May 19 - 25, 2024
Yellow stockings find a way
Image of the Week
Actors Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum in a scene from the New York Shakespeare Festival production of the play "Twelfth Night" at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. (1989)
The NYPL Martha Swope collections are a never-ending source of gems but this Twelfth Night is one of my favorites. (Gregory Hines as Feste!)
Folger Shakespeare Library names Farah Karim-Cooper its new director
Asked to name what she considered Shakespeare’s most underrated play, Karim-Cooper was decisive.
“I always get in trouble for this, because it’s a little controversial, but it is ‘Titus Andronicus.’ It was criticized for years because it’s quite sensationalist, but it does copy classical tragedy in that it’s very, very, very obscenely violent,” she said, later adding, “But what I like about the play is Shakespeare saying something about the past — saying how, when we emulate the past, we have to be careful, because we’re also potentially emulating the violence of the past.”
Broadway Romeo and Juliet sets dates
Starring Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the revival begins performances on September 26 and opens on October 24. The teaser video features the pair frolicking in a bathtub of stuffed animals and an incredible shot of Romeo ringing the Capulet’s doorbell.
“The orchard walls are high are hard to climb” lol
As the Times puts it: “there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas”.
West End Romeo and Juliet Opens
The production’s artful subtlety is encapsulated in the tragic denouement, when the lovers’ deaths are conveyed simply by Holland and Amewudah-Rivers removing their mics.
From the NY Times, which makes an odd fact-checking error:
Marry Paris? Yes. Break it off with Romeo? No.
Michelle Terry as Richard III
So what does Shakespeare teach us?
Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books
So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin.
O’Toole brilliantly skewers folks who claim that Shakespeare’s tragedies “exist to instruct us, and their main lesson is that everything would be OK if only we could ‘conquer’ our shortcomings.”
Or in the words of Geoffrey Tennant, “Do any of you seriously believe that you'll sell more plastics products to the construction industry by studying the crisis management techniques of Claudius?"
Defeating Anti-Stratfordians through the power of “quintessential Englishness”
Also French jokes:
That Englishness also takes the form of running gags at the expense of language-mangling foreigners: something today we may find mildly offensive but, if we are honest, a constant strain in English stage, film and TV comedy. In The Merry Wives, Dr Caius is the archetypal funny Frenchman who, invited to join a small, select twosome, blithely announces: “I shall make-a the turd.”
Michael Billington on Merry Wives.
The Winter’s Tale in Latvia
James has transplanted Shakespeare’s play into the world of tech billionaires. Leo Winter is the CEO of AppZapp, the California tech company behind Bohemia, a metaverse-style digital realm which you can only enter if you’re under the age of 21. No adults allowed.
Read more at Natasha Tripney’s Café Europa
Lotto-winning Tennessee ex-monk helped bring Guthrie's epic Shakespeare History Plays to the stage
Roy Cockrum was a religious brother at the end of a spiritual retreat in England in the mid-2000s when he saw a show that knocked his tunic back. It was the Royal National Theatre's adaptation of Philip Pullman's sci-fi novel "His Dark Materials."
…Cockrum immediately made a vow to himself. "Whenever I have two nickels together, I'm going to help the American theater work at this level," he said.
As fate would have it, Cockrum won $259.8 million in the Powerball lottery about a decade later in June 2014. Since then he has kept his theater promises, using the proceeds to help underwrite ambitious projects for the American stage.
The Tennessee-based Roy Cockrum Foundation is the principal funder of the Guthrie Theater's production of History Plays, a once-in-a-generation epic endeavor in which a 25-member acting company guided by artistic director Joseph Haj presents Shakespeare's "Richard II," "Henry IV" (parts one and two) and "Henry V," in rotating rep.
Some headlines simply cannot be improved.
Happy closing to the Guthrie Histories!
The Bed Trick by Keiko Green at Seattle Shakespeare
The play ends with Green making one more part of theatre history new: the actress playing Harriet explains that bows have historically symbolized an apology from the actors to the audience for telling an imperfect story. She is sorry that they could not fix the play, the “problem” play, because they cannot fix the human heart.
Wherefore art thou, Detroit?
Sam White, founder of the nonprofit Shakespeare in Detroit, will return to the renowned Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada to direct a production of "Romeo and Juliet." She joins the show along with Stratford's Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino to discuss equity in the arts and share what attendees can expect.
Nüwa in Fairyland
You cannot feed [the plants] so
Jinkx Monsoon and Cole Escola on "Little Shop of Horrors"
This, thou dost review
Allen Bratton’s Henriad-retelling is “well written, but inert” and features a Richard II who dies of AIDS.
“Macbeth” from Schauspielhaus Bochum “looks like a stylistic exercise and feels like an endurance test.”
Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century
Charlie Jane Anders interviews Kristine Johanson about her collection of 18th c. adaptations of Henry V, Richard II, Coriolanus, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI.
Includes discussion of how adaptation from this period are obsessed with pairing up un-paired Shakespeare characters and links to this 1966 thesis on Dryden adaptations.
Prospero tells Ariel's post history as a captive on the island, and Ariel brings out his "spirit love" Milcha.
José Ferrer Portrait Unveiled at Princeton
Ferrer's accumulation of awards in the early 1950s followed a prodigious period of post-grad professional activity. Notably, in 1943, Ferrer co-starred opposite Princeton-born Paul Robeson in the first Broadway production of Shakespeare's Othello to feature an African American actor in the title role. (The production ran for nearly 300 performances, setting the still-standing record for the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway.)
From Brian Eugenio Herrera’s excellent #TheatreClique newsletter
New resource for teaching premodern critical race studies
Throughlines from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, launching August 1. Sign up for the mailing list to receive Ruben Espinosa’s annotated syllabus.
Dracula Daily – May 24
I sympathise with poor Desdemona when she had such a dangerous stream poured in her ear…