Sleeping Beauty's Alarm Clock

For those in LA, NY, SF, and ... does Chicago have a two-letter abbreviation? Waking Sleeping Beauty opens this weekend. For everyone else, keep an eye out, it's worth your time. There's a very in-depth article on it here. And if you live in some unfortunate small town ... well, there's always DVD.

What Ho, Brabantio!

Two gag sketches tonight: one's a stupid interpretation of a line and another – I think – is actually supposed to be funny.

( Is it a tragedy? Count the bodies! )

Most Shakespearean jokes go something like this: 'What ho, fair dunnykin! Is 't that thy mawkish corporace dost induce the otterer's hound even to breech his figgin?' Which, when you get the seventeenth-generation photocopied list of Elizabethan slang from your English teacher, is translatable,* but is only 'funny' in an 'oh, I get it' kind of way and not 'Haha! Verily I do roll upon the floor in laughter!' But there is one near the beginning of Othello which ... well, it might just be the way Mr Threlfall delivers it, but ... ( Some jokes never get old. )

*mine isn't; I made it all up

I promise this Othello thing will run its course ... the CDs are due at the library next Thursday and being separated from them for all of the Easter holiday will probably do me a world of good. But in the meantime, well, it puts pictures in my head, which so few things do these days, so I'm going to milk it for all it's got. What's funny is that I don't even like the story that much, or indeed most of the characters* – anyone who lacks enough self-awareness and objectivity to be that easily manipulated is never going to get enough of my sympathy to carry my interest in the main drive of the plot, which I think is why I found the play so dull in high school. But certain scenes are just so good that I listen to the whole thing just to put them in order. And then want to hear them again. And maybe one more time.
*brace yourself, there is an Emilia post coming up