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Shakespeare on Broadway
If possible, see the Shakespeare’s Globe productions of TWELFE NIGHT and THE TRAGEDIE OF KING RICHARD THE THIRD back to back, on the same day. Go for drinks or dinner in between, make a day of it. It would also be good, budget and availability permitting, to opt for onstage seating for one and house…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
Julie Taymor’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is Shakespeare in bedclothes, and sheets in particular: billowing sheets, mussed sheets, straightened and cornered sheets, sheets that wormhole through trap doors and turn into bowers and hammocks, sheets hastily wrapped around discovered lovers, sheets turned into projection screens that demarcate the horizons of the dream world. The whole…
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Romeo and Juliet
Tea Alagić’s production of ROMEO AND JULIET at Classic Stage Company is in the tradition of Peter Brook’s “empty space.” I can almost imagine that seminal figure of the modern theater as having directed it. The script is pared to its essence, to just the point at which trimming a little more would do injury…
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Julius Caesar
For the London-based Donmar company’s JULIUS CAESAR at St. Ann’s Warehouse, we are herded into, and, two-and-a-half hours later, released from a place of mock confinement. Initially, we are retained in a holding room, between a door that has rolled down behind us and one ahead of us that has yet to open. One looks…
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Sider
SIDER is a dance performed to the soundtrack of a film of an unspecified Elizabethan tragedy that the dancers hear through earpieces but that the audience does not. There is other sound and musical accompaniment that we do hear, including vocalizations, which do not seem to me to be in a particular language, although I…
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Under the Greenwood Tree
The cross-dressing heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies create a new social relation by virtue of their masquerades and the secret knowledge they hold. They are thus empowered to influence events to a degree otherwise unpermitted of their sex, and so fulfill Beatrice’s repeated plaint in Much Ado About Nothing: “O that I were a man.” The…
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Much Ado About Nothing
Joss Whedon’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is something to see, a smart, elegant, fast-moving romantic intrigue filled with the spirit and surprise of the best storytelling. It’s that rare film of a Shakespearean comedy that, without modernizing the language, is utterly comprehensible from the first frame to the last. Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play…
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The Roman Tragedies
I would say that last night I sat through six hours of Shakespeare’s three historically-based Roman tragedies – in Dutch, but in fact I did what I was invited to do and milled about. I lounged center-stage on a couch for the first scenes of Coriolanus, at one point dodging a flurry of papers tossed…
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Coriolanus
My suspicion is that a lot of people would find this film version of Shakespeare’s CORIOLANUS to be tough going, and for a good ways into it, I was one of them. The early images struck me as heavy-handedly pacifist, modernized and uncoupled from Shakespeare, who is wise on the subject of war but hardly…
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Anonymous
What if anything to say about ANONYMOUS? I can say that I enjoyed it well enough without thinking it great. That although a legitimate argument can be made for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays that are called Shakespeare’s, the film does not make anything like one…