Fever to Burn

A tree ate the programs, but that didn't make the vintage TV scripts any less funny.

After thoroughly enjoying the first round of M*A*S*H* staged readings two years ago, I wasn't about to miss round two. There are few television shows that capture my word nerd heart like the well-written episodes of M*A*S*H* do. I'm not saying I could quote lines from it, but I am saying that many lines are instantly recognizable the moment they come out of the actors' mouths and land in my eager ears.

But only after checking out Swan Dive for the first time. The little restaurant that's come a long way from its days as a biker bar on Davis Avenue got my attention with a Shells of the Light salad of lump crab, shrimp, avocado, grapefruit, mango, pineapple and greens lightly dressed in a papaya dressing. When I'd ordered it, the server had said it was her favorite for how refreshing it was and she was right, but I was just as impressed with how generous the amounts of each ingredient were.

My only regret was not being able to savor all of the mango, an impossibility given my stone fruit allergy. After 3 or 4 bites, I could feel my tongue tingling, warning me to knock it off. When I apologized for leaving so much mango, the server was empathetic. She has an apple allergy, although she eats them anyway and deals with the discomfort.

Clearly her tongue has never begun to swell like mine has after eating forbidden fruit.

My dessert was called Under the Cherry Spoon and consisted of a brick of frozen chocolate mousse with chocolate ganache and brandied cherries. And, yes, cherries are also a stone fruit, so I kept mostly to the mousse and ganache for fear of landing in the ER instead of at Richmond Triangle Players.

Like last time, tonight's performance featured a boatload of local acting talent and was a benefit for the Mighty Pen Project, which offers university level writing classes for veterans so their service memories can be archived. Lady G's husband is just one of the countless veterans - albeit the only one I know - who have been changed by putting their experiences to paper.

Founded by local author David L. Robbins (who also directed tonight's readings), the project's performance this year featured three episodes from the second season, episodes that included Corporal Klinger in his usual dress and boa, Hawkeye and Hot Lips making nice with each other out of necessity and the bat-sh*t crazy Colonel Flag, easily one of the show's funniest recurring characters.

If I talk about them like they're old friends, it's because they may as well be. I watched old episodes of M*A*S*H* on VHS for more years than I care to admit and still found them hilarious on repeated viewings.

Before the performance began, Robbins explained that a tree had fallen on the power lines near his house this afternoon, robbing him of his ability to print programs for us tonight. Some might question why he hadn't printed up programs for the three week-run sooner, but not me. Given how many of the actors' faces I recognized - Alexander Sapp as Hawkeye, John Mincks as Trapper, Harry Kollatz as Colonel Blake, Thomas Nowlin as Father Mulcahey and Dean Knight as Frank Burns - it's not like I needed a souvenir to remind me.

What I loved was seeing these familiar faces transformed into the smart-mouthed characters I first met in college.

Immediately following mass this Sunday, Yom Kippur services will be held for Jewish personnel of the Hebrew faith.

The second season's first episode, "Divided We Stand," had barely begun when I started cracking up watching the dysfunctional men and women of the 4077th try to stay on their best behavior while being observed by a psychiatrist. And by being on their best behavior, I mean Hawkeye and Trapper putting an appendix in Frank's boot because the other boot was full of tonsils.

I've got enough nausea to light up the city of Toledo, okay? First I'm hot, then I'm cold and my knees are in business for themselves. My tongue has gone cashmere and I'd like to find an all-night latrine that takes servicemen. Now, have I got the flu or am I just in love?

If ever an episode showed off the monumental talent of Alexander Sapp (and, really, what role he takes on doesn't?) it was "Carry On, Hawkeye," as the rest of the 4077th is felled by flu. It's also the one where Harry Kollatz as Henry Blake (wearing the requisite fishing hat) hilariously tells his unit to kindly refrain from kissing anyone unless absolutely necessary.

All I know is I'll volunteer to be on the committee that decides when kissing is absolutely necessary.

It was during this episode that director Robbins took the seat nearest me, next to the two veterans who'd spoken before the performance. From then on, every time I had a laugh attack - like when Hot Lips gleefully jabs Hawkeye in the butt with a syringe full of flu vaccine - he looked over at me laughing hysterically.

I'm sure he doesn't recall, but at the performance two years ago, he actually thanked me for all my "loud laughter," as he called it. Tonight he just looked on proudly and, after the final bow, said to tell all my friends to come see it.

We've got files on people who haven't been born yet.

It was during the final episode,"A Smattering of Intelligence," that Sapp tripped up his line and John Mincks as Trapper quickly ad-libbed, "Easy for you to say," causing the cast to laugh as much as we were.

As Robbins had pointed out, the cast hadn't had a great deal of rehearsal, so they were reading from scripts, but the actors had taken the time to block scenes on their own. The result was that script notebooks became doors to knock on, operating tables when casualties arrived and Radar's omnipresent clipboard.

My practically non-stop laughter at exchanges like, "Colonel, what's your clearance?" followed by "Oh, I go through the door with about an inch of clearance" made the three episodes fly by.

Radar, get another order of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Count me in when it comes to supporting veterans putting pen to paper to save their military memories.

That it involves one of the very few TV shows this non-TV person ever watched is just ganache on the chocolate mousse.

Flirt, Swoon, Use Your Womanly Devices

When your evening begins somewhere luxe, you don't anticipate it ending in an industrial corridor.

Our quartet arrived in the rain at Spoonbread Bistro, were shown to a table in the center of the room and immediately began social intercoursing, at least until we noticed the restaurant steadily filling up. Pros all, we knew it was best to order before the masses did.

The Four Graces Pinot Blanc wet our whistles and amuse bouches of spicy pimento cheese tarts whet our appetites. My companion's order changed once our ginger-bearded server announced that softshell crabs were in the house, while I stuck with a gift-wrapped salad and scallops with corn pudding and bacon drizzle.

The scared and profane part of the discussion began when the friend eating frogmore stew admitted he had shown up for Easter dinner with nothing more than a bouquet of flowers and a cherry pie, completely unaware that Easter was a gift-giving holiday.

Au contraire, he discovered, as we heard tell of Easters past with presents as varied as a BB gun and a Matchbox racetrack because apparently not everyone celebrates resurrection simply with black jellybeans.

And P.S., if anyone's going to bring me flowers and pie, please make it blueberry.

Tonight, mine was the rare case of dessert remorse because the 24k gold leaf carrot cake with maple icing my companion ordered was downright spectacular, certainly more alluring than the chocolate I'd opted for. Will I never learn?

We had no remorse about our choice of entertainment with "Something's Afoot," a murder mystery musical spoofing Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" that, according to director Tom Width, Swift Creek Mill had produced 25 years ago. Not to point out the obvious, but I did a lot of things in 1992 that I'd just as soon not repeat now (one incident involved lemon drops and that's all I'll say about that), but Swift Creek had no such compunction.

Adding drama to drama, he also told us to check out the creek because the water coming down from under Route 1 was battling with the roiling water from the rain on this side, making for some mighty agitation. Of course I trooped outside during intermission with my willing accomplice to see nature's churning spectacle.

The story of guests being invited to an English lake country manor house for a weekend was all kinds of fun with French malapropisms ("Quelle fromage!"), a maid with a pitch-perfect Cockney accent, multiple unlikely death scenarios (poison dart, missing step, falling shield) and near-constant laughter at the top-notch cast's delivery.

Jacqueline Jones was made for the role of Miss Tweed (in a tweed suit, natch), all efficiency and suspicion, while it was impossible not to keep an eye on John Mincks' every move (casually at the fireplace adjusting his junk after fondling a fellow guest) as the crafty nephew trying to secure his inheritance.

Not for a second did the play let us forget it was all one big device, never more evident than when one guest tells another, "We'll leave as soon as it's climatically possible."

The four of us left once the play was smoking its metaphorical cigarette, only to get right back off the highway when we saw a sign for a crash ahead. The nearest exit took us on a soul-less stretch of road that put me closer to Philip Morris than I'd ever been, involved some screaming at a perceived dangerous moment (it wasn't) and, at one shoddy point, was described as resembling a cow path.

Big deal. Once you've been serenaded about getting a rash from a man with a ginger mustache, it takes a lot more than Commerce Road to sour your night.

Besides, no one wants their evening to end before it's climatically optimal.

An Afternoon of Woe

I sold Eliza down the river for history and tragedy.

It wasn't that I didn't want to see the 50th anniversary restored print of "My Fair Lady," I did, but I couldn't justify passing up the funniest park ranger ever or an abridged teenage love story for it.

And, just for the record, I did see a movie (several, actually), improbably enough of the Civil War.

Ranger Mike Gorman - one part photography geek, one part dedicated historian and one part stand-up comedian - was giving a talk and slide show entitled "Richmond, 1865." If, like me, you'd attended "Richmond, 1864," you knew there was no funnier or more informative way to spend an hour without alcohol.

What I love about his presentations is that he does all the work while the audience reaps all the fascinating results.

Leading us on a virtual tour of the city using photographs, he zooms in, blows up and points out minute details an amateur like me would never notice otherwise.

So he's showing us a picture of the laboratory buildings on Belle Isle (and by laboratory, he means girls and women stuffing gun powder in things to be shot) and then zooms in on the far distance where we can clearly see Monroe's tomb in Hollywood Cemetery a mile away.

Like a twisted scientist, he says thing like, "Look, I'll blow that up again. Because I can," and then gives an evil chuckle. Hilarious. Or, about staging photographs back then, "They faked a shot? Of course they did!"

But I also learn so much at his talks, like when he showed us the Gallego flour mills, the largest in the world at the time, and shares that they were 15 stories high in an era when reinforced steel was unknown. Or a photograph of Union graves on Belle Isle when I'd had no clue that had ever been the case.

It wouldn't be a Gorman talk without the picture of NDH - that's "nasty, dead horse" for Gorman virgins - floating in the canal, which he turns into a "movie" by combining it with another view of NDH.

Shots of Lee once he returned to Richmond were taken behind his house on the day Lincoln died and intended to send a message that the war was over.Time to move on, rebels.

One seated shot exposed what Gorman called a "big male no-no," white socks with black shoes. Scratched on the negative was "do not use" because fashion faux pas don't become a losing general apparently. Showing a detail of a standing shot, he showed us graffiti on Lee's house: the word "devil" scratched on a brick behind him.

See? Richmond's tagging problem can't be blamed on VCU students. It goes back to the Civil War.

The presentation ended on a particularly amusing shot of ships in the river, which, once he blew up a detail, showed a man standing naked in the water. "Expose yourself to history," Mike had written across the man's twigs and berries.

With pleasure, as long as it's history cheerleader Mike Gorman doing the exposing.

My exposure to literature, which followed, wasn't nearly as amusing, but it was awfully succinct.

Quill Theater had invited the public to come watch their final dress rehearsal of their 55-minute, six actor touring production of "Romeo and Juliet" at Shafer Street Playhouse.

I don't think I could have invented a good enough reason not to watch love's heavy burden sink a couple of teenagers.

Bonus: I can't help but appreciate a production of "Romeo and Juliet" where the actors playing the leads seem young enough to be believable.

And it never hurts a tragedy to have its light moments courtesy of John Mincks playing a woman, in this case, Juliet's nurse (the cap alone was pure gold). Or, especially for middle and high school audiences, the superb diction of someone like David Janosik or Audra Honaker playing so many roles and making the language accessible to all.

Although I'm far from the target audience for this kind of production - feel free to use every last word of Shakespeare's text and I promise I won't get bored if it's well acted - it was fun watching the classic story unfold in record time.

"The Compleat Works of Wm. Shakespeare, Abridged" aside, the only briefer Shakespeare I ever saw was an acting class' ten-minute version of "Hamlet" that had the audience in hysterics when the Queen said, "I am poisoned," and tossed her cup to the floor pronto.

But today's "Romeo and Juliet" did accomplish one lovely thing and that was deliver nearly an hour of talented actors reciting some of the most romantic lines in the English language.

Oh, she teaches the torches to burn bright.

And no amount of dancing all night can compare to that.

15 Minutes of Fame

I'm feeling really lucky about all the art history-themed theater in town lately.

First there was "Red" about Mark Rothko and now there's "Pop" about Andy Warhol, being produced only for the fourth time, playing at Firehouse.

My only disappointment with the performance was not taking a front-row seat when it was offered because the play began with Warhol taking a Polaroid of the woman sitting in front of me, in the seat I turned down.

Curses!

Once I got over my error in judgement, I was dazzled by the circa 1968 costumes of Edie Sedgwick and Viva, two of Warhol's hangers-on and film subjects.

Much as I loved Viva's glammy, bell-bottomed jumpsuit, if it were 1968, I'd have to go with Edie's leopard mini to better show off the legs.

The play was narrated by the lovely (and formerly male) Candy Darling, star of many Warhol films, who won audience hearts with lines like, "It was a dark and stormy night and we were all at Andy's factory. It was the place to be when we had no one better to do."

Andy kept Viva around because of her intelligence, a fact she came to resent. "When you talk smart during all the sex, it's not dirty, it's art."

And there you have the basis of any Warhol film.

One of the most hysterical scenes, at least to this art history geek, was when a trio of abstract expressionists, Pollak, Kline and Motherwell, showed up as suspects in the shooting.

Warhol  brilliantly puts them in their place, infuriating them by saying, "I'm such a fan of your work. It looks so easy and fun!"

I don't know if non-artsy types see how hilarious that is, but I laughed long and hard.

During intermission, the bar was serving mimosas ('cause it's Sunday!) and the play's signature drink, the Factory Fizz, which director Jase Smith had promised us before the show would make the second act even more fun.

Even sans drink, I had lots of fun during the second act, especially when Mrs. Warhol sang a eulogy for her "dead" son while he watched unhappily from the casket.

The showstopper was "Big Gun" about Valerie Solanas' anger at Warhol for losing her script of "Up Your Ass," the play she'd been hoping he would produce for her.

With Viva and Edie in opera-length white gloves singing back-up, Audra Honaker as Valerie nailed it as the angry feminist who'd written the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) and had a slight problem with all men.

Audra was the standout (even her dancing impressed), but the entire cast was strong, with Warhol's assistants (also playing hapless NYPD cops), Gerard and Ondine, especially strong on physical comedy, drug humor and dancing over people and couches.

And how can you not love a musical with a song called, "Untitled Brawl No. 1"?

Today's matinee was a pay-what-you-will performance and after a highly entertaining afternoon of art history with terrific singing and dancing, I'm not sure I paid nearly enough.

But then, I'm not sure I can afford to pay what it was worth.

Upon a Midnight Pillow

It was exactly as I liked it.

A talented group of actors were putting on a Shakespeare play at Sycamore Rouge in Petersburg.

The room was small, the admission was free and none of the actors knew what play or role they'd have until they showed up at the theater.

Hell, the audience didn't even find out until 60 seconds before the play began.

Answer: "As You Like It," which I'd last seen in March of 2012.

Three of us drove down soul-sucking I-95 in time to get seats, but not all together.

And that's why we have discussions after the play is over.

What passions put these weights upon my tongue?

There were plenty of contemporary touches - a servant taking pictures with his cell phone, two ladies repeatedly high-fiving each other- and plenty of ad-libbing.

"He's an old one," quipped Orlando as his ancient servant Adam slowly trundled off stage. "He needs time."

Costumes were based on suggestions from the director, Adam Mincks, so we saw one character in shiny, yellow gym shorts with a matching headband, another with sideburns attached to the chin strap on his hat and a priest in a robe that looked more like a dress your aunt wore in the '70s.

Beauty provokes thieves sooner than gold.

There was a good amount of singing, sometimes to "Greensleeves" and sometimes to the theme from "Gilligan's Island" with a last minute ad-lib of "Mary Ann was hot" for those paying attention.

If I was a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me.

The play was funny because, well, Shakespeare wrote comedy well, but also because the actors took every opportunity to milk their lines for everything they could.

And why shouldn't they?

If you can't mug for a devoted Shakespeare-loving audience on a Saturday night, you may as well hang up your couplets.

I was just thrilled to sit in the front row and watch the spit fly. And for free.

Fortune reigns in gifts of the world. True story.

A Tongue with a Tang

Oddly enough, it was my second time at Maymont in three days.

I'd been there Sunday to see the trees all dolled up in skirts.

I'm always curious to see how the VCU fashion students manage to make muslin look feminine on a tree, no easy challenge.

This year, they did it with a lot of red trim - rick rack, fuzzy balls and red stitching- but after the recent rain, most of the skirts looked kind of bedraggled.

But that was Sunday and tonight was something else entirely, with the skirts stripped off the trees and a stage set up on the carriage house lawn.

It was Richmond Shakespeare's annual gift to the city, a free performance, this year of "The Tempest."

True, I'd seen this very same production as recently as the last week of March, the difference being this time it was free and outside.

Where better to see a play about a storm than under a breezy May Day sky?

I knew from attending the last two years that it's smart to arrive early and secure a good patch of lawn and planned accordingly.

My fellow Bard-lover and I made Garnett's our first stop, getting a salad, a sandwich and coconut cake to tide us over.

Our server suggested we take our goodies away in one of their picnic baskets and it seemed like too good an idea not to take advantage of it.

"Just bring it back tomorrow," she said, waving us off to have a good time.

It wasn't a tough assignment.

We got there early enough to place our chairs front and center and enjoy a leisurely meal under a sky that vacillated between sunny and overcast.

Looking around, I saw lots of families and lots familiar-faced actors.

When I got up to use the port-a-potties just before the show began, I heard my name called and found two friends lounging on a blanket.

They had all kinds of goodies laid out and she promptly handed me her box of Merlot, saying, "Have a drink! I've only had one sip."

If not May Day to share swill, then when?

We chatted about ways to defuse a protest (he was thinking pink frou-frou shorts and a pink Confederate flag would totally disarm the protesters at the Confederate chapel), a worthy topic on this, the day of international workers' protest.

Back in my chair, the play was about to begin when, at the last moment, a couple spread a blanket directly in front of us.

I was all ready to think rude things about latecomers taking prime positions when I recognized a friend.

A friend I'd convinced to come.

The play began moments later when the cloud cover dissipated and blue sky began to show under wispy cloud scraps.

Since I'd just seen "The Tempest" staged, it was fun this time to enjoy the audience's reaction to what they were seeing.

When Prospero referred to "the rotten carcass of a butt," a little boy near me snickered in delight.

He said butt!

Unlike last time, I also got to watch as the sound effects were made.

We were seated very near the guitarist, keyboardist (who also did percussion) and she who rattled the sheet of metal to make thunder.

The beauty of the outdoor setting was how the cast made the most of it, jumping down on to the grass and gesturing to trees and sky.

During intermission, another friend came over to say hello.

Just yesterday, I'd gotten a message from him asking me what I knew about "The Tempest" at Maymont.

Everything, I'd told him, giving him the lowdown.

I was pleased to see he'd heeded my advice and chanced it.

Even if he was responsible for plopping down right in front of me at 6:59.

He and his friend were enjoying the play and we all marveled at John Mincks' energy and athleticism playing the sprite Ariel.

Repeatedly, he'd come out of nowhere, jumping up and over the set or down onto the lawn and springing back up effortlessly.

"I could do all that jumping," Friend claimed, "But not all that popping back up. Too old."

Aren't we all?

That's why jumping and springing is best left to 20-year olds.

By the time the second act began, the sky was a pale gray and the bugs were flitting around the stage lights.

By now lots of people had donned hoodies and blankets were draped over legs and shoulders.

At one point, Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban jumped off the stage and took off through the sea of blankets and chairs, screaming like banshees to great hilarity.

I could have tripped Caliban if I'd wanted to, he was so close.

It might have been funny, but that trio had already provided so many pratfalls and so much physical humor, cracking up the younger members of the audience over and over again, that they didn't need my help to get laughs.

Instead I just kept my rotten carcass in my chair and enjoyed the gift of Shakespeare in the park.

I almost said butt.

With Witchcraft of His Wits

You gotta want it.

But if you do want it, you'll stand in line for an hour plus to get a ticket (having learned my lesson the first year when I got four people from the box office only to have them run out of tickets).

You'll grab slices of pizza from Tarrant's and eat them as you walk back, tickets in hand, to claim your seats and listen to the pre-show music. And if you want it, you'll devote four hours of your Saturday night to seeing it.

And that's when you'll know you're a Bootleg Shakespeare groupie. Tonight was my fourth attempt and my third success. And I did it all for Hamlet.

Henley Street's annual ode to the Bard always has the potential to be a major mess, yet never is. A month in advance, all the actors get their parts and scrips, which they study but don't rehearse. They come up with their own costumes and props, but still no rehearsal.

On the day of the show (beginning at an ungodly 7 a.m., an hour most of them surely never see), they spend the day blocking but not going through lines. So what the audience sees is as fresh as what the actors experience.

It's a recipe for disaster that inevitably proves the acting talent in this town with enough hilarity and inside jokes interspersed to keep everyone on their toes, both cast and crowd.

This year, it was at Virginia Rep (terribly convenient for me, a mere five blocks from home) instead of Barksdale, meaning way more seats available. The evening began with an announcement from Henley Street's Jacquie O, who enthused from the stage, "This year we turned no one away!"

That's what a fan wants to hear.

After a giveaway of a mug, two tickets to Henley Street's next production and a small ham  (a "hamlet," get it?), we were informed that the only rule of Bootleg Shakespeare is no bad words. Naturally the onstage band begins by doing Radiohead's "Creep" and singing the lyric, "You're so f*cking special" just to clarify that f*ck is not a bad word.

Or, more likely, to demonstrate the attitude of a bootleg performance.

This "Hamlet" was done '90s-style, with disaffected youth, video games and the Pixies. Let's just say that Hamlet wore a Pogues t-shirt. Gertrude wore a pink suit, pillbox hat and white gloves. Poloniuswore a "Sticky Fingers" t-shirt.

Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence.

Henley Street's artistic director James Ricks (his hair dyed blond) played Hamlet in all his melancholy glory, whether stomping the stage in anger at his father's death or giving Ophelia the kiss-off speech.

At a bootleg show, actors often need to call for their lines (not having had any rehearsal) and it inevitably results in hysterical moments. Tonight, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, clad in trench coats and while picking up and moving each other, began calling for theirs, to great comic effect.

At one point, one ad-libbed, "We were supposed to bring a piece of paper and we didn't" to much laughter. Polonius appeared immediately after they left the stage, noting, "This business is well ended." Major applause.

He took me by the wrist and held me hard.

Another very funny scene came after Gertrude and Claudius had been informed that, "Your noble son is mad." Cue Hamlet in an untied red robe wearing goggles and swatting at the air. Passing by Gertrude, he casually says, "Hi, Mom!"

Soon after he's stuffing an entire banana in his mouth until he's unable to answer questions.

This is the very ecstasy of love.

Bootleg always uses modern touches to further the humor as when Polonius asks, "What do you read, my lord?" and Hamlet responds "Slanders, sir," holding up a copy of "Newsweek." When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern set out to do the king's bidding and see what's up with Hamlet, the three end up sitting on the edge of the stage smoking weed and playing video games

Hey, it was the '90s.

There is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to color.

Opehlia's descent into madness was well played by Audra Honaker who ends up looking like a cake-top decoration in full-skirted yellow tulle dress with pink belt and crazy eyes. When it came time for Hamlet's seminal speech, Ricks cracked wise, saying, "To be...line!"

He then exhorted the audience to read that speech with him and we did, first all together, then the women and then the men (giving a far inferior reading, I might add). Midway through that, Jacquie O. ran onstage in socks, pointing at her watch to move things along.

Soon after, when Hamlet decides to stage a play to show his uncle's guilt, he inquires about Polonius' acting experience. Frank Creasy brilliantly did his line with one minor addition, "I did, I played Julius Caesar," and then stepping forward and raising his eyebrows, he continued, "Coming this season to Henley Street Theater."

When the play within a play is being shown, an actor sits in a director's chair clearly labeled "Billy Christoper" no doubt a joke about the local director. The first act ended with the Pixies and the second act began with Ce-Lo's "Crazy," neither '90s songs yet both worked.

The first scene began while "Crazy" was still being sung with Hamlet shaving his own head. There's a moment we won't soon forget.

During the gravedigger's scene as he pulls up skulls, one is wearing a red clown's nose and Hamlet notes, "I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest." Playing in the background for this scene was Blood, Sweat and Tears' "And When I Die." Brilliant.

One thing very obvious this year was how infrequently actors called for lines compared to past years.
There's no value judgment to that statement because either way works for the audience.

But late in the play when John Mincks was playing a priest, he called for his line. When he clearly didn't remember, the prompter gave him more of it, eventually all of it.

"What she said," Mincks said in lieu of those lines and the audience roared. No question that best costume went to Phil Crosby in the role of Osric. He wore a splendid red velvet jacket, a bad wig and a foppish hat that only added to his very mannered line delivery.

He was a hoot.

But because something was rotten in Denmark, we had to end with a big fight scene, albeit one using foam noodles and plastic swords. At the end of the evening some three and a half hours later, the audience gave a standing ovation for the brave people who'd given us our annual dose of bootleg.

People like Deejay Gray who stepped in at the last minute and had only 24 hours to learn his lines. Even so, I'd have to say that he played a queen brilliantly. Likewise, when he and John Mincks played sailors, the camp was off the charts.

And naturally there was the big finish with local legend Scott Wichmann coming out in sunglasses and looking buff in fatigues to play Fortinbras at the end. The Bard said it best and all I can add is "amen."

What a piece of work is man.

Okay, I can add something else to that.

What a piece of work is man and woman...never more so than when combined to give us Bootleg Shakespeare.

Ay, there's the rub. I gotta have it.

Haunted By the Legs of a Woman

"Are you here to audition?"

As if.

Not unless you have to audition to be an audience member, I told the woman at the table with the clipboard.

Actually I was there to get on-stage seats for "Spring Awakening" at the Empire Theater, four blocks from my house.

Once I'd learned that there were a dozen seats available up close and personal with the cast, I was determined to plant myself in one of them.

Well, that and the fact that stage seats are $5 and regular seats are $44, well out of the range of this poor writer's pocketbook.

We were escorted to our seats by the House Manager who instructed us to sit in any seats except those that had drawers on the back.

It wasn't long before two cast members took the seats with drawers next to us and the play was off and running.

What I hadn't realized was that the cast members next to me were going to be singing from where they were,

Sometimes sitting ("Mama Who Bore Me"), sometimes standing on their chairs ("The Bitch of Living"), they were performing inches away.

It may have been the coolest theater experience I've ever had.

And just for the record, while the on-stage seats were not as comfy as the regular theater seats, they were located directly under the box seats, always the priciest seats in the house, so the view was spectacular.

Frankly, for a play dealing with child abuse, masturbation, abortion, suicide and sexual abuse (not to mention a bare male butt), I want a good view.

Of course I was going to love a musical with an alternative music score by singer/songwriter Duncan Sheik, but I was equally as enthralled with having a band (guitars, bass, drums, cello, violin, viola, keys) accompany that music rather than an orchestra.

The story of hormone-driven teenagers ("Why am I haunted by the legs of a woman?") living in repressed 1890s Germany (but one with neon shoelaces, wildly gelled hair and jeweled sandals) took its spark from the energetic young cast, many of whom couldn't legally buy a drink during intermission.

But wow, could they ever dance and sing. And they nailed teen angst magnificently.

From "My Junk" to "Totally F**ked" and whether they were laying on stage singing to the rafters or pulling a mic out of their pockets to sing rock star-style, you really couldn't take your eyes off of them.

During the ensemble numbers, the actors were literally a couple of feet from my face.

I don't want to brag, but I could see them spit. And, yes, I like that.

And John Mincks, your ability to spring from stage to mid-air (mid-note) was nothing short of breathtaking from where I sat.

During intermission, I heard a woman tell someone that she'd seen "Spring Awakening" at a Broadway matinee a few years back and had been so impressed by it that she'd gone back that same night to see it again.

Pshaw. I'd realized that I would do the same before the first act was even over.

And at five dollars a pop, I can easily afford to see it again.

Fortunately, I think I passed the audition to be a stage-sitting audience member.

Pardon my enthusiasm, Virginia Rep, but there's nothing quite like the view from the cheap seats.