Motorcycle Macbeth, Calpurnia Costumes, and a Hated Hamlet

Plus: Which "Office" actor didn't want to write his college Shakespeare papers?

This newsletter has footnotes.¹ If you click on the email headline or visit shakespearenews.com the footnotes will appear when you hover over them. I use open access and gift links when possible but you may still encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with your friends, romans, countrymen! Send it via insulting French herald, sailor, or your most reliable friar. It’s the best way for new folks to find us, thank you for lending an ear.

p.s. This edition is particularly dense, click “view entire message" to do just that.

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Quick Links

• Robert Lepage’s biker gang Macbeth looks properly bonkers. (more.)

• The hot guy from “Outlander” will play Macbeth at the RSC.²

• When you ask a Marvel artist to design Caesar, you get hand-down the best Calpurnia costume I’ve ever seen.³

• “Suits” and “The Pitt” actors are currently starring in a Hitchcock-and-Lynch-inspired Hamlet in LA. “Fortinbras” is now “Detective Fortinbras” and Charles McNulty hates it. (“an act of vandalism”)

• Casting Director Alert: Maggie Siff wants to play Margaret and Titania.

• Ian McKellen will introduce Trans What You Will’s Twelfth Night.

• An audio Hamlet with an absolutely stacked cast (Anna Deavere Smith as the Player King! Daveed Diggs as The Prologue! John Douglas Thompson as Claudius!⁴) from the man who brought you the Hamlitome and is responsible for making sure no one sets The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden in Muskegon.

• Banishing a galvanic-battery-revived corpse by quoting Shakespeare at it will probably not work.⁵

• According to Ayanna Thompson, B.J. Novak “was always trying to get out of writing his Shakespeare papers.”

• St Louis Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a “moving, motorized room which can roll up or down the stage on tracks, ‘like a remote-control car…’”

• So much summer Shakespeare! (NYC-specific.)

• I’ll take, “Drunk Shakespeare is hiring an Artistic Producer” for $100,000.

• Should you ever walk out of a play? Titus vs. Marat/Sade edition. (via

  Rebekah King
  )

  There’s a time for being needfully cruel in storytelling, but if you don’t get the balance right, you lose people who would otherwise have listened.

• Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men”) has a new play about the Booths.

• Cincinnati Shakespeare’s marketing and development teams combine forces.

• Remembering John Andrews.

• What kind of video games would Shakespeare write?

• Shakespeare at San Quentin.

• A “slightly flaccid” time-traveling Caesar, a D&D Tempest, a Richard II that is “like Veep meets Dr. Strangelove,” the world's first one-person Hamlet AI musical, Robert Wilson’s Hamletmachine in China, a “whimsical, toe-tapping” Lear, and an Iranian Lear with rock music.

• This week’s “We’re Doomed” quote:

  “I could see Denzel Washington live onstage playing Shakespeare,” Smith said of the limited-run “Othello” performance, “or I could see Sean Combs accused of sex trafficking.”

• Shakespeare and the Slovenian School of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in Garrick’s Temple. (Yes, all of those words are correct.)

• Samuel Pepys saw Henry IV last week (in 1661) and thought it “a good play.”

Friends of the ‘Stack

So many folks shared things this week! All together now:

• Lola Williams was a 20th century composer who wrote beautiful settings of Shakespeare. Her son Derek and soprano Sarah Moulton Faux recovered her work including a threnos for Romeo and Juliet based on The Phoenix and the Turtle.

• “Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators” is now available! via Amanda Giguere who is an excellent Shakespeare conference banquet seatmate in addition to scholar/dramaturg/teacher.

• “Has America lost its Kents?” via Jordan Schneider. His

  ChinaTalk
  newsletter & podcast remain brilliant even when they aren’t Shakespeare related.

• New Yorker Shakespeare in the Park cartoons via Edward Morris who makes Shakespeare look good.

• Austin Tichenor kindly pointed out that a Richard III link in last week’s newsletter was a) broken (now fixed) and b) not his.

• Letterboxd shared a list of the 20 best Shakespeare on film adaptations (h/t Benjamin Broadribb.)

Recommendations

• A theatrical kimono.

• God bless the USA. (It’s tradition.)⁶

• Freytag’s pyramid as corporate cliché.

• The fake financial panic of 33 A.D (via

  A History of Mankind
  )

• The noblewoman who ordered a hit on a former lover/current priest. (more)

• “Nick hates to be separated from Emmy, but she ‘doesn’t care if he lives or dies.’”

• Ben Franklin says you should lend books to friends even if they don’t return them.

• There’s an interesting conversation to be had about the National Theatre marketing The Bacchae as “not a classic,” but I’m honestly too distracted by the toe lollipop to have it right now.

1. Like this one.

2. “He has a name!” Yes. Sam Heughan. Have I watched “Outlander”? I have not. Did I spend the lockdown days of the pandemic watching him tear around Scotland in a van/kilt? Very yes. I have been reliably informed that he spends significant portions of the tv show with said kilt/kit off. No, I will be linking to specific scenes (find them yourselves you heathens) but this does open up the intriguing possibility that the “Slings and Arrows” naked Macbeth (“this isn’t theater, this is improvisation!”) could actually happen. (Gender parity! Finally!)

3. Look at this brilliance. “Thankless part” my foot. Not in that!

4. You can watch him play the part (in a different production) on PBS.

5. "Hence! horrible shadow! unreal mockery. Hence!"

6. Stay out of this one, UK. Must we bring up cheese rolling?