Started rehearsals this week at OWC for this year’s Shakespeare show. The show is Twelfth Night, a romantic comedy concerning Viola, a shipwrecked girl who disguises herself as a boy; Orsinio, whom she’s in love with even though he thinks of her as a guy (in fact, “he’s” Orsinio’s trusted right hand man); Olivia, who falls for the handsome young “boy” wooing her on behalf of Orsinio; and Malvolio, Olivia’s competent but pompous, top-lofty steward, the part I play. Olivia’s sponging relative and his friends, annoyed by my nagging them, decide to convince me Olivia has fallen for me, leading to my humiliation and painful comeuppance.

It’s a wonderful role, and I found myself getting a feel for it (kind of a British butler with a poker up his butt) very quickly. Learning lines will take longer: Normally I just sight-read the script over and over, but I found out when performing Merry Wives of Windsor in 2006 that I need to hear my cue lines to learn Shakespeare, so this time, I used my camera to record me saying the cues, then downloaded them to my laptop where I could listen to them.

Rehearsals and performance (in March) will suck up time and energy like a giant sponge, but it’ll be so worth it.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Myself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.