King Lear & Shakespeare in Love (SVS)
Saratoga, CA (July 28-Sept 3)
We saw Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s productions of King Lear and Shakespeare in Love on back-to-back weekends, and since they were playing together as SVS’s 2023 Summer Repertory Sanborn Park Series, I’m blogging them together.
SVS’s Executive Director, Annalisa Tkacheff is in Limelight’s production of The Wolves with us (and we had met her earlier in Limelight’s Tigers Be Still), so we were excited to go see her production. We were also excited for some outdoor theater in a beautiful setting.
We saw King Lear on 8/27 (racing there directly from the Cast Party for Becky’s New Car and arriving just in the nick of time). The performance featured an entirely female and non-binary cast. That night featured a few understudies but they were so good that I can’t even remember who was being replaced. [Note to self though, read up a bit more before going to see a Shakespeare play you’re not familiar with because it’s easy to struggle though the dialog and miss things…] The cast was all excellent. I thought that Barbara Heninger (who we had seen in WVLO’s Something Rotten last year) was a particular standout as the Earl of Gloucester.
The next weekend, we saw Shakespeare in Love (Sept 2), which we really enjoyed. There were many familiar faces in the production, including:
Guillermo Morales (most recently in Spamalot, The Crucible, and Sweeney Todd, but we met him originally in Limelight’s The Outsider)
Erik Browne (who had been in Limelight by SVCT’s Ripcord along with Bruce Pember, Roberta Vinkhuyzen, Rosalind Farotte, Christy Wait, and Andre Leben)
Vaughn Mayer (who had been in SVCT’s Cabaret)
Ronnie Misra (who we recently saw in Pintello’s Office Hours, and who had been in Los Altos Stage Company’s production of Oslo with Peter Mandel and Robert Sean Campbell)
Skyler Riodan (who we had seen in Sunnyvale Community Players’ Next to Normal)
And Kyle Dayrit was fantastic as Will.
