Rehearsal Report--6/20

It was a rerun rehearsal of last week.  The actress playing Anne was not contacted to see if she could attend, so we confirmed old ground and started to get a little more in depth with the characters and individual moments throughout the B- and C- plot.  There was a lot of cleaning up and clarification of blocking.

Dr. Caius

The other side of Sir Hugh Evans, our Welsh pastor, is Dr. Caius, our French doctor.  Shakespeare makes more pointed commentary about foreigners with this character and about the utter ridiculousness/futility of the medical practice at the turn of the 17th century.

To catalog all of the ways that Dr. Caius is the butt of the joke would be take too much time and bandwith.  He is foppish but in a far more masculine way than Slender.  He is fiery, quick-tempered, and extremely passionate about the mundane.  He practices his fencing on children.

The actor's struggle becomes to find the point right before it goes over the top. Careful playing on this point will go a long way to make the performance and show extraordinary.