A Tale of Two Weekends

Technically, it was just one weekend, of course, but it seemed like two entirely different ones.  Friday through Saturday I was quite busy, then I did very little today, basically not leaving the house at all.

I mentioned in my last post that I was worried about it raining on our outdoor theatre (Driftwood's Bard on the Bus Tour), but in fact the weather was clear if a little hot and overly bright until 8:30 or so.  What Driftwood has done is fuse Henry IV, Part One and Part Two and Henry V into a single play.  I was looking over my notes, and it looks like I saw a condensed Henry IV previously, though I think they did Henry V as a separate stand-alone show.  (Of course I may be wrong.)  I thought Driftwood's version worked well but only captured the highlights of Henry IV.  Essentially all the battle scenes as well as Falstaff putting together his ragtag mercenaries was cut.  And there was a not very impressive wrestling match between Hal and Hotspur instead of a true sword fight.  The main focus was the Hal-Falstaff and the Hal-Henry IV dynamics, and pretty much everything else was lost from those two plays.  But of course that is generally what people remember from these plays.  I did hear someone grumbling at intermission that it was too confusing because so much had been cut, and that one probably shouldn't do the history plays as summer theatre.  Another person mentioned that he found Falstaff appalling (certainly a bit of a minority position!), but that he would be absent from Henry V.  Henry V had a couple of battle scenes and then Henry's courting of Catherine squeezed into about 45 minutes so was more broadly representative of that play.  However, they decided to bring Falstaff back as a ghost toward the end to speak his cynical lines "What is honour?" which are actually from Henry IV, Part One (incidentally a couple of scenes before the Hal-Hotspur showdown!).  It worked for me overall, but that guy must have been peeved.  I thought the actor playing Henry IV and the inn-keeper looked familiar, and it turns out I've seen him in previous Driftwood productions but also in most of the VideoCab plays.  Small world!  There is just another month to see the show in various locations, including a return to Toronto's Christie Pits park in mid August (calendar here).

Saturday I was able to get up fairly early and get to the gym.  Then at noon, I dropped off my LP player at Ring Audio, which is all the way down Carlaw.  (I'm a little sad that they are going on vacation, and I probably won't have it back until September, but it will be good to get it fixed up.)  I also had a small bag of clothes to donate at Value Village on Queen.  Then I did groceries on the way home.  While it was quite hot, I ended up biking to 401 Richmond to see the gallery shows again.  I'm certainly tempted by a few of the pieces in the Unframed show at Yumart, but I think I'll refrain from buying another piece of art this summer.  This is the piece I liked the best.

Alice Burton, Memories of Edo II, 2022

After that I stopped in at work, then caught the train up and back to Robarts (as it is on summer hours and was closing at 5).  Then I had another hour to kill before a concert at Walter Hall at UT.  (Things would have been considerably easier if Robarts was open later on the weekend.)  I enjoyed the concert, particularly the Shostakovich Piano Quintet.*  I biked home and decided that Sunday I could take it a bit easier after getting so much done on Sat.

Indeed, I mostly read and took care of computer things today.  I finished Pym's Some Tame Gazelle and read most of Paul Auster's Man in the Dark.  I somehow stumbled across Joy Williams's Breaking and Entering (which I would eventually have gotten to because of its Vintage Contemporaries connection, but it might have been a long time indeed).  It turns out that she is a master of the short story form, so I added her to this list.  Apparently, her take on humanity has been getting more and more jaded, and her last two novels really focus on environmental collapse as discussed a bit here and here.  I think I'll definitely need to get around to these more recent novels, but maybe in a year or two.  In the meantime, I think I'll tackle Breaking and Entering as a bit of a stepping stone from Pym to the much, much darker Death on the Installment Plan.

It's evening, and it's raining harder again.  I hope that this time it actually brings the heat and humidity down, and it really has been pretty unbearable these past three or four days.

* I thought that just maybe the pianist had some star potential.  It turns out Stephanie Tang, who looks like she is about 15 but must be older than that, has a Master's in Performance and she lives most of the year in London and has indeed won a number of prizes already.  I'm not quite sure how she got involved with this festival, but I think it must speak to the fact that Jonathan Crow (and of course Tafelmusik) has really put Toronto on the classical music map.