Two Gentlebots of Verona, The Haus of Montague, and The Hex Pistols!
Plus: We could have had a Charles Ludlam "Titus"
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and they will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible, however you may still encounter paywalls. There are options.
If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
Quick Links
There will be a daily newsletter Monday-Friday this week.
Check out the 2026-2027 Shakespeare in American Communities grantees. I was a panelist this year and loved it. Sign up to serve, and learn about the incredible work being done across the country. (check out this Midwest artist survey.)
I'm a lover of Shakespeare, I'm not going to say the government shouldn't fund Shakespeare festivals or Shakespeare programs in schools. The issue is what it stopped funding, which was individual artists, forward-thinking work, revolutionary work, possibly controversial work, artist-run spaces, collectives, all of those things.
Thank you Mya Gosling for the shout out on the Shakespeare Anyone? podcast.
Richard Gadd tells Claire Danes about writing a paper about her at school.
A “gothic feminist retelling” of Macbeth is coming to a screen near you.
Charles Ludlam’s lost Delacorte Titus via Little Theatre Histories.
Production roundup: Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Othello, and McKellen-as-Lear are all coming back, Venus & Adonis, Lady Disdain, Caesar: The Musical, A Man Called Paris, Dungeons and Shakespeare,3 Two Gentlebots of Verona (yes, these are the same folks who brought you Roswell That Ends Well), The Lady Doth Protest, The Hex Pistols! et al., Falstaff at Palm Beach Shakespeare (mashup of the H4s and Merry Wives) an opera mashup of Otello and a women’s convict ship, have Shakes will travel, The Haus of Montague, Eden Espinosa as Beatrice, James Norton as Hamlet (check out his R2 deposition staged where it actually happened).
As a student at Cambridge University in 2006, Norton played Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, staged by Robert Icke.
The folks who got married at Romeo and Juliet. (more + review roundup)
The play’s tragic ending didn’t deter them. “I hope that’s not an omen,” Wasil said.
Sara Holdren’s review is brilliant, particularly on Ming Cho Lee…
I saw him, time and again, distinguish between beauty and function…I once watched Lee stare for a while at a very beautiful model for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: a wrecked ship on a stormy, sandy beach, all shards of timber and gauzy shreds of sails and elegant swoops of rope. Eventually, he said, “Very pretty. But where will Toby and Andrew have their funny scenes?”
…and how other languages work in this version.
It makes sense that contemporary theater-makers are navigating a complex relationship to what the cynical call the “Shakespeare-industrial complex” — these are plays written by an English playwright smack-dab in the midst of colonization, imperialism, and enslavement. They are also works in which language is transcendence. To make English implicitly the language of oppression while staging a Shakespeare play is a decision that will come around to bite you in the ass. You’ve bargained away your greatest tool, the building blocks of nuance, of both beauty and function, and what you’ve gained is a onetime-use statement of values.
Also, Mercutio “gets a big cheer for spray-painting “Abolish ICE” on the wall” but
Perhaps the most jarring part of the evening is Citizens Bank’s very public sponsorship of Shakespeare in the Park. The financial institution has come under heavy criticism for enabling the for-profit prison industry’s ICE detention centers…The contrast between patron and art calls attention to the bank’s garish attempt at whitewashing.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion knocks out “honorificabilitudinitatibus.”
David Sedaris tells Duolingo’s AI his Romeo and Juliet idea. (more)
Plays by Shakespeare—whom Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “the father of the man in America,” despite his being English—were also a staple of the emerging American identity. De Tocqueville remarked “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.”
“I, Richard, Duke of York, promise…that I shall never do…anything which may cause or lead to the shortening of the natural life of King Henry VI.” (more + a frantic Richard III’s postscript to the effect that Buckingham suuucks.4)
What does a skeleton giving a thumbs-up have to do with Macbeth? While we’re on posters, these bleeding strawberries are freaking me out.
More on Stephen King and Shakespeare.
“King is extraordinarily well-read and literary-minded. I found him citing Emerson in a response to a copyeditor, and “Macbeth” in an early draft of “The Shining.” In his novel “The Long Walk”—which he wrote when he was 17—he quotes Andrew Marvell.”
The National Theatre’s casting director on Phyllida Lloyd’s Caesar.
It was just an absolute game changer for me for thinking about how the classic can be presented, and about women in Shakespeare and who is allowed traditionally to play those parts.
Spots are still available for this $5,000 Hamnet trip.
On this pilgrimage, we'll look at the coexistence of grief and joy through the characters and plot of Hamnet, delving into the relationships and the themes of how art can move us forward, what it means to live in tension, and how to be a person who carries the sadness of the human condition alongside the enjoyment of life.
Recommendations
To say I am in service to the play rather than the playwright is not to diminish the playwright’s authority. The play is theirs. But a play is not made only of conscious intention. It is also made of pattern, accident, pressure, contradiction, rhythm, obsession, and the mysterious material the writer may have smuggled in without knowing it.
Waistcoats with tiny medieval people and veggies.
“The Casting Call Was for Zombies. The Job Was Actually a Landlord Rally.”
The brilliant Tanya Dean’s report on Irish theatre criticism via Fergus Morgan.
“…every year on the first Monday after the first Sunday following the 4th of September.”
© 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Like this one.
No. Though now I can’t get Colin-Firth-as-Harry-as-Ariel out of my head so thanks for that.
I’ll add: I’m playing an aroace enby Romeo in Advice to the Players’s Romeo & Juliet!! July 31- August 9. It’s been a delight working with this wonderful team, figuring out what an awkward, not-quite-out-at-the-start Romeo can look like 😁