A Marvel-ous Much Ado, Antonio: The Musical, and Shakespeare as an Auntie
Plus: "Wait, there’s a person *and* a place called Gadshill?"
Happy day-after-St. David’s Day! Remember: your leek will keep for 5-7 days in the fridge after being used as a bludgeon. This newsletter contains two weeks of news and may be too long to read in email, click the header to read [tout] in your browser.
New News
Reviews: Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston as Beatrice and Benedick (check out that curtain call!), Jonathan Bailey as Richard II1 (“He declares with mock solemnity that he has no choice but to raise taxes — and then gleefully helps himself to a line of cocaine.”), Luke Thallon as Hamlet.2
Casting: Giles Terera as Hamlet, Ralph Fiennes will direct Harriet Walter as Jaques this summer (after playing Henry Irving).
A new queer punk pirate musical suggests Shakespeare “was inspired by a real life gay pirate searching for love.” His name? (One guess)
David Tennant, The Comedy of Errors, and “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,”
Luke Thallon on playing Hamlet (his first Shakespeare role). (paywall, register to read for free or email me for the PDF)
An argument against non-textually-supported novels about Lady Macbeth (skip to 9 minutes in)
Romeo and Juliet on Broadway recorded “the youngest ticket buying audience in recorded Broadway history.” It also hosted an onstage proposal and recouped.4
Speaking of marrying onstage, D.C. couples can apply to get married during performances of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s new play We Are Gathered, a “modern-day twist on [a] classical Shakespearean wedding play.”
Look, if you told Henry Clay Folger something had a Shakespeare connection (however tenuous) he would absolutely buy it.
A banger of a double bill if I ever heard one: “Richard II’s Recipes & Medicinal Past of Vodka.”
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is running a short film competition.
Keath David Hall is the new artistic director of Southwest Shakespeare.
Lue Douthit is lecturing for free on Julius Caesar GO GO GO.
Quotes
"He started with a twenty minute like Shakespeare rehearsal of this thing called St. – the speech of St. Crispian? Something like that he called it and he I mean he memorized it word for word off the top of his head”6
“…wait, there’s a person and a place called Gadshill? There’s a Bardolph and a Lord Bardolph? Help.”
“Henry IV represents this idea of not knowing whether you’re going to amount to anything, of not having any road map for how to live your life. But that a sense of achievement and self-love is in your future somewhere, even if you haven’t attained it yet.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, we were doing Gladiator…and all us old senators are sitting around in our gowns with our pinkies up, we’re extras basically, just talking, and someone brings up Othello. And I’m like, oh man, I wish, but I’m too old now. And one of the other senators says to me, no, no, no, go back and read the play...”7
“…midcareers are obviously a prerequisite to late careers, with their witchy, molten qualities. You don’t get to write The Tempest unless you’ve already written Hamlet.”
“There is a line in the play-within-the-play: ‘This lanthorn doth the horned moon present.’ I remember looking up at a crescent moon thinking: ‘Oh, yeah, it does look like horns.’ The idea of Shakespeare looking up at that same moon in that same patch of sky really stirred something in me.”
“…thence to the Opera, and there saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do, and I am resolved to go no more to see the first time of acting, for they were all of them out more or less”
Where Are We Setting Shakespeare Today?
Recommendations
“We are looking for the next Lady or Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.”9
An Old Testament scherenschnitte.
Miss Piggy, in the sauna, with Nureyev, singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”10
Every Lady Bracknell is judged by she delivers the line, “A handbag?”11 Sharon D. Clarke’s is one for the ages.
Next time you are in NYC, go sit on a rock Edgar Allan Poe sat on (and named!)
Make way for ducklings-dressed-as-swans.
Can someone who has seen this please tell me which Richard III speech Gertrude gives? I have questions.
As Gertrude, Nancy Carroll is denied the speech about Ophelia’s drowning (Goold is no shyer with his cuts than his additions) but gains one from Richard III.
Also of note:
a. This sea-set Hamlet is doing a collab with the Queen Mary 2. You can take a cruise “putting the power of Shakespeare to sea.”
b. My pet peeve as a former foil fencer is when modern Hamlets say “bring me the foils” and then use sabres instead. (That below? That is a sabre my friends.) The foil is a perfectly lovely and textually-supported weapon. Please use it and thank you for coming to my TED talk. (And if you want to help me stage Hamlet in the Yale fencing gym, give a shout.)
If you haven’t read the tale of how Jeremy Strong “nearly bankrupted a hundred-year-old college-theatre company” so he could meet Al Pacino, please enjoy. (paywall, usual suspects will o’erleap.)
Joining the rarified 20% of shows that do. I’m curious to do the math on Broadway Shakespeare specifically – (relatively) safer investment than new work/musicals?
Scroll to the end to see the delightful mask for “Wall.”
I do not know who any of these people are but I support this.
I kept thinking of my second favorite “Onion” headline when making this list : “Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” My favorite is of course.
I’m still not 100% sure I didn’t hallucinate this. This man received 43 curtain calls and a 40 minute standing ovation as Romeo.
A mixed bag: Edith Evans, Coral Browne, Judi Dench.
The current production of OTHELLO will change the math on the safety of Broadway Shakespeare productions!