Marlon Brando = THE MAN

I don't know how to embed YouTube videos on this here blog-o-mine, but I do know how to copy and paste. This is Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KXhfjOkKPM

I remember the first time I saw this movie. I was in middle school, in a classroom, and from the time Brando says "butchers" to the end of his soliloquy, my skin prickled in waves all over. He's got everything goin' on in this scene--the indignation at what he perceives as a great injustice; the deception of the conspiring senators, nothing overdone; the excitement, heightened by grief and anger, that a man like Antony must feel in promise of havoc and war; his acting all control, his emotion gradually cracking through that control, then returning. And the shot at Brutus's back as he closes the doors on Antony in the distance, such a great visual of foreboding. I thought it was beautiful, still do.

I'm going to see this play tomorrow night, in the round, with a cast of...all women. That's right, boys and girls, the Tennessee Shakespeare Company is peopling Julius Caesar with a bunch of squeakers. (I love you, ladies.) Now, I think it's a bad nasty idea...especially now I've watched a man who drank ten gallons of testosterone a day cry "HAVOC!" However, I'm going to see it. I feel a little guilty, yes, like a man paying some greasy gypsy to open a tatty tent flap for a glance and a gasp and a smirk at the freak show. But I am interested to see if it can even come close to being pulled off. I'll let you know.