Last night, Ellen and I attended our first “live” event at a location different than the event itself. We had seen advertisements for these often at movie theatres, often for opera performances. This one, seen at the Shakespeare Theatre’s Harmon Hall came about almost by accident.
I received an email from the Shakespeare Theatre that John Lithgow was going to be performing in a play called “The Magistrate” Saturday evening, March 2. I am a big fan of John Lithgow and had never seen him live and even though I had never seen the play he was going to be in, I thought it would be fun. Ellen agreed to go and only then did I realize that the play was being performed in London while we would be in Washington DC. After checking with Ellen we decided to buy tickets and see what it was like.
When I was having lunch with a friend last week he mentioned that since the play would start at 8pm Washington time it was highly unlikely that it would be actually be ‘live’ in London. Well, duh (I realized).
Thus, when we got to the Harmon we were introduced to the concept of live and ‘nearly live’. So we thus were able to use our home theatre to watch a recording of a live play assuming our home theatre could seat a couple of thousand people.
As a side note, the acting was fine (what would you expect from a play done in London), John Lithgow was great (though I suspect his role would have been better served by someone a bit more ‘English’), but the play itself was only ordinary. It was a 19th century English farce, thus dealing with errors in social behavior; unlike let us say a French farce which typically deals with errors in sex.
Our conclusion was that we would probably try it again at some point since at a minimum it allowed us to see in sort of a theatre setting some performances we would otherwise rarely have a chance to see. On the other hand, perhaps I can talk Ellen into just going to a theatre run in London sometime.