Blog Blame

This blog is here because last summer California Shakespeare Theater asked me to keep a blog about rehearsals for their website. Usually they have their officially coronated company members do it, but they asked me as I guess a sort of special guest blog star slash garruloquacious substitute teacher. Then they asked me to do it for another play. Then they started griping it was too dirty and went into my blog and exised the word "douche" which is, as you know, French for shower. I thought it would die when their season ended, and indeed, its not on their website anymore. So people who google me, may they get a life, find this blog and wonder what its about and why somebody as hip as me would be so pathetic and lonely as to have a blog. Although the only people who seem to be reading it are spelling-challenged pharmacists and hot teen pussy. Hi Dr. Rx! Hi Brianne! Bye! Gotta douche!

Golden Age Must

As an extremely camp apertif to the San Francisco Ballet's necrophiliac Don Quixote, I watched the Sophia Loren Peter O'Toole Man of La Mancha. It is so bad and boring it deserved no mention, except that Peter O'Toole is a great actor and so once in a while, onc cares about the title character, gets his deal, and is breifly moved. Not so with Helgi Tomasson's ballet. The Russian "dancer" playing Don Quixote looks like a high school basketball player forced to play the spaniard as detention. I have never seen any profesional actor or dancer move so woodenly. I have never seen pieces of wood so wooden. Presumably he is recreating some original "choreography" from nineteenth cetnury Russia, badly, by the number, so who cares? Archeology is rarely stageworthy entertainment. This is the problem with the company. Acting is not only given a backseat to technique; it is ignored. In a Ballanchine abstraction, it doesn't matter, although it might be welcome. In a story ballet it is a bit of a sine qua non, especially in a story argued to be the best in Western Art whose attendant dancing is plotless and admittedly, I assume, an embellishment alone. It makes for an ugly, embarassing evening. The San Francisco Ballet company are excellent dancers and artists. When they play roles, they seem like embarassed amateurs.