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Mar. 11th, 2024 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsReally recommend having friends whom you can message and say 'hey I will be in town next month, what theater should we go see' and inevitably it will be a banger; relatedly, also really recommend Fiasco Theater's Pericles at the Classic Stage Company if you happen to get a chance to see it.
Pericles is one of Shakespeare's Weird Ones -- it spans 20 years, the titular Pericles bops around from island to island having really tonally dissonant adventures, villains get erased from the narrative offscreen because they were struck by lightning and assassinations get interrupted by pirates turning up out of nowhere to suddenly kidnap the assassinatee -- and Fiasco Theater not only gets round this but joyously leans into it. From the moment in the first scene that an evil king gestures to what in Shakespeare's text is a Pile of Dead Heads and in this production is four actors standing around the main action tilting their heads and making grotesque 'we're dead!' faces in perfect unison, I knew we were going to be in extremely good hands.
The cast of the production are all costumed in very basic linen shirts and trousers, throwing on and off various capes and scarves and headgears and bits of armor as they take on different characters; every time Pericles encounters a major oceanic transition, a new Pericles actor takes over, with the previous Pericles rotating back into the ensemble. This has the impressive effect of making the relative incoherence of the play feel intentional and perhaps even meaningful, while also giving every single actor a chance to shine in at least three different roles. Our first Pericles also played a raunchy governor and a random prince with one line and clearly had as much or more fun delivering his one line as the random prince as he did any of his larger roles, and you got that sense from all of them all the way through.
Generally speaking, the show was consistently very funny and charming without becoming so much a parody that its emotional beats did not hit. I was especially impressed by the SUPER CUTE royal father & daughter duo in the second section -- this also had a really delightful dance scene where there was some business of the dad king making a point of Showing His Daughter's Crush How the Choreography Worked and it was just so, so fun -- and by the fact that somehow this cast managed to make the brothel scene in the back half, which I think would have been excruciating and miserable to watch in almost any other production, really fun and entertaining. They were also really natural at interacting with the audience! It was a very small theater, and the actors had made a point of wandering around before the official start of the show to say hello, so when a guy two seats next to us got struck down with a mortifying coughing fit the narrator could pause to nod and tell him "you're fine" and it just felt very like yeah, okay, the fourth wall is and should be a permeable thing and we and the cast are all in it together enjoying the magic of theater.
The one thing I did not like is that there were a couple of songs in the production, and several of the songs used modern language and unnecessarily spelled out things that the actors had just made perfectly clear with effective stagecraft, and we all agreed on leaving that they needn't have and in fact we would really rather they hadn't. I am exempting the opening song from this, which in fact does mostly use language from the play and as a result I found it perfectly fine; you can in fact hear it in the trailer, here:
Pericles is one of Shakespeare's Weird Ones -- it spans 20 years, the titular Pericles bops around from island to island having really tonally dissonant adventures, villains get erased from the narrative offscreen because they were struck by lightning and assassinations get interrupted by pirates turning up out of nowhere to suddenly kidnap the assassinatee -- and Fiasco Theater not only gets round this but joyously leans into it. From the moment in the first scene that an evil king gestures to what in Shakespeare's text is a Pile of Dead Heads and in this production is four actors standing around the main action tilting their heads and making grotesque 'we're dead!' faces in perfect unison, I knew we were going to be in extremely good hands.
The cast of the production are all costumed in very basic linen shirts and trousers, throwing on and off various capes and scarves and headgears and bits of armor as they take on different characters; every time Pericles encounters a major oceanic transition, a new Pericles actor takes over, with the previous Pericles rotating back into the ensemble. This has the impressive effect of making the relative incoherence of the play feel intentional and perhaps even meaningful, while also giving every single actor a chance to shine in at least three different roles. Our first Pericles also played a raunchy governor and a random prince with one line and clearly had as much or more fun delivering his one line as the random prince as he did any of his larger roles, and you got that sense from all of them all the way through.
Generally speaking, the show was consistently very funny and charming without becoming so much a parody that its emotional beats did not hit. I was especially impressed by the SUPER CUTE royal father & daughter duo in the second section -- this also had a really delightful dance scene where there was some business of the dad king making a point of Showing His Daughter's Crush How the Choreography Worked and it was just so, so fun -- and by the fact that somehow this cast managed to make the brothel scene in the back half, which I think would have been excruciating and miserable to watch in almost any other production, really fun and entertaining. They were also really natural at interacting with the audience! It was a very small theater, and the actors had made a point of wandering around before the official start of the show to say hello, so when a guy two seats next to us got struck down with a mortifying coughing fit the narrator could pause to nod and tell him "you're fine" and it just felt very like yeah, okay, the fourth wall is and should be a permeable thing and we and the cast are all in it together enjoying the magic of theater.
The one thing I did not like is that there were a couple of songs in the production, and several of the songs used modern language and unnecessarily spelled out things that the actors had just made perfectly clear with effective stagecraft, and we all agreed on leaving that they needn't have and in fact we would really rather they hadn't. I am exempting the opening song from this, which in fact does mostly use language from the play and as a result I found it perfectly fine; you can in fact hear it in the trailer, here:
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