A Man for All Seasons

Last night I saw, with my wife and in-laws, Pacific Theatre's production of A Man for All Seasons, and I highly recommend it. I especially thought that Chris Humphreys and Ron Reed did great jobs as King Henry/Cromwell and Thomas More, respectively. The script was excellent - thought-provoking and powerful. The one strange conceit was updating it to the 1950s, but I thought it worked. It wasn't the kind of update where you tell the original story in a modern framework through modern characters (like Hamlet with gangstas or something), but rather offering the pretense that Henry VIII's reign and the Church schism, and all the surrounding relevant events, actually did happen in the 1950s. Somehow it was easy to believe.

This is the second production by Pacific that I've seen in the last couple of months, after Dan Amos's stellar one-man version of It's a Wonderful Life, so I think a subscription might be in order. Apparently they have a current deal where you can see four shows for $55, which is pretty amazing.