New News
Seth Meyers pivots perfectly from prosthetic penises to Richard II.
Why do we think Romans sound British and is it Shakespeare’s fault? (No.)
These posters for the National Theater of Korea’s Macbeth are excellent.
An employment tribunal ruled that the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival has to pay their actors.
Getting cast as Celia and Oliver in As You Like It is a solid matchmaking strategy.
This is wild because Celia and Oliver famously have the most non-existent courtship in Shakespeare. While Orlando is running around defacing acres of National Forest for his love, Oliver swans up, sees Celia once, and immediately gives up his fortune to live in the woods as a shepherd. He doesn’t even know Celia’s real name, or that she is secretly the daughter of a Duke so his grand gesture is moot. What this means in production is that every (Celiver? Olia?) infuse the three short minutes they have onstage together with *as much sexual tension as humanly possible.* Half their scene is Google Maps directions and the other half is a monologue about why you shouldn’t fall asleep in the forest so this is reliably delightful.
Casting News
The full cast for Broadway’s starry Sam-Gold-directed Romeo + Juliet1 was announced with a press release and hipster music video.
For a production that presumably has the budget to hire all the actors they want, there is an extreme doubling of major roles – Mercutio/Friar, Nurse/Tybalt, Capulet/Lady Capulet – and no doubling of minor roles – Balthazar, Abraham, Gregory, ect. I’ve never seen a Romeo cast list that looked like this and opinions are, like Verona, divided. (A friend immediately texted, “WHO THE FUCK DECIDED DOUBLING NURSE AND TYBALT WAS A GOOD IDEA?”)
Those characters have incredibly different energies – manic pixie dream boy vs. serene fatherly priest, cheeky mother-figure vs. violent macho maniac, ect. I have no idea how the Cap/Lady Cap double will work since they frequently appear onstage together. But Gabby Beans was fabulous in Skin of Our Teeth and I look forward to her Mercutio.
Times News
A solid week for Shakespeare in The New York Times:
A love letter to American Players Theater in Wisconsin and “the Packers fans of theater.”
A review of the season at the largest repertory season in North America including a Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night with a female Malvolio (an increasingly common choice, yellow spinning bra optional)
Old News
Jonathan Pryce as Petruchio can get it (1978).
This is a revelation for millenials who first encountered the actor in a curly wig in Pirates of the Caribbean. Pryce is also a phenomenal musical actor – his Engineer in Miss Saigon is Emcee-meets-Angelo levels of creepy brilliance, though his casting was problematic on about eighteen different levels. In other Shakespeare news, he played Shylock opposite his daughter as Jessica.
On Christmas day in 1929, a woman repeated the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth until she passed out.
“Aged thespianess” Anet Barrie was trying to win a thousand dollar prize for endurance speaking at the “Noun and Verb Rodeo” held at the Armory on 34th and Park. Other contestants included, “Sirfessor F. W. Wilkesbarr, Lord of Interpretations, Master of Mentoidology, the Demigod of the Demi-Damned,” and a “French blonde [with] a Bronx accent.”
Language News
“Quern” (as in “skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern”) is an very old word.
Bonus Recommendations
LA has a Waiting for Godot escape room and Prince’s signature color was inspired by Harold and the Purple Crayon.
Irving Finkel is a curator at the British Museum and the Internet’s benevolent Assyriologist Gandalf. His subject is incredibly niche (there is a specialty-suppressing deficit of cuneiform readers in the world2) but he communicates with panache, humor, and giggle-inducing profanity. I barely made it through Gilgamesh but will happily watch everything this man does.
They are the special people. In 1872 when scholar George Smith discovered a particularly interesting tablet “he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself !” The linked article glosses this as a “frenzy of excitement.”
The ghost scene is what I most remember, how it was extended by the physical movements, etc. I was thinking about how he had to continue after all that energy expended so early in the play. I still get chills thinking about it and watching the YouTube.
Several years after Shrew, Johnathan gave a thrilling performance of Hamlet, especially the scenes with the ghost! That's how I "met" him. I saw his performance in London at the Royal Court. I will never forget it.