{"id":1343,"date":"2008-09-20T09:51:53","date_gmt":"2008-09-20T14:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/?p=1343"},"modified":"2008-09-20T09:51:53","modified_gmt":"2008-09-20T14:51:53","slug":"camelot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/uncategorized\/camelot\/","title":{"rendered":"CAMELOT!"},"content":{"rendered":"

ok, you have two more chances go to see it.\u00a0 tonight at 8, tomorrow afternoon.\u00a0 Twenty bucks.\u00a0 the best use of twenty bucks i can think of for you to spend this weekend.<\/p>\n

it’s playing at the hoogland downtown, on 6th street in case you never get downtown.\u00a0 some people don’t.<\/p>\n

i’d never seen the musical.\u00a0 it’s been around since before i was born, so you’d think i’d have seen it at some point.\u00a0 i’ve seen too many hellodollymusicmanpeterpanoklahomablahblahblah to last me a lifetime, but i don’t know why i’ve never seen camelot.<\/p>\n

it was refreshing to see something new to me.\u00a0 i’d heard some of the songs before, but never knew they were from the show.<\/p>\n

everything was good about it.\u00a0 the show itself, the acting, the singing, the costumes, the sets, the grand, great big orchestra, the lighting.\u00a0 dazzling.\u00a0 aasne vigessa was guenevere, with a long luxurious wig, and she was incredibly wonderful.\u00a0 i don’t know why she’s not a professional actress.\u00a0 she so effortlessly puts so much into each little nuanced gesture and inflection.<\/p>\n

i do have to say, though, that in my opinion, her dog, Jack, stole the show.\u00a0 jack is this sweet and\u00a0 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.\u00a0 how could your heart not go out to a three-leggd dog, especially one so clearly reveling in being onstage?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

there’s Jack, being held by dave shaw, who was the amazing set designer.\u00a0 petting him is pat foster, a talented actor who also happens to be a genuinely nice guy.<\/p>\n

in back of them are, left to right, arthure, guenevere and lancelot.\u00a0 arthur isn’t actually asleep in the photo even though he looks like it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 he was also really good, and a fine singer.<\/p>\n

you might notice that right between arthure and guenevere is…kevin!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

but when i saw joey rehearsing, all i could think of was that he looked like a teenager.\u00a0 and awfully skinny especially compared to the more mature swordfighters.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 and now he’s in love with the mother.\u00a0 but it worked, it totally worked.\u00a0 joey was as perfectly Good and Pure and Oh So Tormented Lancelot.\u00a0 SO good, SO pure, SO TORMENTED.<\/p>\n

it would be tough being so GP&T, and not easy to do a good job of making it believable.\u00a0 but this guy who IS pretty darn young, did a perfect job of it.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

it’s not just the bringing the guy back to life, it’s the passionate, humble, Good, Pure and Tormented way he does it.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 i did leave feeling bad that arthur and guenevere and lancelot are now going to be tortured till they die.<\/p>\n

it was a wonderful play.\u00a0 go see it if you can.\u00a0 i’m thinking of going back tomorrow afternoon.<\/p>\n

you don’t often get to see people brought back to life onstage, and especially not in that passionatehumblegoodpureandtormented way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

this is the whole cast plus the crew.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

here is kevin with all the swordfighters.\u00a0 these guys are wearing chain mail, which weighed about 50 pounds.\u00a0 their broadswords were actually swords, and also very heavy.\u00a0 the swordfighting was quite a workout.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 wearing chain mail.\u00a0 both the guy and jeff were wearing the chain mail, which made the whole endeavor really, really heavy.\u00a0 jeff is what is known as a TROOPER.\u00a0 plus he had to sing and dance.<\/p>\n

the swordfighting looked real and authentic and spontaneous, even though it was all carefully choreographed and rehearsed.\u00a0 they did a great job.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

i didn’t mean to spend such a large part of the morning writing about camelot, but it was worth it.\u00a0 go see it tonight!<\/p>\n

or tomorrow afternoon.\u00a0 tonight you could go to Sherman where kevin’s band is playing at some bar as part of the sherman celebration.<\/p>\n

and tomorrow, when maybe i’ll be seeing camelot again, kevin will be taking part in some civil war reenactment thing in rochester.\u00a0 and right now he’s finishing up the laminate floor he put down on the screened in porch.<\/p>\n

because the man is always in motion.<\/p>\n

ok then,<\/p>\n

saturday morning grace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ok, you have two more chances go to see it.\u00a0 tonight at 8, tomorrow afternoon.\u00a0 Twenty bucks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 some people don’t. i’d never seen the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6JLYy-camelot","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}