I got carried away and forgot the best part of the play last Saturday – in the final swordfight between Romeo and Paris, Paris’s sword broke off at the hilt and clattered across the stage. There was a moment of silence, as they both watched the blade skitter away, then looked at the broken hilt, and then looked at each other – and then they just jumped in and improvised the rest of the fight scene (which involved a lot of grappling). The actor who played Romeo told me afterwards that I missed the best fight of the play – it was a long one that had been choreographed with the cloak-and-dagger and cloak-and-rapier fighting styles, and looked really sweet. But I don’t go to the theater to see well-choreographed fights, I go to see the energy and unpredictability of a live performance – and this one delivered in spades. Kudos to all.

They had to use some girls to play guy parts, which kind of threw me. I’m not averse to crossdressing in performances of Shakespeare, since women weren’t allowed to be actors in Shakespeare’s day, and men played all female roles, but that was in the opposite direction. It’s especially weird when the girls were 14 and had some of the “dirty” lines Shakespeare wrote (“Aye, the heads of the maidens – or their maidenheads, take it in the sense thou wilt!”). I really don’t think they knew what they were talking about, though. When we studied “Romeo and Juliet” as freshmen in high school, our teacher had us ask the health teacher about the terms; he refused to explain them himself.

Quote of the Day:
Me: “Did you know ‘thou’ isn’t in the Microsoft Word dictionary?”
Dann: “Try finding ‘Netscape’ in there.”