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One year ago: Snug raps, play scrapped, and a new Shakespeare manuscript turns up in Georgia (maybe).
Featured links: “Recycled glass Ophelia measures temperature, transparency.”
Quick Links
Cordelia goes to work at a snail restaurant, creating opportunities for humor at the expense of its French chef and his cuisine…Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester from “Lear,” a loyalist to the king, becomes Raymundo’s brother and chef Gilberto, with two sons, Edmundo and Edgardo, competing to succeed him. Among the melodramatic Edmundo’s schemes is to turn the restaurants vegan, starting with a nut cheese substitute for queso.
How to be Remembered: Give Actors Free Food and Booze. (more.) Robert Baddeley, an 18th c. actor known for his Bottom, Trinculo, and Second Witch (huh?)2 started a 230-year-old Twelfth Night tradition at Theatre Royal Drury Lane:3
…in his will…he stipulated that one hundred pounds be invested to enable ‘the purchase of a twelfth cake or Cakes and Wine or Punch or both of them…’ so that his fellow actors at Drury Lane ‘will do me the favour to accept on twelfth night on every year in the Green Room…’
Chadwick Boseman’s play Deep Azure is “influenced by the poetry of Shakespeare.”
This lovely moment with Judi Dench will be a full documentary.
When Strictly and Shakespeare conflict.4 (paywall)
Is a state visit to the UK a state visit to the UK without mentioning Shakespeare?
"A fifth of all of humanity speaks, writes, thinks and prays in the language born on these isles and perfected in the pages of Shakespeare and Dickens, Tolkien and Lewis, Orwell and Kipling—incredible people, unbelievable people like we have rarely seen before and probably won't see again."
Nimrod, a “a five-act brute-farce in verse.” via Ben Broadribb.
When The Hurlyburly’s Done at the Public. (more.)
“I wanted to write a play about young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war to be performed by young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war.”5
An RSC Lear goes to the Isles of Scilly.
In this reimagining, the tragic ending is softened when the king’s Fool tells the audience to challenge leaders if they do not approve of what they are doing. Asked to shout out what they could do to make things better, Hattie, 11, called: “Work as a team.” Later she said she had liked the play, though found the blinding of Gloucester scary.
Of the RSC’s 835 employees, 420 are eligible to apply for voluntary redundancy. A spokesperson confirmed a compulsory scheme would begin if insufficient people took up the voluntary offer.
“Richard Burbage: the Elizabethan De Niro to Shakespeare’s Scorsese.”
Fighting knife crime with Romeo and Juliet. (paywall)
The programme will explore a scenario based on the scene in Shakespeare’s play where Tybalt and Mercutio are killed in a fight with knives…Participants will also experience a scenario in which Romeo is put on trial for his actions, as well as exploring a mocked-up crime scene.
Shakespeare at the Hollywood Bowl (1934).
The play’s fairies crossed a suspension bridge that was erected to make it appear as though they were frolicking in from the Hollywood Hills. A hillside twinkling with fireflies required 30,000 electric lights and a special transformer to carry the additional load of electricity…a ballet corps of fairies were commended by the New York Times for their exquisite grace.6
Satire in Troilus and Cressida + design.
We may see a faded ‘I heart Helen’ t-shirt in the Greek camp. Whilst Troy is going to be this shiny Vegas-esque world, we’re also interested in the bleakness surrounding it, which allows us to come back into the world that we’re creating for the Greek camp.
If you are looking for a new “+” platform to subscribe to, the Stratford Festival just launched StratFest+.
John Christopher Jones was a remarkable actor, a founding member of Shakespeare & Company, and a deeply kind man who used to come to Shakespeare Society events. He mentioned that he’d played Prince Hal at the Folger in 1974 but didn’t have any pictures. I dug up some un-digitized ones for him and he was generous with his memories. Watch his documentary about playing Beckett with Parkinson’s.
Recommendations
- on Mary Lincoln:
What she could control was her name. To strip that from her is not pedantry; it is cruelty disguised as scholarship.
Like this one.
He also died in his dressing room. Hopefully not a tradition.
Branagh on Kingston: “Alex Kingston is an actress who I saw not long after she graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was a sensationally beautiful and sexy actress and remains both those things.”
The best book about performing a Shakespeare play about a civil war in the middle of a civil war remains Alexander Nemerov’s Acting in the Night.
Adding ballerinas to Shakespeare didn’t always go great.
Opera and Shakespeare have substantially similar highbrow/lowbrow problems.
Includes a brief detour into Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas and therefore Twelfth Night and Midsummer: “The Tale of Sir Thopas may also have provided Shakespeare with a model for the virtuosically bad poetry of the mechanicals’ playlet.”