Live Entertainment Smorgasbord

As the so-called entertainer trapped in the body of an engineer, it should be obvious that I know and love the importance of live entertainment. Lately, though, it seems like I've gorged myself on a nonstep buffet of the stuff, and my only complaint is that I wish it were spread out more and that it would never end. Besides "The Foreigner" in May and the Michael Buble concert on Sunday, Carrie and I have seen all three shows of the Lexington Shakespeare Festival and we'll probably see Swingtime Canteen in the next couple of weekends. There's also a BBQ Cookoff and Blues Festival this weekend outside of Morehead that I may try to convince Carrie to check out with me. I don't know what it is, but it seems like we can go weeks and even months at a time without any good, quality live entertainment, and then all of a sudden there's so much that our bank account can't keep up.

Then again, the term "good, quality entertainment" can be very much in the eye of the beholder. For instance, the first show (and the only actual Shakespeare performance in this year's festival) of the Shakespeare Festival was "As You Like It". Though I'd never seen or read the play, it's pretty typical Shakespeare fare - Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall quickly for each other before going back to their own family squabbles; separately and for different reasons, the two find themselves exiled; Rosalind disguises herself as a man and offers to teach Orlando how to woo his lady-love while fending off the advances of a woman who falls in love with her masculine identity; and in the end, it all works out rather cheerily. Of course, I don't think Williams Shakespeare ever pictured Touchstone as a travelling clown, Audrey as a pair of siamese twins, Phoebe as a bearded lady or the banished duke as a cross between Colonel Sanders and a tent revival preacher. I was surprised - to say the least - to hear Rosalind break into "Send in the Clowns", Dave Matthews' "Satellite" as the background of Orlando's & Rosalind's (disguised as a man still) dance instruction, and Touchstone's renditions of "Unchained Melody" as he sang for the circus crowd and "Tears of a Clown" during the curtain call. The whole thing has started to grow on me the more I look back on the performance, but my first reaction was to describe it as "Shakespeare on LSD", because the whole thing was pretty strange at first glance.

If I considered myself more of an artist and less of an entertainer I might launch here into a commentary about artistic purity versus artistic license. Is there a requirement to perform a piece exactly as the author wrote it, or does the performance become the work of the director and performers, allowing them to make changes as they see fit; to turn the original work into their own piece? It's funny to me, though, that this seems to happen a lot with Shakespeare, a playwright so well-known and widely read as to be considered one of the greats. Hollywood gave us Leonardo di Caprio in "Romeo and Juliet", true to Shakespeare's dialogue but set in modern times. One of my least favorite versions was "Much Ado About Nothing" done by Sweetbriar College a few years ago where the setting was a New York pizza parlor and the various factions included mounted police and bicycle messengers. Does Shakespeare's work have to be changed and re-packaged to make it entertaining to today's audiences? Or is it the audiences that need help these days? Do we need music and special effects to make a story worth hearing, or are we all so determined to be different that we can't do things the same old way?

Dang if I know. Maybe I don't have a clue what I'm talking about and this is just another excuse to write instead of work.