Three winners!

Sunday, July 7, 2018, Ashland, Oregon--Three winners, well maybe four!   We started the day with a superb tour of the OSF Rehearsal Hall, learning how it manages to put on 11 plays continuously with 92 actors and a huge staff to cope with the work.   This included the backstage of one of the theaters, the newest, the Thomas.  Our guides were an actor, James, and one of the stage managers, Wendy.   

Dinner was a winner at Peerless, one of our favorite restaurants.  This is an Ashland encore every year.  We enjoyed Chinese style buns, duck confit, lobster stuffed potatoes and spicy fries as our appetizers and moved on to such varied main dishes as pork chops (David and Ed), noodle salads (Ben and Jane), roasted vegetables on quinoa with crab cakes (John) and halibut (Andy).   We enjoyed a 2016 Eluoan Pinot Noir which is blended in the Rogue Vogue Valley from grapes from over Oregon.   Ice cream and carrot cake for dessert.  

Now the plays, Othello and Oklahoma!  Both winners.

Othello, one of Shakespeare's 400-year-old masterpiece tragedies, was given a fitting masterpiece performance here.  OSF's version is  set in contemporary Venice and Cypress and completely resonates today in our world full of racism, misogyny, religious extremism and xenophobia.  Iago, who is evil incarnate infects Othello into raging, murderous and suicidal jealousy.  One interesting note:  Iago is portrayed as a deeply closeted homosexual.

Oklahoma! is a 75th anniversary performance of Rogers and Hammerstein's musical.  This terrific production is gay-themed and  has won plaudits from Ted Chapin, the chairman of the Rogers and Hammerstein Foundation and Todd Purdum, author of a recent biography of them. The choreography (credited to Agnes de Mille) and dancing were superb.  Ado Andy (not Ado Annie) is so well-acted by Jonathan Luke Stevens and both Tatiana Wechsler's Curly and Jordan Barbour's Will are superb renditions.