Love’s Labour’s Lost Part One : Shakespeare Dreams

So I’ve had a busy week.  Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was coming to town (Holyoke, Mass) to perform Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I’ve been looking forward to it for months.

First came the Shakespeare dream.  I love it when this happens.

It was the day of the show…only, we were at Boston Common, where Commonwealth Shakespeare performs.  “Odd,” my dream self thought, “I did not realize that CommShakes had a winter show.”  Even in the dream I realized that this was not the right place, and I had to get by them in order to get to my show.

The show itself was a rather weird choreographed affair, mostly of children.  They appeared to be dancing, though they were armed, as if miming a large battle scene.  (Funny how this comes into play later during the actual LLL show.)

I jog through much of this (hoping that this is a rehearsal and not a performance, I do not remember seeing an audience).  As I cross to the other side I hear reference to characters of “Richard” and “Katherine”.  I wonder if they are doing Taming of the Shrew, somehow mapping “Richard” to “Petruchio” in my brain.  Even in the dream I recall thinking, “This is probably one of the histories, and I just don’t recognize it.”

The story doesn’t have a climax, that’s really about it.  I never got to LLL in the dream.  Just crashed a rehearsal for what only now occurs to me may not even have been a Shakespeare play to begin with :). 

If I know my brain, and I think I do, then the production was children because of what Keri from Rebel Shakespeare (the kids’ group) has been going through this week.  It was highly choreographed because what little I know of Love’s Labour’s Lost comes from cursory knowledge of Kenneth Brannagh’s movie, which I understand to be a classic 1930’s musical (I’ve not seen it).  I have no idea where the Richard and Katherine references came from, although if I had to guess I’d say that was my brain’s way of generically referring to “the Shakespeare stuff you don’t know.”  Which would be logical, given that I’m not that familiar with LLL, either.

Ok, that’s enough of that story.  Part two shortly.