I really, really love going to live performances of things. Music, art, theater, whatever. I love it. So going to see BYU's performance of Love's Labour's Lost was super fun! Plus I got to go with one of my awesome mission companions, Katherine, which made it even better :)
I'll start with my favorite things about the performance...I thought the idea of setting it in 1940 was a little weird at first but in the end I thought it merged with Shakespeare really well. Especially after reading the director's story about how her grandparents had met during the war and how they had an introduction similar to Biron and Rosaline. Their witty encounters and sharp banter ended up endearing them to each other--just like in the play.
I LOVED the fact that during the intermission they had a dance and let the audience be involved. That was probably the best part, because I love dancing :) And dancing was such a big part of that era. It helped keep the audience in the right time period. And it was hilarious because the actors stayed in character when they asked people to dance. Costard asked this girl to dance and she kind of shrunk into her seat a little bit and he was like, "HA!" in this really funny/obnoxious way and grabbed her hand and took her to the stage.
And the live band was AWESOME!
The set was great. I really liked the simplicity of it because I think it allowed the focus to be on the characters and their interactions. The idea of having the characters look at "mirrors" while facing the audience was genius. I think it helped accentuate the aspect of dramatic irony in the play. This play was full of scenes where the characters only had their limited perception of events while the audience could see much, much more. For example, the entire scene where, one by one, the men all admitted their love for the ladies the audience could see that Biron was actually in love, and that he was watching the others as they divulged their secret admiration, but each character thought they were alone. Another example was when the ladies switched wardrobes before the men arrived in their Russian costumes. We knew that they weren't the right girls, but the men had no idea. The mirrors helped represent the limited perception of the characters.
Ok, now for the things I didn't like so much. I really, really did not like that the script and dialogue was split up among so many people. It made the play so confusing! I had just read the play and I was even confused. It was so hard to follow who was who and who was in love with who and it took me like half the play to realize that they weren't just taking forever to introduce the main characters; it felt like there weren't really main characters. Their parts had been split up so much and since I had just read the play I was like, "Oh, that girl is Rosaline cause she just said her lines....no wait, that girl must be her....wait, who is Rosaline?? There are like ten girls saying her lines!" It was just confusing. And it made it harder to become emotionally invested in the characters because half the time I was battling exasperation with having to try to follow so many people.
But overall I liked it and it was a fun experience :)
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