Bill Burr, Silent Discos, and Legos
Plus: This Bud's For Othello
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…and we’re back!
There are an unsurprisingly large number of Lego Shakespeare proposals. Vote for your favorite!
Paul Rudd drinks a Romeo and Juliet cocktail: “Everything in this will kill you.”
Applications are open to get married onstage during Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Midsummer-inspired play about “queer love and forest magic.”2
Claiming copyright over 27-year-old Shakespeare performances on Youtube is very dumb.3
Please enjoy this director attempting to discuss Hamlet while in severe pain. (The Hot Ones knockoffs are getting out of control, y’all.)4
An early account of Macbeth has him hallucinating greyhounds.
30-somethings on playing Lear and Gloucester in a Korean opera.
“Wohl had a grad school professor whose rule about Shakespeare and audiences was perspective shifting: ‘They’re there.’”5
Yes, the pastoral bits of Winter’s Tale 100% work better as ballet.
This week in adaptation: Tiff'ny of Athens, Henry IV as a folk musical, and As You Like It, now with 100% more Canadian lawyers!
“He once read the entirety of Titus Andronicus on our stage through the night.”
Can we please banish the phrase, “Shakespearean Baddie” from our collective vocabulary?
She’s warm! And also, maybe, smells good?
“She ‘pulled a lot of Shakespeare stuff’ into her vampire mommy role.”
Mrs. Alving and Portia in red? “He’d outfitted her in a similar shade when he costumed a 2012 production of The Merchant of Venice.”
“Reading King Lear at Columbia in the Wake of Mahmoud Khalil’s Kidnapping.”
Only this year, under the guidance of my colleague Professor Julie Crawford, did Lear snap into clarify for me as a political caution not about bad actors but about those who fail to stop them.
All About Othello
“This staging of Othello is not good.” -Roxane Gay10 And has product placement?
During a scene where Iago and his fellow soldiers are cavorting merrily, an actor carries a case of Budweiser to and fro across the stage, careful to keep the branding marks facing out to the audience. Other actors are drinking from cans that are, visibly, Budweiser cans. This beer spectacle is absurd and distracting. It is unseemly and absolutely cheapens the show.
Iago is “a weasel in a torso-hugging tee,” Othello comes off “as [Desdemona’s] weird dad,” “the vibe is mild depression,” and “it’s hard to summon anything as visceral as fury.”
Recommendations
“His voice struck me as both un-attractive and really unsuited to the microphone.”
“Gallot has said he is still routinely asked if he has Oscar Wilde’s testicles on his desk.”
Bill Burr too:
Now that Burr is a bona fide thespian, he wants to make the rounds and catch some of his neighboring Broadway shows. Bracing for the buzzy revival of “Othello” that just opened down 47th Street, he ordered a “No Fear Shakespeare” copy of the play (or, as Burr likes to pronounce it in brusque Bostonian, “No Feah Shakespeahe!”). In reading that more accessible translation, he’s developed an affinity for Elizabethan slang — particularly, the innuendo of “making the beast with two backs” and the trash talk of “proclaim him the streets.”
“You go to a sports bar and you get into an argument and you start dropping some ‘Othello’ on them? They’re going to laugh,” Burr asserts. Proving his point, he again breaks out his wicked smaht twang: “Say one more thing about Tom Brady and I will proclaim you in the streets!”
At the Guthrie’s recently-closed production, couples could go home with an original song penned during the show.
The technical director of one of the targeted theaters posted an entertaining Reddit thread.
For an internet chicken show, there is already a surprising amount of Shakespeare.
Liberation was *excellent.* There’s a moment towards the end of the play that is everything Hamlet seeing the ghost should be:
Aidem’s Margie steps in to represent older Lizzie, so that the narrator, rather than embodying her mother, can speak to her for the first time. Flood and Aidem produce something absolutely gorgeous together, a heartbreaking mini-miracle of theater as séance…
No.
Bernhardt has many Shakespeare connections.
Look, it’s very stupid. But hey, Michelle Obama seemed to enjoy “It’s Hard to be the Bard.” Given who is sitting next to her (hint) I’m sure she could have used the distraction.
I want to block quote this entire essay. Okay, one more:
The last pair of pants Roderigo wears… never has a pair of pants been so unflattering upon a man’s body. Words cannot express how bad those pants are. The actor should call his agent, ASAP. Get the union on it. It’s a crime.
There’s…so much here. The black and white chairs to align “with the themes of racial dichotomy.” But, “subtlety, though, was key.” Also the phrase, “I would never claim to try and be a dramaturge here, but…” (Bonus: “Is This Why Othello Tickets Are So Expensive?”)
The ur-animal-pun-headline is still, “When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray.”