Twelfth Night -- my favorite parts

[owlectomy]

* Andrew Aguecheek "speaking French" in Act III, scene 1. Hamish Linklater stole every scene that he was in, he was just ridiculous.

*Speaking of which: Where Cesario and Andrew cross swords, both clearly terrified and chagrined by the idea.

*Where Cesario is going on about how she might hypothetically love Orsino if, hypothetically, "he" were a woman. And Orsino looks at him with this long silence and an expression of "Okay, I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."

*Viola and Sebastian reunited -- I think it's a brilliant bit of plotting on Shakespeare's part that this incredibly joyous moment, of these two people who thought each other dead, is also the moment that untangles all the messy "people in love the wrong way 'round" stuff.

*Olivia being kind of surprised that she's not married to the person she thought, but then realizing that Cesario is still going to be her sister-in-law. Because, even as Cesario has been protesting against Olivia's love for the whole length of the play, there really seems to be a bond between them -- after all, they've both lost a brother recently...

*The part at the very end where they sing, "For the rain it raineth every day." Which drew a big laugh because indeed the rain it raineth every day lately.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I waited in line for seven hours to get tickets. The insufficient popularity of theater is not a problem to me. ;)

But I'll have more on the rest later.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare in the Park is kind of a special case because it's free, but it consistently attracts Hollywood-caliber actors; Anne Hathaway played Viola, and there were a few other actors who were famous from Broadway or had done TV or movies.

So all that proves is that, if you put a famous person in a famous play in one of the biggest cultural centers in the world, and it's free, you can get a big audience for it. I will admit that live theater is probably in trouble even though all of that is true.

I don't know a ton about the economics of theater, but I know that a lot of plays were forced to close this year because they had to sell out their shows, at $60 or $100 for the cheap seats, just to make enough money to stay in business, and when the economy got worse people could no longer make that happen. You might have an extra $60 lying around or you might not, but you would be thinking, "I could see FIVE movies for that price...." Outside of a city as large as New York, it gets that much harder to fill a theater at those prices.

If it costs $60 to go to the theater, plays aren't going to be written for the masses. And people who have the talent to write for the masses are going to go into movies and television.

You can bring that cost down by doing the play on a shoestring budget. And there is a lot of good theater being done by colleges and high schools, on a very tight budget. Or you can bring that cost down by putting the play in an auditorium so large the actors are just specks on the stage, and then what's the point of seeing live theater at all?

I think ultimately you have to convince people that (a) entertainment is not about seeing things explode, or (b) one night at the theater is worth the same as five movie tickets. There are, of course, plays with a lot of whiz-bang special effects, but it was only by pure luck that I was able to geta ticket to Wicked under $200...

Or else just government-subsidize it till it turns cheap, I guess!