Love's Labour's Lost at Cal Performances

* Notes * 
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre opened a run of Love's Labour's Lost at Cal Performances yesterday. Musicians played in the audience, there were a mere five instrumentalists that played recorder, shawms, dulcian, ocarina, hurdy-gurdy, sackbut, viol, hunting horn, Baroque guitar, theorbo, and percussion. Many of the actors also walked around in the lobby and through the aisles of the house to get on stage.

The acting was very strong. The rapport that Philip Cumbus (Ferdinand), Trystan Gravelle (Berowne), William Mannering (Longaville), and Jack Farthing (Dumaine) made for spirited entertainment, but really, there were no weak links in the cast. Everyone moved beautifully, and the choreography was perfectly together, almost uncannily so. Nearly everyone sang as well, and all sounded quite lovely, especially given the cavernous space that is Zellerbach Hall. Thomasin Rand (Rosaline) had a particularly pretty singing voice, though her speaking voice was considerably less so. Paul Ready was surprisingly winsome as Don Adriano de Armado, and his Spanish accent was ridiculous without being unintelligible.

* Tattling * 
There was a great quantity of bread thrown near the end of the play. The audience laughed at this, and pretty much at everything else too, though some of the wordplay was perhaps lost. A cellular phone rang just before Holofernes said "shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions" in Act IV, Scene 2.