to say about it, including a tap-dance battle that sounded really fun, so we decided 20 years was long enough to wait before seeing it again. We’ll be headed back up there one weekend next month to see it, and I’ll post an AAR here when we do.
Meanwhile, it’s time to go scout next year’s season and start making plans for that.
