samoyeddogs

“Bard on the Beach” as it’s called and a workmanlike production of Macbeth. Cast of thousands. Very stagey. Very play-like but a little flat, a little rote. A matinee so the cast does it all over again in a couple of hours. It’s hard work, the theatre.

And a lot of work went into this production but isn’t it too ambitious? Less would be more. A main stage production so it needs size to it. Set is a problem. Good backdrop, but there’s no depth or real believability. The set designer’s notes for this version sets the play “in a post-urban era marred by an unspecified event that caused the Macbeth’s to dwell in a sealed underground bunker.” Unspecified for sure. If you didn’t read the notes ahead of the play you’d have no idea what’s supposed to be going on here.

The furnishings of lady and Mr. Macbeth’s unspecified environs do seem meagre indeed and somehow in this world Birnham Wood still eventually comes to Dunsinane, a bunker now, sealing Macbeth’s fate. Don’t forget. We’re acting Macbeth here. Gotta do all the stuff. 

Macbeth and Lady have an intercom of all things on which their porter, the porter or doorman dogsbody of “Here’s a knocking indeed” fame, communicates with them. Bzzz. Yet in the porter role “Here’s a knocking indeed” is never heard. Unless I was doing something else, but I wasn’t. I’m giving the play my full attention.

Munish Sharma, actor/playwright/producer, says his personal website handle, puts in a workmanlike performance as the crazed Macbeth. There’s that word again. He seems a bit old for crazy Macbeth. My vagrant thought is he would be good as a tough veteran cop in some tough, veteran cop thing. Tess Degenstein as our Lady Macbeth looks the part. Her exasperation over her husband’s weakness when he hesitates to act would shrink the soul of the stoutest scot. Kill ´em all Mac comes back with his hands covered in stage blood. The original premise of the play – a nobleman up there in the wilds of Scotland decides his best route to the throne to settle his beautiful bride is murder three people. He offs the king and the king’s guards too of course. Can’t risk them blabbing. It’s brilliant. And everybody everywhere will be okay with it. And furthermore he has the luckless Banquo, who would be king ahead of him if King Duncan disappears, killed by some deadbeats. The crown’s all his.

You’d think the Macbeths might have given consideration to everybody everywhere not being okay with it. Fools. It’s a tragedy. To borrow from the Dane’s (Hamlet’s) old man: Murder most foul. I’d find life difficult if I just murdered three people and ordered the killing of a fourth no matter who I thought I was. It’s crazy talk. But Macbeth’s a brilliant man. Thane of Cawdor The witches said he’d be king. They just didn’t say how. And now you’ve stepped in it.

The witches are underperformed in this effort. The closest resemblance of these three entities is to dark grey sheeted mumbling ghosts. Someday maybe, they’re gonna be witches if they can finally move up.

Withal withal. Worth seeing, good old Macbeth. B on the B is looking terribly successful these days. Bloody good show oldsters. Place was stuffed with them and we fit right in. Macbeth keeps murdering sleep to September 18.

Gordie Howe knew my mother. My mother knew Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe was born in a small Saskatchewan town and moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan at an early age. My mother was born in a small Saskatchewan town and moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan at an early age. Gordie Howe came from a family of nine siblings. My mother came from a family of nine siblings. Gordie Howe had five sisters. My mother was one of four sisters. You got us there, Gordie.

The similarities trail off. Gordie Howe was a professional hockey player and played most of his career with the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. My mother wasn’t a professional hockey player and never played hockey in any league anywhere. She could skate though.

One of Gordie Howe’s five sisters, I wish I knew which one, was a friend of my mother’s when Gordie Howe’s sister and my mother were young girls in Saskatoon. Gordie Howe took his sister and my mother for a ride in his new convertible and he gave my mother the above snapshot from his rookie season in Detroit. And when she died it came to me. I can’t help it if I’m lucky. My mother was twelve years old in Gordie Howe’s rookie season. I do know that those primitive, scuffed skates he’s wearing wouldn’t be sported today by the lowest talent thrashing peewee hockey player, girl or boy. Different era. Gordie Howe was six years older than my mother.

In my infancy I saw Gordie Howe play once. I also saw him close up. He looked just like he did on TV. It was not hockey season and Gordie Howe and his Detroit Red Wings teammates were playing an exhibition game in Peterborough, Ontario against the adult amateur hockey team of the time. The Wings played with their sticks upside down, just the end of the blade on the ice, to give the locals a chance, but it was still a wipe out. Great fun and I was given the autographs of Gordie Howe and two of his teamates, Alex Delvecchio and Terry Sawchuck, hockey players much better known then than now. The trio came along the boards after the game to sign autographs. My mother was there for them.

It’s a nice looking bridge. Modern. Clean. Impressive engineering feat. It should stay closed. Keep traffic off it. There’s too much traffic around there anyway. Trade and traffic need to be cut right back. Just keep the thing for Mr. Hockey, his memory. The grand old man. The image is from the “International Gordie Howe Bridge” site. It proudly states the bridge is to open “Fall 2025.” That should be grand.

Something happened. Never heard of the bridge before it did. Don’t live anywhere around there these days. The American President should make a so-called state visit to Canada soon. See if it can fire Mark up. Show the love. Go for a walk on the bridge. Prove it works wonderfully as a pedestrian bridge. If the president needs a wheelchair the prime minister can push it along. Great story.

International Gordie Howe Bridge opens soon probably, but who know’s with this guy? He needs a good spanking and will get it because history says so. But when? Doesn’t matter. Corrupts absolutely like rotting fruit. Rabbits turn away.

I’ve been finishing up The Afterlife of Malcolm X published last year.. I’ve been reading all of it all the way through. I’ve retained interest in Malcolm X. My interest originated from TV news items of the day in the long ago when I was starting out as an infant.

It’s true he was portrayed as and the implication was that Malcolm X was a radical, which he was, but also a dangerous radical because how could a black guy demanding, not asking for, but demanding something from white people as ridiculous as decency, respect and equality not be dangerous?

I was scared myself of what he seemed to represent as I rattled the bars of my crib. Black guy not going to take any crap. Dangerous. But Malcolm X also had a quality. He had the mystery of charisma and speaking forcefully and uncompromisingly. He was a preacher but he never preached violence. He wasn’t a violent man. His violent end just six weeks after seeing his segment on the ancient half hour Tuesday nights at 7:30 “Front Page Challenge” just before my last bottle and nighty-nights shocked me. And I’ve never forgotten who this Malcolm X guy was because even as a baby I was interested in all things American. America came from the TV and to my little mind had to be the best place in the world because it had “The Flintstones” and Disneyland and cute scary black guys like Malcolm X.

One day in the long ago seven black guys were hassled then shot at by Los Angeles Police Department members outside a mosque. One black guy died. Malcolm X didn’t like the cut of that cloth and had something quite forceful to say about it.

At the time he was high in the Nation of Islam hierarchy. This was before his break from the nation and its leader “the honourable Elijah Muhammad.” Turned out Elijah Muhammad wasn’t so honourable. He was a serial sexual predator. Malcolm X thought that was a bad look for the NOI and did the exposing of Elijah Muhammad then left the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X had converted to Islam while in prison.

“In order for you and me to devise some kind of method or strategy to offset some of the events or repetition of events that have taken place here in Los Angeles recently we have to go to the root. We have to go to the cause. Dealing with the condition itself is not enough and it is because our effort getting straight to the root that people oftentimes think we are dealing in hate. We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied not only civil rights but even human rights so the only way we are going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us or aside from us is to come together against the common enemy. 

“Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin to such an extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose, and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much so that you don’t want to be around each other? No, before you come asking for Mr. Muhammad does he teach you hate you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what God gave you? And I for one as a Muslim believe that the white man is intelligent enough, if he were made to realize how black people really feel and how fed up we are and without all that compromising sweet talk. Stop sweet-talking. Tell him how you feel, tell him how what kind of hell you’ve been catching and let him know that if he’s not ready to clean his house up, if he’s not ready to clean his house up he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire and burn down.”

They shot him, February 1965.. And in a place called the Audubon Ballroom. How could it be that the bird book guy Audubon had a so-called ballroom in Harlem, New York City where people went and got shot? Crazy talk. Malcolm X was thirty-nine when he was murdered.

Mark Whitaker has written a big book. Three black guys went to long term prison for the crime of murder in the first degree.. Two of them took no part in Malcolm X’s murder and the other one knew it and knew who fired the fatal shot, but said nothing. I was glad to hear the two innocent guys were exonerated even if it was a lifetime later and one of them was already dead.

The guy who did the shotgun blast lived openly across the Hudson River from New York in a town in the state of New Jersey until he packed it decades later when he was in his seventies. Somehow, it was important for me to at last know all this. The shotgun guy had once been what in the U.S. military used to be called and may still be a Green Beret and supposedly was a well respected member of his local community. I should hope so after what he did. But he never faced justice.

Elijah Muhammad and all the other stuff about Malcolm X and his falling out with the Nation and how it led to his demise and his time generally is here and well worth a look.

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