Last night, for the actual fifth anniversary of our first date, plumtreeblossom and I saw All’s Well That Ends Well on the Boston Common. The show is free, but we splurged and reserved rented lawn chairs in advance, which got us an excellent location. The show was really, really good. plumtreeblossom and I agree it was probably the best performance we’ve seen by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. The acting was uniformly excellent, except for a couple notable performances that were even better. The CSC tends to do spare, stark, abstract and almost cartoonish sets, which I always like, but this one worked exceptionally well, and they did some neat things with a giant lazy Suzan (e.g., having the actors walk or run, but stay in place on the stage because the stage was rotating under them) that I thought worked really well. The lighting and music were also extremely effective. And oh, the acting and direction!

The performance goes through this weekend, and I very heartily encourage anybody with the slightest interest in Shakespeare, stagecraft, parks, Boston, the English language, water polo, eating, or breathing to see it.

And big thanks to my honeywuzzle for making sure we didn’t miss it. I love you!