ok, you have two more chances go to see it. tonight at 8, tomorrow afternoon. Twenty bucks. the best use of twenty bucks i can think of for you to spend this weekend.
it’s playing at the hoogland downtown, on 6th street in case you never get downtown. some people don’t.
i’d never seen the musical. it’s been around since before i was born, so you’d think i’d have seen it at some point. i’ve seen too many hellodollymusicmanpeterpanoklahomablahblahblah to last me a lifetime, but i don’t know why i’ve never seen camelot.
it was refreshing to see something new to me. i’d heard some of the songs before, but never knew they were from the show.
everything was good about it. the show itself, the acting, the singing, the costumes, the sets, the grand, great big orchestra, the lighting. dazzling. aasne vigessa was guenevere, with a long luxurious wig, and she was incredibly wonderful. i don’t know why she’s not a professional actress. she so effortlessly puts so much into each little nuanced gesture and inflection.
i do have to say, though, that in my opinion, her dog, Jack, stole the show. jack is this sweet and well-behaved little three-legged dog who appeared in a few scenes, and every time he came onstage it was impossible to pay attention to anything else going on. how could your heart not go out to a three-leggd dog, especially one so clearly reveling in being onstage?
there’s Jack, being held by dave shaw, who was the amazing set designer. petting him is pat foster, a talented actor who also happens to be a genuinely nice guy.
in back of them are, left to right, arthure, guenevere and lancelot. arthur isn’t actually asleep in the photo even though he looks like it. he is kevin purcell, who used to do a bunch of theater here but then moved away and came back and now does more theater. he was also really good, and a fine singer.
you might notice that right between arthure and guenevere is…kevin! they took a couple of pictures of the cast along with the crew, and since kevin staged the swordfighting, he got to be in the photo. I went to a couple of the swordfighting rehearsals, and joey cruse, who plays lancelot, was there (lancelot is the best fighter in the land, plus he has magical powers and is generally all-around perfection personified).
but when i saw joey rehearsing, all i could think of was that he looked like a teenager. and awfully skinny especially compared to the more mature swordfighters.
i saw joey in “picnic” a while back at the university, and in that production, assne was the mother of the girl he was in love with. and now he’s in love with the mother. but it worked, it totally worked. joey was as perfectly Good and Pure and Oh So Tormented Lancelot. SO good, SO pure, SO TORMENTED.
it would be tough being so GP&T, and not easy to do a good job of making it believable. but this guy who IS pretty darn young, did a perfect job of it. you can see why guenevere, who had previously mocked and scorned him and is really a flippant and shallow princess-type queen, falls hopelessly in love with lancelot after he brings a guy back to life.
it’s not just the bringing the guy back to life, it’s the passionate, humble, Good, Pure and Tormented way he does it.
i do have to say that although the first act is mostly bouncy and fun, the second act does dissolve into lots of despair and rest-of-their-lives agony for all the leads. arthur tries to pick it all up at the end with a rousing song of “camelot” sung to a little kid who was a good actor but his gleaming braces kind of pulled me out of the carefully-constructed image of a time when kids didn’t have braces. i did leave feeling bad that arthur and guenevere and lancelot are now going to be tortured till they die.
it was a wonderful play. go see it if you can. i’m thinking of going back tomorrow afternoon.
you don’t often get to see people brought back to life onstage, and especially not in that passionatehumblegoodpureandtormented way.
this is the whole cast plus the crew. there on the lower left is leigh steiner, the woman who makes all this great stuff happen. and three on the left over from arthur is my friend randy, who got to wear some great costumes but didn’t do as much as i’d hoped he would in the show.
here is kevin with all the swordfighters. these guys are wearing chain mail, which weighed about 50 pounds. their broadswords were actually swords, and also very heavy. the swordfighting was quite a workout. and jeff nevins, who is third from the right up there in the back, also had to do a lot of carrying of other people, including the rather big guy (who is an actual football player, i believe) on a stretcher. wearing chain mail. both the guy and jeff were wearing the chain mail, which made the whole endeavor really, really heavy. jeff is what is known as a TROOPER. plus he had to sing and dance.
the swordfighting looked real and authentic and spontaneous, even though it was all carefully choreographed and rehearsed. they did a great job.
i took this picture when they were getting ready to have another picture taken, and i liked the fact that that one bald nicely smiling fellow there continued to pose for me as everybody else didn’t.
i didn’t mean to spend such a large part of the morning writing about camelot, but it was worth it. go see it tonight!
or tomorrow afternoon. tonight you could go to Sherman where kevin’s band is playing at some bar as part of the sherman celebration.
and tomorrow, when maybe i’ll be seeing camelot again, kevin will be taking part in some civil war reenactment thing in rochester. and right now he’s finishing up the laminate floor he put down on the screened in porch.
because the man is always in motion.
ok then,
saturday morning grace.