Was it worth it?
Definitely!!!
There is truly something about watching a play that adds depth to the words preciously read. While watching it, I found that there were many times I had simply overlooked the vast emotion that was created by the actors. I was able to connect with the characters more emotionally as I was able to hear their distraught voices and see their faces expressing the wide range of utter unhappiness to the purest of joys. I hope that I can bring my reading more to life in the future with this added sense of the actors performing.
The director went for a more serious tone for the play, choosing a dramatic romance instead of the comedy that was discussed earlier. I felt like this was a good choice through looking at the audience. The majority of the audience appeared to be 50+ in age, which meant that the good majority of them had been married for a long time. As opposed to a group of college-aged students, an older audience would find the married relationships to be more serious as most of them have gone through struggles in their own lives with their marriage. I don't believe that they would have been as humored making light of Leontes' concerns regarding his marriage. However, because of this heavy drama, the humor in the characters of the Clown and the Old Shepherd were greatly appreciated as almost a stress-relief to the audience. It was almost as if the Shepherd's first lines cursing youth's idiocy gave the audience a moment to exhale and realize that the rest of the world was still untouched from the madness of the Sicilian court.
Now, not so analytical...
Another interesting aspect about the play was that it had more of a modern style choice that I personally felt was a genius move. The second half of the play was made more credible (being that it jumped sixteen years into the future) because the styles had changed. The men went from wearing waistcoats with tails to the more modern-cut suits we have today. This idea of showing the passage of time through fashion really impressed me.
I don't know about you, but this screamed later in time to me. It was something unexpected, but in a pleasantly surprising way.
Major props to the director for this one!
Watching the play definitely did help make more sense of it all. I did like the passage of time shown by fashion, I was wondering how they were going to do that whether with makeup or wigs or something. The fashion change was cool.