Yesterday I went out to Brooklyn and saw Patrick Stewart in an innovative production of Macbeth. (Macbeth, for those of you who don't know it, is not a new McDonald's burger.) The production was modern--complete with impressive lighting, videos projections, dissonant sound design and hip-hopping "weird sisters." There was fear, horror, laughter and language. Timeless truths. All in Brooklyn.
Then at home on Turner Classic Movies I watched two Laurel and Hardy essentials. The Music Box in which the boys try to move a piano up a steep flight of steps (yes, the plot is that complicated) and Sons of the Desert, in which the boys try to go to a convention in Chicago.
Yes, Laurel and Hardy are hardly high comedy. But as anyone, even Shakespeare, will tell you there's a lot of comedy in a fat man falling into a fountain. Stan Laurel was a genius. His face, his eyebrows, his mangling of the language ("we're like two peas in a pot") are genius.
I guess there is an advertising point here.
The threesome of Laurel, Hardy and Macbeth are original, real and evocative. They move and touch. Kind of what advertising should do.
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