liz3564 wrote:Dr. Peterson wrote:...my wife and I bought tickets roughly a year ago to the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City for all six plays over the Thursday-through-Saturday just past...
Cool! How was it?
First the three non-Shakespeare plays:
Fiddler on the Roof was
Fiddler on the Roof. Familiar tunes, etc. Always a bit touching, really. The singing voices weren't great in this production, but the acting was good.
Moliere's
The School for Wives. I'd never seen this, but it was fun. Light farce, of course. Nothing very deep. But funny.
Cyrano de Bergerac. I've always liked this play very much, and Bryan Vaughan was excellent in the title role.
Now for the three Shakespearean plays:
Two Gentlemen of Verona. Not Shakespeare's best. In fact, truth be told, I generally have a hard time keeping the plots of several of his comedies distinct in my mind, with the girls pretending to be boys and the sundered twins/best friends, etc. But still worth seeing, funny, and well staged. Shakespeare can never be altogether bad. If nothing else, one can always simply luxuriate in the language.
The Taming of the Shrew. The director decided to set this in 1946 Allied-occupied Italy, with Petrucchio as an Italian-American GI. I didn't think much of the idea when I first heard about it, but found the production surprisingly good. Post-war Italy worked for me. And I've always liked the play.
Finally, I always dread watching
Othello, with its inexorable progress toward disaster -- much more so than, say,
Hamlet and even
Lear -- but it's a great play, and this was a fine performance. The Othello and the Iago were very good.
All in all, I think it was one of the Festival's strongest seasons, in my experience, and we've been coming faithfully for twenty years.