AI R&J, Audio Plays, and Broadway
Plus: Radiohead Hamlet, cursed gloves, and racoons. So many racoons.
And we’re back! I went to a college friend’s wedding at the end of last month, attempted to scream-shout “Mr Brightside” with a dozen ex-Whiffenpoofs in the Minnesota woods, and lost my voice/have been varying levels of indisposed for the past month as retribution for my hubristic attempt to reclaim my collegiate impunity for physical limits/close harmony. Remember: they have vocal training, you do not.
Other than the plague, the wedding was delightful. Highlights included traveling to the ceremony in a pontoon boat with a tuxedoed finance bro explaining the entire plot of The Producers, spending cocktail hour listening to a tech bro in a mesh shirt explain that his crypto company collapsed so now he’s really into Not Dying, and introducing Tech Bro to Grown-Up Theater Kid Who Only Wants To Talk About Her Ayahuasca Journey during the after-party so I could slip away to visit the cheese curd truck1 and contemplate my life choices by a lake while listening to Cascada blast from the party cabin. 10/10. Congratulations!
This edition features highlights from the previous five weeks of Shakespeare news, we’ll return our regularly scheduled programming as soon as my cough/memories of Goldman Guys in lederhosen are gone.
The Big News
We lost Maggie Smith and Cal Shakes.
Spooky
No cheating: name the five Shakespeare plays with ghosts in them.
A pair of cursed gloves that may have been owned by Shakespeare.
He put the gloves on, and the curators told him that anyone who wears those gloves will die within a year.
You can now stay in the home where the 1605 murder that inspired the play The Yorkshire Tragedy took place.2 Once thought to be by Shakespeare, the scholarly consensus on the play’s authorship is now firmly Middleton-y.
Theater
“Who can forget the classic first line of ‘Romeo and Juliet’: ‘How y’all doin’ today?’”
Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare?
Conrad Ricamora warms up to play Abe Lincoln in Oh Mary! with Juliet, Hal, and Angelo (skip to 4:45) and reminisces about his years at Utah Shakes.
Brian Cox on Olivier and Lear (he played the Duke of Burgundy).
David Tennant adds to the lore of improvising Shakespeare onstage.
Things I always have time for: a Hamlet broadsword fight, an R&J rapier duel.
James Ijames’ Hamlet adaptation Fat Ham is the second most produced play in America.
Robert Lepage will direct Macbeth at the Stratford Festival next year. His Coriolanus featured the title character fleeing Rome in a sports car and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with the Scotsman. I hope it involves the Porter crashing a Kia into Dunsinane’s banquet hall.
The new Shakespeare in the Park theater will have a raccoon wall to keep those adorable trash pandas the &%$# offstage. Where they belong.
A virtual reality Winter’s Tale. “Madara Viļčuka does an amazing job of constructing a character while sporting a plush purple bear head.”
A reminder that John Douglas Thompson was a software salesman until a date stood him up. He is now playing Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 1975, Patrick Stewart was listed as one of the RSC actors “who have yet to achieve fame.”
Diane Paulus once played Juliet with Liev Schreiber as Tybalt.
The Folger Theatre used AI to turn stump speeches into blank verse for their Romeo and Juliet pre-show.4
Lady Capulet’s verse was derived from the speech made during the Republican National Convention by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was the inspiration for Benvolio, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s speech provided the basis for the remarks by Paris. Meanwhile, Mercutio’s words were adapted from Oprah Winfrey.
History
That time the Booth brothers’ Julius Caesar was interrupted by Confederates trying to burn down NYC. Rude.
That time a Jewish actor dyed all of his hair (and I mean all of his hair) blond and sat in the nude in order to convince his director that he was a Tyrolian peasant so that he could keep performing with a woman he’d met in rehearsals for The Merchant of Venice.5
“The moment in which Richard and Henry lived was a moment of political masculinity in crisis.”
Books about Henry V: the reasonably new and the very old.
Archaeology reveals that Shakespeare wrote ‘fightier’ plays in rectangular buildings.”
Talks
Other
The anti-Stratfordian’s lament: “I’ve been called a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist.”
No. 10 is minus one Will (and an Elizabeth and a Maggie).
If you have $500, Capitol Hill Books has a Dalí As You Like It for you, elephants on stilts included.
Margaret Atwood (Hi, Huge Fan) Please Get Your Richards Straight.
Recommendations
Copyediting the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The “Bront” sisters just doesn’t have the same ring.
Pick Your Weapon, Ancients Edition: quoits or rocket powered arrows.
Ah yes, that old Scottish tradition of forcing freshman to give you raisins in return for illuminated receipts in Latin.
How Dramaturgs Resurrected Lynn Riggs’ Sump'n Like Wings, the Forgotten Sister to Oklahoma!
“People imagine a fierce old German professor poring over folios and popping toads into cauldrons.” A dramaturg reflects (1975).
Turns out Ralph Ellison was an excellent photographer.
I love Surekha Davies newsletter “Notes from an Everything Historian” and have been eagerly following updates for her new book HUMANS: A Monstrous History. Be cool like me and pre-order it + sign up for her talk on Wednesday.
It was exactly as amazing as it sounds.
If brutal 17th century murders are your jam, number one: why? Number two: here you go. (The fact that his wife was saved from being stabbed to death by the boning in her corset is pretty cool.)
I have so many questions.
1. If you’ve seen this, is it good?
2. As a freelance writer who has previously been hired by the Folger to adapt things: the &%$#?! I understand that, as the article notes, “AI adds hands to a small team” but still. “Paying an actual artist to do that work would be a better way of adding hands.” At my back I always hear NVIDIA’s data farm hurrying near.
3. The “ancient grudge” that kicks off the action of the play has been interpreted in infinite ways from the mildly absurd to the wildly offensive but the best productions I’ve seen have stuck to the text, attributed the families’ ancient animus to the universal principle of “F*ck that guy,” and carried on.
HOW is this not already a major motion picture ? Kudos to Tomas Weber who wrote the story for Smithsonian, someone please buy the film rights from this man immediately.
“…when she discovered that a ‘common playhouse’ was about to open in her elegant neighbourhood she was furious. Galvanising her local community into action, Elizabeth got up a petition against the opening of the Blackfriars Theatre…”