13 lizards doing their best

The thing about standing ovations is that they are like after care for actors: it’s ok that you dressed up and played pretend for two hours! Everyone liked it! No one thought it was weird!

every time i remember that one of the first people who played elektra used his son's urn for the scene where elektra cries over her brother's ashes i tear up a little

The iconic 90 Degrees photo in all its glory- photo credit to the one and only Nancy Zamit

My new favourite thing about The Goes Wrong Show is the genuine befuddlement the seems to exist between Mischief Theatre and the BBC Health and Safety Department

I think S1E6 "90 Degrees" genuinely caused someone to have a nervous breakdown lmao.

"Co-star Jonathan Sayer said at one production meeting a man stood up and shouted: “This is madness! People are gonna get hurt! There could be aneurysms all over the place!”

Fellow star Henry Lewis added: “He was almost in tears saying that the blood was going to pool in their limbs." " source

“Shake my hand in character”

(From Denise Jastraunig’s TikTok)

Never seen cats, never intend to watch it, don’t care at all, but I love this.

I love all the comments saying “how many cats ARE there in Cats?!” because this isn’t even all of them lol

This is why I can watch Cats (the broadway version) over and over. Every single person on stage is doing so much character acting with their body language constantly; there are always new interesting background details to notice. <3

the most insane double casting i’ve heard of is ophelia and horatio being played by the same actress. the implications of that drive me crazy

you guys are doing things in the tags of this post

#to this day my favorite performance of hamlet i’ve seen is one where there were two hamlets#one was the dutiful son and the other was his vengeful id#and they split all the lines in the play depending on which hamlet was speaking#all the soliloquies became arguments between the two and it was SO good#the second hamlet doesn’t appear until hamlet’s father appears and tells him Claudius is to blame for his death#he opens to curtains and his first line is ‘Murder?’#and the other characters can’t see that second hamlet at first - just the initial one#until slowly throughout the play the second hamlet is the one they look at and interact with#until finally the first hamlet - the dutiful prince - is the one who’s ignored#anyway it was metal as fuck holy shit#i wish i could watch it again but i have no idea if it was recorded (via rythyme)

Some favourite staging moments in productions of Shakespeare plays:

head in my hands head in my hands head in my hands

[Text ID:

Judas: So here we are again.

Joshua: I bless you, (full name of the actor playing Judas). I baptize you and recognize your divinity as a human being.

The actor shudders as water is poured over him.

I adore you, (first name of the actor playing Judas). I christen you Judas.

The actor stops shuddering and looks up at Joshua.

Joshua: I did love you, you know.

Judas: Not the way I wanted. ] End Text.

im glad my beloved will save me from my swan curse i hope he doesn't publicly profess his love for someone who looks exactly like me but evil

shakespeare characters having weird reactions to deaths: macbeth / hamlet / julius caesar

sorry to be pedantic outside of the tags but i love these as exhibits a b and c of why the “shakespeare is meant to be performed” cliche is real; on the page they look wild but actors know how to read the embedded stage directions

two of these examples can’t be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrude’s line and brutus’ are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesn’t have to be (macduff and malcolm’s lines add up to ten beats indicating that it’s shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)

remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the scene— they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. there’s a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is

MACD: your royal father’s murdered.

(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)

MAL: oh.

(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ...

by whom?

all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor it’s playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh i’ve always found “drowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) .....where?” to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ..........where did it happen?

the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two ‘o’s and a ‘ha’ (they aren’t meant to be pronounced exactly like “Oh” or “Ha”; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what they’re experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every “o” or “ha” or “ah” etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium

it’s a rich moment for actors because in classical text it’s frowned upon to act “outside” of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that aren’t words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. “act on the line” says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeare’s voice), it’s diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than you’re given. but when you’re given the space of ten beats for “ha portia”, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that “ha” into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?

in the same way that lear’s “howl howl howl” is very much not just the word ‘howl’ said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say “oh.”, quiet and childlike, or maybe that ‘o’ is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat

anyway you get what i mean. you wouldn’t look at a blueprint and say you saw the house, you wouldn’t read the sheet music and say you heard the symphony, etc

Justin McElroy talking about accessibility in live theatre (June 9, 2019)

“Art is happening everywhere all of the time” but an awful lot of it seems to only ever happen in New York and London, doesn’t it?

he is there inside your mind, is the thing

I don’t usually throw people’s tags into the spotlight but you… you understand me

anyone who told you much ado about nothing is good and worth watching was RIGHT and you should listen to them

Ah here we go! Free full play for anyone who needs it, i watched it last week so i still had the link in my history heh :D enjoy!

God I love this version

I feel like I need to tell everyone how brilliantly the Globe incorporated a deaf Gildenstern into the 2018 Hamlet and then force all of you to watch it

ok, so Gildenstern is played by a deaf actor, Nadia Nadarajah. he* signs all his lines, and either Rosencratz interprets for him, or the person he’s talking to says something that makes it obvious what he just said, depending. how each character reacts to Gildenstern is completely in-character and often hilarious

it’s all brilliant and adds another layer of humor and pathos and you should all watch it

*casting at the Globe right now is gender neutral so I’m just going to use the character’s pronouns

guys I know I’m wittering on about this but the thing I want to emphasize is that there is no tokenism here. they didn’t just shove a deaf actor into a speaking role so they could pat themselves on the back about how progressive they are. they went to the effort of fully integrating Nadarajah’s deafness into the story so that it not only fit organically within the narrative but actually enhanced it. watching Hamlet’s signing disintegrate as his trust in R&G disintegrates adds a depth to that storyline I’ve never seen before. Claudius has exactly the awkwardness of someone who thinks of himself as a good person and therefore thinks he’s being kind and generous with his accommodations for disability, but has never even once actually asked a disabled person what they need, which is so on-point for his character it hurts.

I know Michelle Terry gets a lot of hate mail for her policy of race-, gender-, and disability-blind casting, but fuck all those people. long may that policy continue.

the glenda jackson production of king lear on broadway did something similar with the Duke of Cornwall, and it was actually the best part of the play, imo.  because when Cornwall was speaking to Lear or to the Court, he had a sign language interpreter to speak the actual literal words aloud, but when he was talking to and conspiring with Regan, his wife, they were just signing back and forth with no translation for the audience, and it emphasized the intimacy between the two even as they turn against literally everyone else in the play, which was fantastic.

and the best part of it was, by the second half of the play, you were so used to it, that you didn’t even blink anymore when watching him and listening to the spoken words come from the interpreter - you just watched the actor playing Cornwall and let the words come from the other guy, but the guy kind of fades into the background.  it didn’t hurt that the actor for Cornwall was one of the tallest on stage, and had bright red hair - it was easy to watch him, instead of his interpreter.

which is why it was so shocking and so perfect when the interpreter is the one who kills him.

See, they folded the character of the servant who kills Cornwall into the person of this character who had been such a non-entity that you almost forgot he was on stage - until you realize, no, this is another person, and he’s been here, watching all this the whole time, and he finally gets to the breaking point where he can’t stand by and translate anymore, he has to do something to stop the cruelty he’s seeing, and it’s not just a random guy who comes in for the scene and sees them blinding Gloucester, it’s the man whose been by his side for the entire play, the man who was his voice who finally has a line of his own.  who finally speaks on his own behalf to say “no.”

and then, of course, he gets killed, but Cornwall dies in the same scene so it’s not like they need to get a new translator or anything.  but it was the most fucking brilliant choice i’ve ever seen re: casting in a Shakespearean production, and the rest of the play pales in my memory in comparison.

thinking about how when I was chip in beauty and the beast I was like 12 and wont to disappearing in the bowels of the theatre during rehearsals, so even though I took the show Very seriously and wouldn’t Dare miss my cues, the stage manager didn’t trust me and wouldn’t let me leave my cart for the entire show except to pee during intermission.

context is that my costume was a teacup piece that went on my head, and then I sat in a cart that closed around my neck, so that only my head was visible, as a teacup.

so I’d just be in this cart at all times, for two and a half hours, and the stage manager would just PARK me wherever there was room backstage, and I’d take the teacup off and slink down into the cart and close it above me, and people would forget I was in there, and other actors would start having whispered conversations beside me before their cues and I’d pop out to join in and Terrify them and get in trouble

but it wasn’t MY fault I was PARKED THERE!!!!!

she is always watching

I think the other important thing about this show is that the crew had built this Enormous castle set piece. the structure was Wild. And for be our guest, there were so many lighting cues, bubble machines, etc., they ended up having some of the light board and controls WITHIN the castle itself, and there lived @vontrtl, also my age, like some sort of creature in the center of a labyrinth. you had to crawl to find her and she had a little room in there. Master of all our destinies…..

Ah yes. Under there. With the smoke machine that belched fake smoke that I was. VERY ALLERGIC TO. nearly passed out once when the machine had been shifted and a bunch of it backed up and filled my crawl space.

We’d have found you in there like a dead Egyptian king of old in his tomb

I want to see the Yiddish version of Fiddler so badly. 

[About Tree of Life shooting] ‘In “If I Were a Rich Man,” the sweetest moment, the sweetest aspect, of Tevye’s dream is that if he were rich, he could sit in shul all day and go three times a day. That is turned on its ear when you see that a synagogue is not necessarily a safe place.’