Globe For All Is All-In

They are "all-in." Globe For All is the touring arm of the Old Globe Theatre and it fills an indispensable role in communities by bringing free, live performances to many different venues in San Diego County. Like the wandering minstrels of old, they set up in parking lots, prisons, shelters, school auditoriums and elsewhere to reach out to audiences that are often ignored, can't afford tickets or never heard of Shakespeare.

Most recently the five-member cast visited Lemon Grove's Treganza Heritage Park on Nov. 10 from 3:30 - 4:30 pm to perform the engaging Shakespeare: Call and Response as part of an 18-gig tour.
Directed by the award-winning Patricia McGregor and introduced by the fetching Valeria Vega, the one-hour show was performed on the grass against an ingenious set that arrived in a big truck. Under blazing sunshine, the audience sat on folding chairs adorned with orange-hued "jackets" and was urged by the cast to respond on cue. A pair of game senior citizens even got up to read a brief scene from Romeo and Juliet, the teenagers whose grim fate is the stuff of legend.
The point of this clever show is to make Shakespeare understandable, relevant to modern life and amusing. For some of us the plays have always been all that. But for too many they are foreign, distant, and, gasp, irrelevant in a world dominated by pop culture even though they are an underpinning of Western culture. McGregor gets this as her scenario reveals:
The quintet performs scenes from Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew and even the rarely-performed King John interspersed with calls for responses from an enthusiastic, willing audience.
The troupe is helmed by two pros, Eddy R. Brown III, a tall, lean, expressive actor a.k.a. "Firebrand," and Sofia Jean Gomez, a powerhouse performer a.k.a. "Traditionalist."
Next in virtuosity is Christopher River a.k.a. "Clown." The "Romantic" is the charming Anne Son, while the gentle Miki Vale composed the music and served as DJ. They are all young, talented and represent America's racial-ethnic make-up. As Globe ambassadors they are instantly appealing to audiences of any age or background.
For relevancy McGregor inserts political and social comment into the show, particularly at the end. Political commentary is risky, especially if devoid of context, and doesn't really work.
But social commentary strikes chords, such as the "sexism meets patriarchy" view of Taming of the Shrew and the hilarious rewording of Kate's closing monologue ("I place my hand
beneath my husband's foot"), which prompted suggestions from the audience like "set fire to his foot" and "poison him," provoking gales of laughter from the largely mature audience.
The show closes with a group hum that evokes the grief of losing so many to Covid-19 and complements Gomez's moving "Grief fills the room up of my absent child" speech from King John.

The Lemon Grove Historical Society continues to build the relationship, begun in 2016, with Globe For All (GFA) and happily flung open its historic H. Lee House for the cast and crew. We believe the GFA concept is unique in modern theatrical history and ploughs new ground for the Bard and his descendant playwrights. Come back! Come back to us in 2022!

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