SCOTS WITH STICKS COME. Scots with stocks come. Scots with sticks and stocks and glocks come.

Via Unequally Yoked.

WOOD WITHIN THIS WOOD: Last night I watched a recent adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set (with some condescension and religious illiteracy, but some bicycling fun) in late 19th-c Italy. Here are a few scattered thoughts. Overall I'm glad I saw this, but I'm especially glad it wasn't my first Dream. At this point I can easily cherish the good parts and dunk the stupidities in Lethe; that would be harder if I didn't have a few earlier, differently-flawed productions under my belt.

So, let's go: First, the cast is ridiculous. Kevin Kline is superb as Bottom. Dominic "Jimmy McNulty" West is entirely serviceable as Lysander. Calista Flockhart is surprisingly good as Helena, and Stanley Tucci is as fun as you'd expect as Puck. You've also got Rupert Everett, Sam Rockwell, and other people I'm forgetting.

This production is oddly cavalier about the horribleness of the protagonists. They're just all so awful before they enter the wood! I can understand that as an interpretive choice, but it's not a lot of fun to watch--and made all the harder because

this production ups the humiliation for Bottom significantly. His whole character arc is so complex--for the play to work best, he needs to be better than his reputation and surroundings from the beginning, and then taken into a fairy world which is finally big enough and sublime enough for him; and yet even in that world, where he should belong, in fact he's an enchanted ass. There's a huge amount of humiliation built into this amazing character. No need to ratchet it up by having local yokels pour wine on him as he (brilliantly!) overacts. It just made everyone else seem more horrible. Adding a Disappointed Wife similarly made Bottom way too much of a pitiable victim rather than a comedic-yet-sublime visionary--and I would caution against any directorial choices which shifts the Dream further toward misogyny. Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers of women ever, and I agree with Herr Doktor Professor Harold Bloom that his women are typically more intelligent and stronger than his men; but this isn't his subtlest work on that score, you know?

Speaking of Bottom and of Bloom, not even Kevin Kline could come close to the ecstatic experience of hearing Harold Bloom recite Bottom's "dream speech." I saw this in, I think, spring? of 1998, and it was like King Haggard's first sight of the unicorns: "The first time I saw them, I thought I wanted to die." I'm going to try to talk about what it was like, now, but my description is necessarily reductive and inadequate.

What Bloom did, when he recited for us, was to take us completely into the experience of someone who has finally entered into the world for which we long. Our whole lives, we have portrayed a Wall--a wall broken through by a monster. And at last, Bottom follows, through the hole, and finds the monster... and she is just as beautiful as he could ever have hoped. She is the key for his lock. She is the reality of which our entire lives are merely the shadow. She is the quiet hour, the sudden moment when we can be truly present to the crocus and the snow.

(One thing the movie got right: She gives the Nietzschean wedding ring of eternity.)

He was helpless and baffled and sorry, sorry and he didn't know why.

I can't blame Kevin Kline for being insufficiently mind-blowing! I mean listening to Harold Bloom recite the speech... there's a song, some whiny pop song, where the guy whines something which I consistently mishear as, "Being with you, girl,/Is like feeling sorrow." Very few people can carry us--especially through a screen, rather than in person--into that place where a comedic, endearing speech is like feeling sorrow.

That said, there are a lot of dumb choices in this movie. There's mud-wrestling, which I'm sure sounded better in theory than it played in practice. There's Tasteful Nudity which ditto. There's a sequence of a kind I'm usually primed to adore, in which an actor finds his confidence and his true self halfway through a disastrous performance and thereby rescues it (Slings and Arrows s1 had an especially fine example of this), which is robbed of emotional heft because it centers on the guy who plays Thisbe, about whom I didn't care enough, and because the music is horrible and insistent and easy. The music is horrible and insistent and easy throughout, actually.

Again: This is worth seeing! There are some very fun comic-timing moments, and if I were to rewatch I'd look for what I think are real parallels between the barely-named fairies and the lower-class humans. It's pretty and frothy and if you can get past the really painful treatment of the difference between Bottom's dreams and his reality, it's sometimes charming.

Man, I hope they put that on my tombstone.

IT'S NICE TO TAKE A WALK IN THE RAIN: I finished Slings and Arrows. Not sure what to say to make you guys watch this terrific TV comedy set behind the scenes of a Canadian theater company, but I will say that along with all of the gallows humor (one of the main characters is a ghost and/or hallucination) there's a really compelling portrayal of leadership-through-chaos and its limits. Since this is the only kind of leadership I personally have ever exercised, I loved it!

It's available on Netflix Instant Viewing so if you're in the USA and have a decentish Internet connection you are in luck.

LORD GOD HAVE MERCY--ALL CRIMES ARE PAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIID!!!! On Saturday the Rattus and I went to New Britain, CT, to see the Hole in the Wall Theater's punk-themed production of Richard III. I was expecting cheap thrills, something a bit chintzy but still fun.

And sure, okay, some of the acting was wobbly. But mostly this was super extra awesome! And smart, too--there were genuine insights and smart choices here. I feel like I understand the play better now, plus it was so much fun that I almost exploded. I really wish I'd seen it earlier--we went to the very last performance. I'll definitely be checking out what this theater is doing the next time I'm in sunny New Haven.

So some thoughts: First, the punk theme isn't quite consistent or really very thematic at all! That's fine--I don't think a one-to-one, "everyone is corrupt and their level of punkosity signals their level of corruption" thing would work, nor would a more explicitly '70s Britain "winter of our discontent," nor would a "Richard III is the story of England going crazy" thing. Instead, the punk theme was basically an excuse for lots of hilarious and terrific visuals. I mean, if you don't love Richard of Gloucester spray-painting an anarchy sign on a wall, you basically hate freedom.

The Richard was fantastic: Nick Pollifrone, who trained at RADA. He's having an immense amount of fun, and he sells the various choices about when to yell and when to slink. The seduction of Anne is hard to mess up, but this guy was even able to handle the really clunky "Richard is Richard; that is, I am I" speech--he spends the first half of it reflexively sarcastic, self-lacerating and self-ignoring, and then slowly becomes completely unhinged.

The cross-gender casting was also really well done. Catesby (Amanda Ratti) was a groupie-ish girlfriend type, violent and lost; Ratcliffe (Katie Corbett) was a dead-eyed and intermittently thuggish blonde (throughout her first scene she did this terrific, drugged-out stare, with slow, mindless blinks every ten seconds or so); and Hastings (Barbara Gallow) was an older feline. All of Richard's minions captured the variety of motives you need to explain how he hung on to anybody after he started killing off his supporters. Buckingham (Ed Bernstein) is naively ambitious and a bit flighty; Hastings is overconfident in her own abilities, especially her ability to read other people; and Catesby and Ratcliffe are in it for fun, for a nihilistic, ecstatic anti-joy.

Richmond (Kenneth Semerato) was a sleek corporatist. Both he and Richard play their "rally the troops" speeches as rallying the audience, which I expect is a normal interpretation even though I don't recall ever having seen before, and which totally took advantage of the tiny theater space. The fight in which Richard is killed was furiously physical, and there's a nice, nice moment when Richmond limps away, echoing Richard's own limp. (Also, most of the Battle of Bosworth Field is scored to my actual favorite Sex Pistols song, "Sub * Mission," with some very cool choices in pairing action with song. In general the song choices here were absolutely stellar--Ratty pointed out that this was clearly a labor of love.)

The production notes were hilariously in the tank for the historical Richard. There was even an ad! YORKISTS 4EVA.

So yeah: I'm really just posting this to tell you to keep an eye out for Hole in the Wall if you're in the area. The Rat and I were surprised and thrilled.

HE THOUGHT HE WAS THE DUKE OF AMERICA: I hope you all know how much I love the Shakespeare Theater. I've reviewed its productions here and here for money, and here for free. I love it! I have a season pass!

Their current As You Like It is wrong from jump.

The essential problem is the premise: The Forest of Arden = America. This is a one-liner, not a basis for an extended interpretation. There are no real parallels or insights--at least not in this production--except insofar as the Forest represents the American hope/cliche of a new life and identity in the New World. The stagnant nature of the simile also means that AYLI becomes a play to be "solved" rather than experienced.

The basic problem in approach leads to many, many sub-problems, of which I list only a few: a) glitz overtakes intriguing interpretation. There are something like three million costume changes as we move from 1670 (? can't remember exact date, but about a century before independence) to 1933. The production is ridiculously expensive while presenting virtually no intellectual challenges whatsoever. Characters get lost in their costumes and their shifting, bad/intentionally-bad (see below) period accents.

b) creepy racial issues encroach, since the play is supposedly a Depression-era Hollywood confection presenting an idealized, immigrant-with-convert's-fervor vision of American history but there is no framing story. So we get the happy slave, emancipated by the nice white lady, but without any framing story he lacks any semblance of a specific personality or inner life. Nothing complicates or challenges the idyllic Americana, which alludes smugly to past evils without confronting them.

c) I don't think I had any new experience of either America or As You Like It. I already know what the cliches are. I don't need another iteration of them.

The costumes are beautiful. I stopped caring sometime after intermission, but still, they are wonderful.

There are genuinely lovely moments. I'd never noticed quite how Jonathan-and-David the Celia/Rosalind relationship is--how much Celia sacrifices, and how explicitly, for her friend. That was beautiful and poignant... and totally swamped by the weird costume- and period-changes Celia has to undergo later. Rosalind's actress is wonderful, and Floyd King, of course as Touchstone, is of course brilliant. All of the actors were either good or obviously directed-badly. (In fact, the problems with the show can probably be calibrated by the fact that amid the tepid applause at the end, Rosalind's actress barely brought the audience to warmth, and King managed to take the only bow I've ever seen in which he was not showered with applause and even hooting. None of this debacle was their fault!)

I have frequently questioned this theater's interpretive choices (Edward II, The Misanthrope). I have never before thought they were just being intellectually lazy. These actors deserve better. Shoot, I deserved better, and I'm just the audience!