Cricket Bats, Ticket Stats, and Bureaucrats
Plus: Touring classical theater is essential to democracy (Bart Sher says so)
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you click on the headline they will appear when you hover over them. I use open access and gift links when possible but you may encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive.
Quick Links
Yes, thank you, more people should see Jeff Goldblum as Malvolio.
Arin Arbus will be the next Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience.
Bart Sher on touring classical theater with The Acting Company:
“…to see these shows go to these small communities – whether it's August Wilson or whether it's Shakespeare – is it unquestionably a revolutionary act. It is essential to democracy.”
The National Theatre’s first season led by Indhu Rubasingham includes a Hamlet.
Making cricket bats from the Wood that inspired As You Like It.2
“Ever been watching a Shakespeare play and thought 'this would be 100% better if it was an all female cast, played out in a fierce cabaret style, complete with poledancing?’”3
Olivier’s depiction of the French knights in Henry V continues to pain curators 80 years later.
Chicago Shakespeare is looking for a “VIVACIOUS” Gertrude and an “IMMMORAL” (sp) Claudius. Also a “POLONOUS.” for their Short Shakespeare! Hamlet.4
Re: Hamlet Hail to the Thief: “One of the cast said it’s like being thrown down a staircase.”5
…visual references include the angular portraits of Egon Schiele, Joseph Beuys’s felt-blanket-and-live-coyote performance piece I Love America and America Loves Me6, and Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings of business people jerking their bodies in interior agony.7
In the Public’s Twelfth Night starring Lupita Nyong’o and her brother, Junior, “the play’s twins immigrate from Kenya to the mythical land of Illyria.”
Honoring Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster with Orange Scramblers and anchovies on toast.
If you ask nicely, you too can be left to roam the room where Twelfth Night premiered.
Ticket stats: Othello recouped but wasn’t nominated for a Tony.
Stop demonizing bureaucrats and using Shakespeare as an excuse to cut the NEA.
Historically, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Beethoven were supported by private patrons, religious institutions, and ticket-paying audiences—not government grants.
The Broadway theater designed specifically for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.9
Quotes of the Week
Judge cites Shakespeare as she rules Trump’s attack on liberal law firms is illegal.
No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers…” When Shakespeare’s character, a rebel leader intent on becoming king, see id. l. 74, hears this suggestion, he promptly incorporates this tactic as part of his plan to assume power…Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power.
When Kevin Kline’s Hamlet Turned Into a Bengay Ad:11
[Richard Frank, who played Horatio] was such a great actor but also a very sort of no nonsense actor. He said, “When Hamlet dies, I always want to be able to cry when he's dying – he’s my best friend – but I'm not going to be able to cry eight times a week.” So he arranged with the actor playing Osric to have just a little bit of Bengay on his fingers so that he could grab it and discreetly dab it on his eyes so that he would be able to cry at the right moment. Except there was one performance where he must have gotten a handful…Every single one of us who were dead already – the queen, the king, me – were weeping…the audience was crying, everyone was crying. It was a big ad for Bengay.
Don’t do this.
I attended the Shakespeare Association of America conference when I was a little under two months away from giving birth. I felt great, ready to present..After an invigorating seminar, I led my mother to the reception. Nursing a seltzer, I looked around the room, grateful for her company. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted two mentors from my master’s program chatting in front of the bar. I made my way over to say hello. The male professor swiftly averted his eyes from my bulging belly and said, I swear, “I am so disappointed in you.”
Recommendations
“Lady, we give these guys axes…We aren’t worried about hardcovers.”
“Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine?”
“‘Venom’ is The Odd Couple with Hardy playing Felix, Oscar, and the apartment”
“…she occasionally evokes Emily in ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ murmuring the reminder, “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.”12
Like this one.
No, not the Forest of Arden. That would be too simple! This is the Soulton Wood which was one of the inspirations for one of the *sources* of As You Like It, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde.
No.
C’mon, guys. We can’t all write Lin-Manuel-level character descriptions but spellcheck has got to be the bare minimum. (“But it is a TYA audition! The kids won’t care!” Nope. Treat young audiences – and the actors who work with them – with the same respect you treat their parents who buy the tickets. Just because they are young doesn’t mean they are stupid. “Use them after your own honor and dignity,” as someone once said.)
“Longo began to use his friends [emphasis mine] as models…He would bring them up on the roof of his New York City loft, rig up ropes to them, throw rubber balls, rocks, and other objects at them to make them jerk, fling or fall – and then take their picture.”
Anyone who can play both Miss Trunchbull and Jonathan Strange has my vote.
“I was fighting off Kevin Klein with two swords and then he killed me and it was great.” David Hyde Pierce also played Don John in Much Ado in the park.
The job:
I hate myself for even skimming that terrible think piece. Could we not argue that Shakespeare's company did in fact receive a form of government grant through royal patronage????