Merry Wives and Love Stories

We started yesterday with a talk about theater with Jamie Anne Romero, with whom we had lunched on Thursday.   She is the love interest in Shakespeare in Love.  It's a great deal of fun to get to know the actors and about them, as we had also done with William DeMerritt, who played opposite her in both Merry Wives and Shakespeare in Love. She was interviewed by Rex Young who played Master Ford in Merry Wives of Windsor.  Jamie is a very poised, thoughtful  and articulate actress carefully climbing the ladder to what we expect to be great success.  After the season here, she is returning to New York to pursue film and television roles.

Shakespeare in Love, of course, is an adaptation for the theater of the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow.  Frankly, the idea of the stage production and its execution is better than the movie.  When you see the interaction more closely, from the fifth row, of the actual people, you get a much more emotional response to the humor of the piece.  

The other play, seen last night, was Merry Wives of Windsor.   This is an over-the-top production, far too campy, a bit too long, and just a little bit more farcical (if that is possible) than the play that Shakespeare wrote.  That said we enjoyed it particularly the late 70s and early 80s music.   The woman who played Falstaff wore the most outrageous codpiece, which became part of the play (when it fell off), and the wives were more than adequate with great timing for the comedy.   Romero and DeMerritt as the love interests, the subplot, got quite lost in the extravagance of the performance.

We enjoyed a dinner with Dick and CB at Amuse, one of our favorite places, the others being otherwise engaged.   The sweetbreads for an starter for John were very good and his gnocchi with vegetables was a good vegetarian main course.  Ben had another lovely piece of halibut (the ocean's will soon be empty) and a leek soup.   We enjoyed a Ridge Paso Robles 2104 Zinfandel.