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A bad play about Shakespeare
By adamg on Sun, 09/14/2008 - 8:13pm
Ian finds nothing to like about How Shakespeare Won the West at the Huntington:
... The play collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness. There are potentially interesting characters, in an interesting period of history, making a decision to do something interesting -- and the play is boring. The constant narration is annoying, the melodramatic stupidity of the plot is cloying and offputting, the characters' interpersonal interactions are completely unbelievable, and, of the three uninspiring new works we've seen on Shakespearian themes, this one is the worst.
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Comments
really? worse than Cardenio?
it couldn't have been worse than Cardenio. there's really not any way that it could have been worse than Cardenio.
I'm just saying.
Oh yes it was. The best bit
Oh yes it was. The best bit of Cardenio was when Will LeBow did Hamlet's speech to the players, and suddenly everyone sat up and thought, "Oh! Shakespeare! This is what it should be like!" In How Shakespeare Won the West, the closest it even got to real Shakespeare was some dumbshows behind curtains and a bit of doggerel at the end.
Actually, the best
Actually, the best Shakespeare in the play was the three miners standing waist-deep in water, betting on whether one of them could correctly remember the opening to Twelfth Night.
It was. The three we saw
It was. The three we saw were The English Channel -- not good, but tolerable -- Cardenio -- much worse, but, if you workshopped it for six months and cut out all references to Shakespeare, you might end up with a play that was merely not worth watching, rather than wretched, and this one.
This one was much, much worse. IT was a lot worse than Cardenio.
Y'know, it's enough worse than Cardenio that this may end up as a selling point -- because you're probably now curious as to how a play really could manage that, aren't you?