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Who Made The Salad?

Old 70s TV commercial reference there. What a thrill to see my pal Kelly Au Coin sharing a Broadway stage with Denzel Washington, playing Octavius Caesar to his Brutus in "Julius Caesar." It was a slightly surreal sensation, and Denzel seemed very life-sized, not the larger-than-life icon of the silver screen. He can certainly act, and he infused Brutus with brooding sobriety, and perhaps not enough passion to interprety a revolutionary zealot. Denzel's co-leads were far stronger - Colm Fiore as Cassius and Oz's Eamon Walker as Marc Anthony. Kelly was splendid as the cool, assured, emporer-in-waiting Octavius. The production itself was better than the reviews suggested - I liked the contemporary trappings (a mix of urban decay and Baghdad-esque debris) and the use of modern body language and intonation to get us quickly to the meaning of the dialogue while preserving Shakespeare's 17th century poetry intact. Too often watching Shakespeare I miss the meaning because the words fly faster than I can decode and absorb them - which is quite a statement given how many languages I understand.