stresskitten

Shakespeare first:

Went to see Titus Andronicus yesterday with Pam. Wow. It was amazing. Bloody, gory, and brutal, but amazing. Titus was appropriately pathetic and vengeful (sometimes one, the other or both), Tamora, queen of the Goths strutted around with attitude and anger in tight black pants and knee-high heeled boots, Saturnus was appropriately weak, petty, and controlled by Tamora, the costuming was brilliant, Tamora's sons were extremely athletic (I haven't seen that entertaining a stage-fight in years... most times people are a little hesitant swinging swords around onstage. Not these two) and the acting had me in tears several times.

There was more blood than I'd expected (mostly because stage-blood is hard to do well), so it was appropriately bloody even while the blood remained quite realistically done. You know a play's going to be bloody when there's a pool of blood on the stage as the audience files in and the first thing that happens in the play is that a servant comes out to wipe it up. A servant also had to come in at intermission to clean the blood off the stage... he had a good time hamming it up for the entertainment of the audience filing out to use the restrooms - he was in a butler's outfit and took off his white gloves, dropped the cloth on the floor, and was using his foot to wipe up the mess.

Interestingly, they chose to do Saturnus' brother Bassianus with a female actress, making it his sister. Since Bassianus (name changed in the play to Bassiana) is the one who has married Lavinia, this meant there was a lesbian married couple as major players in the performance. Very matter-of-factly done, no other attention drawn to it. Very Vancouver, I think. :-)

The only complaint Pam had was that Tamora's sons' costumes were pretty much exactly the same as the Anthony Hopkins movie that came out a while ago (which I haven't seen). On the other hand, she acknowledged, the costuming in the movie was amazing, so keeping the same flavour wasn't a terrible thing.

Bard-B-Q and Fireworks on Wednesday... we're seeing the Tempest. Should be fun. :-)

Chores:

I've already been productive today... patched and puttied the central column in our kitchen, put the first coat of paint in the alcove where the fridge belongs, and puttied around the patched hole in the ceiling above the upstairs landing. My goals for today include sanding and then doing the second lot of putty, upstairs and down, doing the second coat of paint in the alcove, and folding the six loads of laundry that I haven't gotten around to folding in the past couple of weeks. *sighs* I hate folding laundry.

Edit: Second coat of paint on, painting stuff cleaned up. Second set of putty done on both post and hole.. putty on the ceiling also artistically dotted to try and mimic the flocking on rest of ceiling (as a note, I HATE textured ceilings...). About to go put movie in and fold laundry for an hour or so before going to pick up boy.

Edit 2: Laundry folded. Next step: put it all away. Probably not until tomorrow.

Going to see the following Bard On The Beach performances. Anyone local want to join me? Let me know so I can get tickets... if I get my mum to buy them for me, we can get seats reserved in advance for us, rather than having to deal with festival seating.

Titus Andronicus: Sunday July 20th, 1pm

King Lear: Sunday August 10th, 1pm