H.P. Lovecraft, Golf Carts, and Leeks

Plus: "All I can tell you is get a light Ophelia."

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Quick Links

• Marlowe: The Musical² via Little Theatre Histories (previous)

  if you have 38 minutes of your life that you don’t need back, you can watch a clip here.

• Production roundup: Pericles in space (photos +props) A “queer Brummie” Midsummer, an off-grid Midsummer at the Globe, “Shakespeare’s Apocrypha Now”, a commedia Much Ado, Hamlet at The Acting Company, “the best case for ‘The Comedy of Errors’ you are ever likely to see”, Lady Macbeth: the ballet, R&J: a new ballet, “The manosphere may get satire-maxxed”, and Tempest on The Golden Hinde via Rebekah King.

• Check out this beautiful list of Shakespeare-ish plays.

• At home with Gielgud via James Grissom

  With a laugh, he recalls his famous response to Michael Hordern when Mr. Hordern asked him for advice on how to play Lear: "All I can tell you is get a light Ophelia." Oops! He quickly corrects himself: "Cordelia!"

• Zendaya watched All’s Well That Ends Well multiple times? (not new news, but sometimes it’s Winter’s Tale)

• Job alerts: Shakespeare in the Park needs golf cart drivers,³ + someone needs a PA.

• A Mark Strong-Rob Icke Macbeth may be in the works.

  …Strong teases a near-future collaboration with Icke on one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, “Macbeth,” revealing that the director has “got some very strong ideas” about how to uniquely remount the oft-revived show. Also on his wish list are more Shakespearean roles — including Richard III, King Lear, and Iago…

• Don Cheadle does Cassius on Colbert.

• I’m not sure where this music goes in Hamlet but it goes. (more)

• Killing Irish rats with Shakespeare’s verse.

• Kings Like Horses.

  He asked what could be worked out for the entertainment at a big development event at the Prince of Wales’s (now King Charles’s) home at Highgrove. I said what about a reading of Venus and Adonis? In the middle there’s a fantastic verse where Shakespeare’s in a lather of excitement of how beautiful this horse is, so I thought that would go quite down well with this audience.

• Mystery solved! The Shakespeare scholar tortured by Michael Keaton on the set of Much Ado was very likely Russell Jackson, reliable sources say. Now if someone can find the production where Peter Dinklage was bolted to a wall…

• Stealing Shakespeare’s skull. (Maybe.)

• Even without twins, this is always the goal. via Leah Libresco Sargeant

  Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE F*CK”

• Staging Shakespeare at the altar. (previous)

• Are Shakespeare’s Commas Really That Important?

  Regarding the second, in the line “it had a dying fall,” Ádám is mitigating the fact that Hungarian doesn’t have any equivalent to an “it has” in a case like this, so he plugs the gap by here giving the fall a second adjective. It is not merely dying, but szép—beautiful. It’s beautiful comma dying.

• Shakespeare at the UN. (Titus in French is GREAT)

• “A voiceless Richard III would be a clown.” -H.P. Lovecraft

• Wendell Pierce on names.

  I mean you just take Othello. In the middle of his name is the word, “hell.” Othello is in the midst of hell because he doesn’t trust his lovely Desdemona. And in the middle of her name is “demon.”

• Rebecca Heminges + The King’s Women via Edel Semple.

• “I dunno, maybe Midsummer *is* the best.” (+on -er vs. -re via Benjamin Dreyer)

  I saw an outdoor production in Oak Park, Ill., decades ago, utterly conventional/traditional, from the Elizabethan costumes to the piped-in Mendelssohn, and it's one of my greatest theatrical experiences.

• “I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but –”

• Why do we need new editions of Shakespeare’s plays? (more Titus here and here)

• A hell of a leek smack. (background)

• You’re the Topps.

Recommendations

• Jellyfish helmets.

• Mail-order magic.

• Queens playing Queens.

• Paul Child’s judo notes. (archive)

• Brecht’s Red X⁴ via Jessa Crispin

• I’ve seen better bears in Winter’s.

• “Pan of Beans Plays ‘Ave Maria’”⁵

• Wrap me in ships and sell me time.

1. Like this one.

2. A survivor is now in Cats.

3. No / they’re everywhere.

4. Say it five times fast.

5. With bonus As You Like It:

There may be sermons in stones and books in the running brooks, but it was left for a Santa Barbara woman to reveal today that there is a Schubert melody in a pan of boiling vegetables.