May 2011
7 posts
An Extraordinarily Difficult Play to Stage...
I’ve now seen a half-dozen straight stage productions of that play and I can say that, so far, I’m inclined to agree with Geoffrey Tennant’s assessment. Macbeth is, indeed, extraordinarily difficult to stage effectively. When the staging isn’t terribly effective - a problem with a production I saw in 1995 with two excellent Canadian actors in the leads - the play is limp...
"So long as you use this formula, you can put your...
I’m working now on a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (not doing it for anybody at present, just doing it - though I hope, of course, to take it somewhere) and have been thinking a lot about setting in film versus stage adaptations of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare onstage is frequently done not in period but in some non-period setting. This is sufficiently common that, in...
The Invention of Love, and the Love of Invention
Talent is a funny thing, maturing according to the muse’s timetable and not that of the artist. Some, like, say, Orson Welles, reach extraordinary heights with their earliest efforts, only to see so many of their subsequent projects fall short - due to overambition? an uncompromising ego? or the sheer smallness of the ordinary mortals with whom they find themselves surrounded? Others,...
Liar Liar Pants On Fire
Almost caught up on theatre reviews - there are two productions of Macbeth that I’ve been saving until I see Sleep No More, at which point I can review them all together. Other than those, the only thing I’ve left out is CSC’s recent production of Double Falsehood.
Double Falsehood purports to be a version of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio. All I can say is if...
A Far Cry From Kensington Gardens
I was downright fulsome in my praise of the recent production of Treasure Island in Fort Greene, so it might surprise you to learn that I was downright disappointed in the very theatrically inventive and engaging Peter and the Starcatcher, the final performance of which I caught at New York Theatre Workshop last weekend.
It surprised me. The production was really outstanding; the cast uniformly...
Elder Eldad the Rain King
A man goes on a mission. He is sent deep into the jungle, to confront a world of cruelty and insanity almost beyond his comprehension, and certainly beyond anything he was trained to deal with. Faced with impossible odds, he goes off-script, begins to improvise in ways that alarm his superiors. They tell him his methods are unsound, withdraw his commission, order him to return home, but he refuses...
Dying is Easy. Comedy is Hard
A commenter asks “What do you see as the distinction between tragedy and comedy in classical theater?” I started to answer in a comment, but it got too long, so I’m promoting my answer to a post.
First of all, I have to question the notion that Shakespeare is classical theatre. Shakespeare obeyed none of the classical unities from Aristotle - there is never unity of action...
