I promised a Comedy of Errors review last week, but honestly I really don’t have much to say about the production I saw. There is not much to say about Comedy of Errors at all, anyway, and so in one way this isn’t surprising. Needlessly to say it was a good production, it succeeded as a farce, and the actors I met at the talk-back were nice. It was a repertory company, incidentally, which is the first of those I believe I’ve ever seen.
This repertory business led to some strange decisions, mostly w/r/t blocking, that I’m not sure would carry to all traveling actors or what: but like, the characters would just line up during crowd scenes and step forward to speak. I can understand if you’re on a different stage every week and can’t manage to keep your blocking consistent why this would happen, and really, in something as flimsy as Comedy you’re not going to break suspension of disbelief by lining up. It makes me wonder what these guys do when they perform tragedies, though.
Now take a look at some other things! Hayley Campbell, world-famous twitter enthusiast, has a blog up on fear (the best emotion) and The Woman in Black, a play I saw in London and reviewed here. I imagine Campbell seeing it at what was probably not a matinee filled with shrieking schoolgirls helped her dig it slightly more than I did, and I admit that though my opinion of the play in that review is slightly critical, in retrospect I’ve grown rather fond of it. Especially now that a film version with Harry Potter is in danger of destroying everything I find compelling about the original play.
On the front of Lovecraft news, I want to take a moment to point out Cthulhu Chick, who knits Cthulhus, but also has put together a version of HPL’s complete works for your ereader of choice. And it’s free! I should point out that this isn’t technically complete, because it has only his short stories and novels but not his oodles and oodles of terrible poetry. But that’s me being a pedant. Something else of note Cthulhu Chick did was this list of Lovecraft’s favorite words, just in case reading them each a good couple dozen times in every story was too subtle for you to figure out how to write your next pastiche.