Brian Cox, Delia Bacon, and Sonic the Hedgehog
Plus: "Seagulls have no respect for Shakespeare"
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Quick Links
Winter’s Tale + Brecht. (more and more)
Susannah Clapp is right when she points out that it’s a problem if you need the programme notes to make sense of a show. via
Production roundup:
Roswell That Ends Well. (“a cowgirl with dreams of a life dance battling in outer space, finally gets her wish thanks to a four armed alien king”)
A 60-castle tour of Much Ado. ("seagulls have no respect for Shakespeare")
“The Neo-Political Cowgirls dance theater collective presents ‘The Weird Sisters.’”
Brian Cox a) would like to play Lear again, b) is proud that “eight people were carried out by St John’s Ambulance on the first matinee” of his 1987 Titus, and c) was a terrible stage manager. (paywall)
“I’d be on the book in the prompt corner, on page 12 when the actors were on page 28. I remember a production of The Merchant of Venice when the actor came on to deliver Antonio’s first speech and went: “Oh, for f*ck’s sake.” I thought: “That’s not Shakespeare.” I’d left the iron curtain up.”
Delia Bacon2 takes the water cure, Or: “I have lately been promoted to the ‘big douche.’”
The philosopher-poet of American Players Theatre:
“We needed stability and maybe a little less idealism, initially, a brief spell of pragmatism,” Frank told Cap Times reporter Kevin Lynch many years later. (In 1995, he used different language for programming the safest Shakespearean hits: “if you have to prostitute yourself — what a way to go!”)
Richard Wilson’s Macbeth-in-Kiev play (via
) has a name and a venue: When the Hurlyburly's Done will play the Public in September.Robert Wilson’s obituary and his fascinatingly bonkers “Sonnets.” (music by Rufus Wainwright)
Even when directing Shakespeare, Mr. Wilson sometimes had his actors distort the rhythms of the dialogue to suggest new meanings. Other times he trimmed the text radically, as in a 1990 production of “King Lear” in Frankfurt.3
A John Conklin remembrance from Mark Lamos.
The first time we met was in a fitting room at the Guthrie Theater in the mid-1970s. I was an actor then. He was designing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” I was playing Guildenstern…The costume gave me buoyancy, vulnerability, piercing intelligence. Everything that Guildenstern required.
Shakespeare in the Park late night roundup: Lupita on Fallon, Peter Dinklage on Seth Meyers,4 and Sandra Oh on Meyers plus Colbert:
Oh: That’s us with a Fourth Folio, it was amazing.
Colbert: They brought it up from the Folger or something like that?
Oh: I don’t know where it was from. From some really rich person’s house.5
“His last major role on stage was as Malvolio in the Globe’s Twelfth Night in 2012.”
Women playwrights lose the limelight.6
“Some theatres pointed to the canon and shrugged helplessly—was it their fault that Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Shakespeare were inconveniently male?”
On Macbeth,7 Winter’s Tale,8 and As You Like It:9
Until experiencing those Shakespeares in quick succession here, I had never deeply absorbed how so many of the canonical plays are set in motion by the same chaotic figure: a man temperamentally unsuited to the wise use of great power.
- .
These classically trained actors lacked opportunities to leverage their skills and deepen their craft, so they saw fit to create ways to do so for themselves.
Recommendations
Alexis Soloski takes a well-deserved break from reviewing theater.
You will want to know what it feels like to be pulled by the strong hands of Jason Momoa from the cyan waters of the Pacific and then to flop, into the belly of a canoe, like some recently netted fish. It feels, I can tell you, wonderful.11
“The Great Turnaround,” when we finally started shelving books spine-out.
On the creator of the Wall of Sound:
He claimed to be able to communicate with inanimate objects, such as sound system gear in this case. People would happen upon him hugging a speaker and crying and talking to it…
Like this one.
Picnicing on her grave in New Haven is a thing one could do, but it wouldn’t be very nice.
Delia Bacon died in her late forties in an insane asylum in Hartford, Connecticut, remembered as a “sex-starved spinster”* who wrote an unreadable doorstop of a book – never mind that she turned out to have anticipated a larger movement questioning Shakespeare’s authorship, nor that her douche of a boyfriend is known for swearing up and down that the ancient Phoenicians took their vacations in upstate New York.
“Mr. Wilson has broken '“Lear'“ into 15 segments plus a prologue based on a poem by William Carlos Williams.” Christoph Waltz was Edgar. Also:
“Taking a sheet of paper, the director drew three lines: straight (Goneril), zigzag (Regan) and curved (Cordelia). ''Your walk is your character,'' he said. '‘I can't explain it, but I can draw it.’”
Here’s the leather-clad-Christopher-Walken-Iago he references, I’m still (still!) looking for the production where Dinklage was bolted to the wall as Chorus.
Investment banker Gary Parr’s house to be specific. He’s being generous with it and you still have time to apply for the Parr Prize for Excellence in Teaching Shakespeare, though the nomination deadline has passed.
“There’s not that many theatres, maybe five hundred across the country, and, by and large, I would say 99.8% of them do not want to be a$$holes…”
“…he stages Banquo’s murder as a gasoline immolation”
"[Mamillius] usually just lingers at the end, unseen and unspoken. Not here. In this production, he arrives accompanied by an angel.” (shades of Suor Angelica)
“The heroine’s bridal dress is an upcycled IKEA bag…”
Relevant to Shakespeare only if you want to burn Joan onstage in a historically-accurate manner. (Not accurate, but awesome: Margaret emerging from Joan’s ashes a la Michael Boyd, dressing her like this.)
“…if your editor texts to ask if you would like to go to Hawaii to write about Jason Momoa, you will say yes. Then you will spend several weeks agonizing over what constitutes a ‘work swimsuit.’”
What a great roundup! if only there was time to read all of these links and articles...