Romeo & MOOliet, Al Pacino, and Victor Hugo's skull poetry
Plus: Shakespeare LPs and a historian reviews "The King"
Romeo and MOOliet
Please enjoy this local news interview with two guys in cow onsies talking about Romeo and MOOliet, performed by their brass theater ensemble. One of them plays the euphonium. Also Romeo. The entire production has been uploaded to Youtube. If you’ve ever wanted to hear the Prokofiev music played with 50% more brass and 100% more cow onesies,1 now’s your chance.
Al Pacino Was the Auditionee from HELL
If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the famous Shakespeare soliloquies. I would bellow out monologues as I rambled through the streets of Manhattan.2 I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, places where no one was around. On those side streets, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to play Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock, or Macbeth.
I grew to love Hamlet’s rogue-and-peasant-slave monologue so much that I started to use it at auditions. I would say to the director, “I know you have your pages that you want me to perform, but I have a little something that I’ve already prepared, if you don’t mind.” Usually they would give me a look that told me they were already finished with me.
Who walks in and does Hamlet instead of their sides? Al Pacino that’s who.
Living Shakespeare LPs
Bless the Internet Archive. I’ve seen singles of the Living Shakespeare LPs at record stores for years but never picked one up. The Internet Archive has digitized excerpts from these 1960s audio adaptations featuring a murderers’ row: Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, ect.
One of my first jobs out of college was as production assistant on a series of Shakespeare audio recordings3. We rehearsed and recorded each play (full text, no cuts allowed) in three days + plus one day for post. Four people cooped up in tight quarters in a dark room listening to Shakespeare for 8+ hours a day. The thin line between us and madness was an endless supply of 32 oz. iced coffees from the nearby deli, Cheez-Its from the studio vending machine, and a meticulously planned and constantly changing schedule in Excel. (“No, you can’t have another go at Hecate, we’re seven minutes over and have to kill the children now.”)
I haven’t found any accounts of the recording conditions for “Living Shakespeare” but I’m curious.
An Actual Historian Reviews The King
Mya Gosling and I watched the film when it came out and had thoughts.
Sarah Bernhardt’s Yorick
Victor Hugo gave this (real human) skull to Sarah Bernhardt4 to use as Yorick. The very creepy poem he inscribed on it and the very attached jawbone (not chapfallen at all) make it an odd choice, but Bernhardt was an odd duck.
Kudos to the V&A for making their online collections so searchable. When I saw that the object type was a) listed as “skull,” and b) a link, it was impossible not to click and start rummaging around.
Which of course, revealed… ANOTHER HUMAN SKULL.
Also used as Yorick but properly chapfallen this time and of considerably more recent vintage: 1980. It is signed – in blue felt pen as the description carefully notes5 – by the cast of Richard Eyre’s Hamlet – Jonathan Pryce as Hamlet, Harriet Walter as Ophelia, ect. – and offered as a raffle prize “presumably by the theater.”
This feels…gross. The ethics and legality of selling human bones is incredibly complicated and I have no idea how the company came by the skull – actor Del Close (maybe) donated his to the Goodman for this exact purpose – but I can’t imagine that anyone would want their head felt-tipped and raffled.
As a palate (ha!) cleanser, some other highlights from V&A Shakespeare collection:
That time a costume designer tried to get Gielgud to play Lear in “flesh-coloured body tights and body bands.”
Quick Links
Marketing to the youths is hard.
Kathryn Hahn played Polonius at school – “It was very hard for me to not wink, especially during the death scene.”
Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) as Mercutio at the Globe (2017)
Shakespeare and Gossip Girl (and Buffy and Gilmore and…)
John Heffernan *won an Obie* for playing *Justice Shallow* when he was *26.* All of those things are crazy, not least that Henry IV Part 2 was an off-Broadway hit.
These photos from Shakespeare on the Common’s Winter’s Tale are beautiful. Every time I see a picture of the character “Time,” I imagine them interrupting Viola’s, “Oh Time, thou must untangle this, not I.”
Recommendations
Mythbuster Adam Savage was a master carpenter at the Eureka Theater during the original run of Angels in America and MISSED IT.
This sketch of scenes from 19th c. German play, The Broken Jug. 1877-ish, Adolf von Menzel via the Getty. The drawings on the left are alternate versions of staging (hand on shoulder vs. hand on mouth).
Theater field trips for read throughs are great, but why are there people trapped in the middle?
Whether or not this Romeo and MOOliet needs more cowbell is tbd.
The camera crews came later. I very much enjoy Al Pacino muttering to himself while wandering around the Cloisters.
Somehow they are still available. Zach Appelman as Antony is a sound to hear.
It also notes that a production photo shows the skull with more teeth and “some were obviously lost during the production.” Some poor carpenter probably found a couple wedged in the floorboards. This is why we have ghostlights, that theater is *absolutely* haunted.