On Stage: Henry IV

Tom Hanks as Falstaff; And Vice Versa

When I mention seeing the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, the first question that comes my way is “How was Tom Hanks as Falstaff?” The query generally carries an attitude mingling hope with suspicion. Movie stars, even the most decorated (as Hanks is with two Oscars and three other nominations), seldom make good Shakespearean actors or good stage actors or, even more seldom, good Shakespearean stage actors. This being Hanks, who seems such a good guy and is unquestionably a pro, you hope he proves the exception. I’ll answer that here right off. Hanks is a good Falstaff, a performance that reminds us he got his professional start with Shakespeare roles at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Nevertheless, I learned many Henry IVs ago that a good or even a great Falstaff does not a good Henry IV make without an equally strong or stronger Prince Hal or Henry IV. As larger than life a character as Falstaff may be, his part does not make up the sum of the rest of the play. For the complete review, click here.

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A Weekend at the Blackfriars Playhouse

On Stage: 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale

Reflecting on Shakespeare
In a House of Mirrors

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton's new play has two titles, 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale. Note that the latter is not a subtitle relegated to parenthesis. This play features two distinct but intertwined tracks, a story about 16 winters and a tale told by a bear. Its most engaging relationship, though, is with another play, William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. This is the second offering in the American Shakespeare Center's ambitious Shakespeare's New Contemporaries initiative to solicit new plays that pair with each of the 38 plays in the traditional Shakespeare canon. 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale sets an exemplary standard while the production offers three paths to satisfaction: Hamilton's clever script and its perceptive themes, the play's carnival house-of-mirrors reflection on The Winter's Tale, and one heckuva cast.For the complete review, click here.

On Stage: The Winter's Tale

Watching the Cat's Cradle Unravel

Antigonus has just exited with the newborn daughter of Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicily in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Leontes believes with zero evidence that his best friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is the baby's father and has imprisoned his wife and intended to outright kill the kid. When court counselor Antigonus intervenes, Leontes orders him to abandon the baby in some wilderness. “Blessing against this cruelty fight on thy side, poor thing, condemn'd to loss!” Antigonus says to the baby. Leontes softens in Ronald Román-Meléndez's interpretation of the role in the American Shakespeare Center's production at the Blackfriars Playhouse. He appears to be reconsidering his edict and, perhaps, all of his actions that have brought him to this point. He glances around the theater's audience, pausing on faces and steeling his resolve as he does so. “No, I'll not rear another's issue,” he says, a conviction he seems to draw from us. We have become complicit in the still unfolding tragedy. This production has three things going for it: The way it converses with its companion new play, 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale, the way Director Kevin Rich uses the Blackfriars playing conditions to get us inside Leontes (and on his side), and one heckuva cast. For the complete review, click here.

On Stage: The Comedy of Errors

A Play to Take Your Breath Away

Topher Embrey is panting as he walks on to the Blackfriars Playhouse stage during intermission. The American Shakespeare Center's tour troupe is performing music during the break in the play as patrons line up at the bar cart on stage, mill about the playhouse, or rock out with these top-tier musicians. Embry is the preshow and intermission emcee. "Whoa!" he gasps, catching his breath. "People ask me, Topher, do you work out? No, I do Comedy of Errors." Like all good comedy, this joke is based on truth. Embry is playing Dromio of Ephesus in this American Shakespeare Center production of William Shakespeare's early comedy, and both he and his counterpart twin, Annabelle Rollison as Dromio of Syracuse, are getting an aerobic workout with this show. In fact, the entire cast engages in the production's frantic physicality, and as fun as the play itself is, and as fresh as Director Desdemona Chiang's take is, what makes this production so hugely entertaining is one heckuva cast. For the complete review, click here.

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Commentary: Time's Passages

My Love's Labor Now My Winter's Tale

My wife grew old this week. It happened in seconds, about the time it takes William Shakespeare to span 16 years in The Winter's Tale. The day it happened, in fact, was a very Winter's Tale kind of day for me. I had been pondering posting something this month about our current condition: where we are relative to Sarah's medical issues, my Shakespeare Canon Project (42 Plays, 42 Theaters, One Year), and the lifestyle consequences of both (i.e., dwindling finances). I left off that narrative back in December with Sarah in a perpetual state of debilitating medical mystery and me in a perpetuating state of overwhelm. Shakespeare's sledgehammering relevance hit me hard this week as I slid from Love's Labour's Lost to The Winter's Tales, literally and figuratively, experiencing an inexorable slide away from the songs of Apollo on the wings of Time and realizing how, with The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare poignantly portrays lifetime. For my commentary, click here.

Love's Labour's Lost

Building a History

When you walk into the Folger Shakespeare Library's theater for this production of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, you might think you are next door. The set resemble's the Folger's famous reading room, a perfect setting for a play about a yearning for learning, a feast of words, noble pursuits of arts and culture, and poetic ponderings on love and beauty. Director Vivienne Benesch also channels another spirit of the Folger experience: a space of play and community accessible to people of all social substrata, and she and her gifted actors adroitly blend the play's elegiac tones, satirical streaks, and slapstick elements into a wholly Folger-like embodiment of fun, passion, beauty, and humanity. For the complete review, click here.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

It's a Mad, Man's Mad World

Trust can be an elusive thing, even if William Shakespeare's name is attached. Such is the case with The Two Noble Kinsmen, which Shakespeare at the end of his career cowrote with John Fletcher. Even the two actors playing the two noble kinsmen headed into the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival production's preview performance unsure if they could trust this verse-heavy, melodramatic mashup of Greek mythology, Chaucer romance, and crazy country bumpkins. Trust the play they did and earned a rewarding audience reaction. Now, on opening night, it is the audience reaping the rewards of a talented cast under the insightful direction of Elizabeth Swain delivering a poignantly funny, unrelentingly current rendering of this rarely staged, much-maligned tragicomedy. However, when performed by skilled practitioners such as the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company, based at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, what emerges from within the play's obtuse language and archaic set pieces is a depiction of human nature at its silliest. The Two Noble Kinsmen further explores the greatest universal truth prevailing through time from the prehistoric world through Medieval society and the Elizabethan enlightenment to #MeToo awareness: guys are such guys. For the complete review, click here.

Hamlet

Deacon Blues

This is an Original Pronunciation production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, but as we're in Baltimore, I'm leading off with race. Baltimore has been enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, taking up arms against its sea of troubles as centuries-long fissures between whites and people of color erupted four years ago with the uprising that followed Freddie Gray's death in police custody. In this community context, the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory through shrewed casting choices has achieved something profound, not merely a black Hamlet nor merely an OP Hamlet but a Baltimore Hamlet, a company of actors displaying cohesive, multiracial artistry and energy while performing a standard of Shakespeare singular to this city. For the complete review, click here.

The Tempest

Insubstantial Pageant? Hardly

Mistress of a "full poor cell." Yeah, right. Prospera's abode on the mysterious island of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is the cluttered remnants of a mid-20th century movie palace in Joe Dowling's production at San Diego's Old Globe. This set designed by Alexander Dodge is the kind of stage scenery a well-endowed theater uses to wow! audiences and sometimes distracts from the art being plied by playwright and performers. In this production, the cast of accomplished actors keeps the focus on Shakespeare's masterful story. The scenery also proves practical for a play that explores family bonds, social bonds, and humankind's bond with nature and presents an allegorical foundation for Dowling's staging of Shakespeare's comedy about political power lost and natural powers gained, of revenge and forgiveness. The latter is made most poignant by the performances of Emmy-winning and Tony-nominated Burton in the lead role and longtime fave René Thornton Jr., appearing in his fifth production of The Tempest, as her brother Antonio. For the complete review, click here.

Arden of Faversham

The Crime, The Comedy, The Burning Passion

Thomas Arden, an entrepreneur and real estate developer in Faversham, England, sits down to breakfast before departing for London. Someone backstage starts plucking on a double bass. It's an ominous soundtrack with a jazz-tinged groove. Either somebody is about to die, or we're about to see some fun. This soundtrack plays seven times in the American Shakespeare Center's production of the circa 1590 play Arden of Faversham at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Yet, only one time is a person offed, and only one person is offed despite the number of times we hear this bass line riff. Arden of Faversham is not a whodunnit but a howdunnit—or, rather, a hownotdunnituntilfinallydunnit. The many missteps made in trying to murder Arden turns this real crime drama into a comic gem burnished to brilliant, multifaceted matter in the hands of the American Shakespeare Center actors capping off one of the company's most artistically satisfying Actors' Renaissance Seasons. For the complete review, click here.

Cymbeline

Shakespeare Establishes the Genre Farce

With each reading of William Shakespeare's late-career romance Cymbeline, I become more convinced he wrote a farce. I've got no Shakespearean scholarship supporting my contention, and most productions I've seen play Cymbeline earnestly, but I simply can't see how Shakespeare took any of this seriously. He was eyeing the end of his writing career. Maybe his intent was to do the complete works of William Shakespeare abridged, which would make Cymbeline the springhead of the genre farce. What Airplane! is to disaster movies, what Naked Gun is to cop shows, what Scary Movie is to scary movies, Cymbeline is to Shakespeare plays. Given the disdain I hear and read about the play, the serious approaches I see, and the fact Cymbeline is positioned among the tragedies in the First Folio, maybe my take on it is only wishful thinking. Well, wish fulfilled. The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory has produced a Cymbeline wrapped in a Monty Pythonesque sense of humor I've long divined in the text, and it works just as I've always thought it would.For they complete review, click here.

Vanity Fair

Blinded By the Dark

I have seen the future of live theater. Unfortunately, I was watching it from the past. We are sitting a half-dozen rows from the Lansburgh Theatre stage watching the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Vanity Fair, Kate Hamill's enticingly agile adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–1848 serialized novel. Hamill's own stamp on the story is Shakespearean in scope and texture, combining with Thackeray's plot and themes to make enlightening, in-the-moment theater. Except that we, the audience, are not in that moment; we are left in the dark. To continue the review, click here.

A Two Woman Hamlet

What's My Clothesline?

I collect things. With William Shakespeare, I don't try to see every production out there, but like any serious collector—and not just the OC-type—I seek out the unusual as well as the significant and the craftwork for which I have a personal fondness. My collection of 25 staged Hamlets, for example, includes a wordless version, a commedia dell'arte version, a First Quarto version, a four-person production, three one-person productions, and a one-woman-but-actually-four-women production. Now I've added to my treasures a two-woman Hamlet called A Two Woman Hamlet at WSC Avant Bard. Some of the minimal-actor Hamlets I've seen are little more than theatrical stunts. Nevertheless, in all these Hamlets, actors bring their own particular insights to a play that's been analyzed and even played every which way over the years but still has the capacity to surprise. Hannah Sweet and Nicola Collett, the two women of this production's title, present their 80-minute Hamlet with a sketch-comedy vibe, but they nonetheless delve into some emotional conundrums in the work and contribute their own interesting perspectives. For the complete review, click here.

Henry IV, Part One

Royalty and Loyalty in the DNA

It starts with a poetry slam. Not William Shakespeare versus Kit Marlowe but Montell Jordan versus Kendrick Lamar. It continues in a post-punk meets hip-hop aesthete, the actors costumed in torn jeans, black leather, and bling, the rebels wearing double-breasted, red-trimmed blue uniform tunics, Hal wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "Hotspur sucketh" (available for sale in the lobby). Is this what happens when you turn a Shakespeare play over to a dozen actors and tell them to stage it by themselves in five days? Yes, it is and thank goodness because, collectively and individually, the members of the Actors' Renaissance Season company at the American Shakespeare Center have given us a most inventive and insightful Henry IV, Part One. To continue this review, click here

The Merry Wives of Windsor

I'm Just Saying

Rick Blunt walks onto the Blackfriars Playhouse stage in Staunton, Virginia. That's all he has to do for cheers to erupt from half the patrons in the filled-to-capacity theater. The other half are newcomers to the American Shakespeare Center's re-creation of William Shakespeare's indoor theater, the only such specimen in the world, so they don't know Rick, the only such specimen in this world. The rest of us, who haven't seen him in more than three years, are glad to have him back. Yet, something has changed about Blunt since he last performed here: he's upped his game as an actor, and what he brings to the roles of Mistress Quickly and the Host of the Garter Inn exemplify the skills of an ensemble that make this Merry Wives of Windsor the creamiest of the crop I've seen. For the complete review, click here.

Anne Page Hates Fun

A Flamingo Takes Flight

The real suspense this evening at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia: Will this play in any way and in every way be measured a success? So much more is riding on that mystery than those posed in the play. Amy E. Witting's Anne Page Hates Fun won the first of 38 playwriting contests in the American Shakespeare Center's ambitious Shakespeare's New Contemporaries initiative to pair each William Shakespeare play with a new piece inspired by that play. Witting triumphed in having her script selected out of that initial batch, but the stakes are exponentially higher tonight: Her play has to win over a paying audience at the Blackfriars and serve as a herald for the potential worth of the entire Shakespeare's New Contemporaries effort. After the play, Amy Wratchford, managing director of the American Shakespeare Center, is looking at me, awaiting my reaction. I flash her a thumbs up. For the complete review, click here.

Richard III

The Tortured Path to Redemption

Uh-oh. I arrive at this judgment just a few lines into the David Muse–helmed production of William Shakespeare's Richard III at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, D.C. A rocky sequence of scenes follow, leaving this Shakesgeek feeling like he is on an intellectual roller coaster of a production trying to find its bearings. Like any well-designed coaster, though, Muse and his cast use unabashed theatricality in tandem with carefully calibrated performances to build a web of emotional intrigue that pays off with dramatic thrills and ends up in an uplifting vision of community. You just have to trust them to do their jobs. For the complete review, click here.