Theatre: My Personal Chicken or the Egg

I just had the TV on while I was online job hunting.  I turned it on TCM when I saw that there was a Doris Day film on.  It was an adorably hokey film about Ms. Day’s character hitting it big as a singer and finding love along the way.  Enjoyable, as all her films are.

When the film ended there was a maybe ten minute segment about Frank Capra, whose films have more than stood the test of time and on which one could write forever.  But after that Ben Mankiewicz, who presents many of the films on TCM came on and began to discuss a new show on their sister network, TNT.  That show, Will, is a new take on the life and times of William Shakespeare.  Tonight TCM is airing films inspired by Shakespeare and to help present, Mr. Mankiewicz had the director and writer of the premier episode of Will.  The writer, Craig Pearce, wrote the screenplays for director Baz Luhrman’s Red Curtain Trilogy (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+Juliet, and Moulin Rouge!) and 2013’s The Great Gatsby.  The director of the premier episode of Will, Shekhar Kapur, directed the Queen Elizabeth I biopics Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Immediately, I’m riveted.  This is the writer and the director of some of my favorite films.  As they began to discuss how they got involved with the show and their take on Shakespeare my mind is swirling in a million directions.  I love television, film and theatre.  And while, I haven’t seen Will yet, I will most definitely give it a shot.  As I contemplated all these things that I so enjoy, I thought to myself “Do I like theatre because I was involved in theatre in school, or at least do I like it more because of that?”  And this stuck.  Did I start doing theatre in high school because I like theatre or do I like theatre because I did it in school?  This may be too much of a the chicken or the egg type question.

I don’t know that I could tell you the first play I ever saw in person.  I danced as a child and certainly attended ballets by age five or six.  So even if I had not attended a play, I was certainly familiar with going to the theatre.  I do, however, vividly recall seeing my first live musical.  There used to be an outdoor theatre in my hometown and when I was in about the third grade my family went to see a production of Fiddler on the Roof.  I made my mom take me again the next week.  I’ve been hooked ever since.

In junior high I started participating in my school’s fall musical.  To my recollection, I only did this because a lot of my friends were.  At the time, my school had the rather odd rule that anyone and everyone could be a part of the play, so long as they met the academic requirements and attended all required rehearsals.  There were usually about forty kids acting in each show.  The only way to consistently accommodate that many actors is to produce musicals.  Unfortunately for me, I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I was always relegated to the choir.  But I still loved it.  Hanging out with friends, learning goofy dance moves, painting and constructing sets, sewing costumes.  I enjoyed every second of it.

I continued to be involved in theatre in college.  And in a exciting stroke of luck, one of the classes I was required to take when I did study abroad in London was an English class that focused on modern plays, modern being anything from about  1700 to now.  We didn’t read almost any of them; we went and saw them.  At least one play a week the whole semester.  Ten years later, I’m pretty sure I can still name them all.

Musicals are amazing.  They speak to us in a way that even the best theatre somehow can’t.  And while I truly love musicals; it’s opera that just kills me every time.  I started going to the opera at the Kennedy Center while I was living outside DC after college.  For a few years I went to every show each season.  Generally, I went by myself.  Even for theatre and music lovers, opera is an acquired taste.  But for me, I’ve never seen a bad opera.  I remember as a child my mother watching opera on TV; I’m sure it was PBS.  For a long time, I assumed that she like it and I think a lot of my initial interest came from that assumption and the memory of watching it together.  It wasn’t until much more recently that she told me that she really only watched the operas because she was taking a music class in college and it was required.

The first time I managed to get someone to go to an opera with me, it was my college best friend and at the time roommate.  We went to see Don Giovanni.  It was a lovely production.  When we left we dissected everything about the show.  The costumes, the sets, the lighting, the singing.  My friend had attended a theatre program at governor’s school in Richmond for high school.  She is even more knowledgeable than I am.  And she can actually sing.

She’s my favorite kind of person to attend the theatre with.  Even if the show we see isn’t our favorite, she, like me, still takes so much away from it.

It baffles me that there are people who don’t like the theatre.  There are shows out there for everyone.  There are certainly more types of shows and more styles and more genres than you could list.  From classical productions of Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, to the most modern of plays, the theatre is as varied as the human race, if only one would take the time to examine it.

Whether it was the chicken or the egg doesn’t really matter, I guess.  I’m just glad this chicken hatched and is always on the lookout for the next great show.

Romeo and Juliette and Zombies: What Would Shakespeare Say?

Spoilers. Stop now if you haven’t seen “Warm Bodies” and don’t want anything given away. I just watched it. As in the credits are still rolling. If you aren’t familiar with the movie it’s about zombies. Now I’m not a zombie person. I watched “Walking Dead” a few times and just didn’t like it. I did enjoy the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but really that was because I love Jane Austen. I’m more a witch, wizard, elf girl. But this movie looked good.

It stars Nicholas Hoult as a zombie named R who has retained a bit of his consciousness. He and some other zombies, called corpses in the movie, attack a group of scavenging humans and he sees Julie, played by Theresa Palmer. For some reason he is instantly mesmerized by her. This is helped along by the fact that he sees her boyfriend’s memories when R eats the boyfriend’s brains. R takes Julie back to his house for a bit and eventually helps her get back to the walled city where she and all the uninfected humans live. And while they’re together, R begins to change. He can talk more and walk easier and seems to be looking less dead.

R and Julie are clearly becoming friends and more. When Julie leaves R in the middle of the night after he confesses to having eaten her boyfriend, R follows her home. If the star crossed lovers bit hasn’t given it away, the fact that he finds her at her house standing on a balcony is a dead giveaway that this is a zombie take on Romeo and Juliet. To be honest, I knew before I saw the movie and I can’t guarantee I would have figured it out on my own.

As I was watching this take on the Bard’s classic tale of woe, all I could think was “I think Shakespeare would have approved.” Shakespeare’s work might be some of the most widely known in history, but at the time, it was pop culture. His plays were the original movies that broke box office records, tv shows that everyone talks about the next day at the water cooler, and books that everyone reads on planes, at the pool, and on their latest e-reader. So, I think he would have loved this recent version employing the contemporarily ubiquitous genre. This is a medium that gets the story across to a large audience because of the widespread interest in zombies. I think old Will would have laughed as much as me at the conversation of grunts between two of the zombies and swooned just as much when R and Julie finally kissed.

It might seem hokey to say the message of this movie seemed to be “love can change the world,” but in a large way it was. But in the best possible way. R and Julie really did change the world. Their love was what reminded all the zombies about life. Love saved the world. Literally. A lot of times when I watch movies, read books or see plays I’m reminded of my theatre professor in college. I took a theatre class the semester I did study abroad in London. We went to a play every week. One of the things we talked about with each play was why it was relevant right now. This story seems to always be relevant. This more violent and encompassing portrayal of it made it feel even more relevant to today. The world is pretty divided about a lot of things nowadays. A little love and acceptance, like in the movie, could certainly help make things better. And who’s to say that someday there won’t be someone or a group of someone’s who manage to be an example to the world and help us all on a better road.

As we all know, in the real Romeo and Juliet, our hero and heroine don’t exactly make it to the end of the play. I spent this whole movie being terrified they were going to die. There’s a scene at the end when R and Julie are running from the skeletons (zombies beyond redemption) and are in a stadium. They open a door and it leads to nowhere except air several floors off the ground. And I’m thinking, “No! They’re really going to die!” So they jump into the fortuitously placed water feature below and the zombie takes the impact of the fall and they survive! While it would have been truer to the source material to kill them, I certainly wouldn’t have been as pleased with the movie if they had.

You know when you watch a movie and you really like it and you get that warm fuzzy feeling? Well, I’m hoping you do and that’s not just me. I’m watching the end of the movie, with that warm fuzzy feeling, thinking, “Aww, I wish this wasn’t over.” And they’re showing scenes of the zombies becoming more human and integrating back into life with humans. It shows R’s best friend, also a zombie, and he strikes up a conversation with a human who helps him. He introduces himself and she says, “I’m Ethel.” I laughed out loud and the warm, fuzzy feeling got a million times bigger. See, I was part of the move.

So, a movie about zombies managed to make my day a bit brighter. I’m sure I’m over thinking and being a bit maudlin about the whole thing, but really it was cute and fun. I knew there was a reason I had wanted to see it so badly at the theatre.