Harrisburg Shakespeare, at the Gamut Theater Group, invited me to come check out their performance of Pericles. It’s not often performed, which is too bad, because it’s a fun show.
Some of the performances in this production were very strong, especially Marina. The cast was very diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity, which is always nice to see. And the music and dancing were great. Also the combat–the scene where Pericles participates in a tourney was very cool, as the last fight ended up being four-on-one. The choreography was complex, but clearly safe and did a great job telling the story.
I think my favorite thing about this production was how they used textiles to tell the somewhat confusing story of Pericles’ journey. As he traveled, each place he visited had distinctive clothing that roughly mapped to a real-world location. So when he was in what is (I think??) Syria-ish, everyone was wearing tunics with blocky prints, but in another part of his journey, they were wearing clothes that were from Thailand. Then when he retraced his journey, I could immediately orient myself to his location and remember everything that happened there.