All's Well That Ends Well DID INDEED End Well

This is my first blog post as a theatre goer! Exciting! Last night was the final performance of CSC's production of All's Well That End's Well, you know, the one you might have auditioned for (I sure did) that went up in Boston Common these past few weeks. Well, normally I don't go to CSC's stuff, the crowds are huge, you get a crappy view, the productions are OK but don't seem worth the effort to me and I actually don't put in the effort to see that much theatre unless I know somebody in it or it's like, right in Harvard Square, even then I go to the theatre far less than I really should. But, my friend David Gardener has struck up a tradition of getting groups of people together on his birthday to come and see the plays every summer, and since Adia had gotten in touch with David about some bike stuff and he was all like "you guys should come to my thing" and she had a friend coming in from out of town who we needed to find stuff to bring on... we ended up going! We arrived at 6:30 for the 7 o'clock performance, which would probably be a mob scene under normal circumstances but due to the weather, it was cloudy and drizzling intermittently all day and the forecast predicting like a 90% chance of rain, not that many people came out. As such, we got BALLER ASS SEATS or spots, I should say, the likes of which would have netted in the hundreds of dollars to sit in the orchestra of an indoor production. I had read head lines vaguely extolling the virtues of this production, and realized that three people who taught in the semi-program I had attended, one of whom I'd taken multiple classes with, all of whom I'd seen in various other things, had prominent roles.

Long story short, I really enjoyed the show. Before writing this, I admit I checked in the Hub Review, local critic Thomas Garvey's art blog in which he reviews the first two thirds of All's Well, and compares it to "arena Shakespeare" but holds that the setting is incapable of capturing the play's "essence" which has to do with all this stuff about death and hedonism in society and the various things Shakespeare was working through in the latter part of his career. He has a point, but I felt like he's comparing it to some other ideal production of the piece, specifically his ideal production, and was basically saying it wasn't to his ideal. And that's fine. I hadn't read or experienced All's Well That End's Well, and I appreciated the ease with which the play flowed and moved, I thought it moved exceptionally well which I don't care what "thematic ideals" you are in pursuit of, that is absolutely necessary in staging Shakespeare. I did agree that the woman playing the lead was just OK, capable, but didn't do anything fantastic. Overall I thought the show was pitched to entertain and allow the audience to understand what the characters are saying and doing at any given time, both of which it accomplished very capably.