Shakespeare, William

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Two Shakespearean Triumphs in Paris, or a Plague on Both Their Houses?

      by

      New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works. The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.Two Paris playhouses, both alike in dignity, putting on rival new Shakespeare productions.Thus expectations were high for a springtime face-off — with contemporary stagings of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” — between the Comédie-Française, France’s top permanent company, and the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the Left Bank’s most venerable theater.The results certainly felt French. The country has long been a haven for concept-driven theater-makers, and the two directors involved, Silvia Costa and Christiane Jatahy, have no qualms about cutting and splicing the Bard’s plays in experimental, sometimes cryptic ways.At the Comédie-Française, Costa’s “Macbeth” edits the two dozen named characters down to only eight actors and leans heavily into religious symbolism. In “Hamlet,” Jatahy goes so far as to keep Ophelia alive. Far from going mad, Ophelia climbs down from the stage and exits through the auditorium after declaring: “I died all these years. This year, I won’t die.”Jatahy, a Brazilian director who has a significant following in France, has performed this sort of bait-and-switch with classics before. Her adaptations of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (“What If They Went to Moscow?”) and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (“Julia”) reworked the plays’ story lines and characters from a feminist perspective, lending greater weight to female roles.At the Odéon, Jatahy also cast a woman, the outstanding Clotilde Hesme, as Hamlet, explaining in a playbill interview that her goal was to refocus the story on three female characters: Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. And while a female Hamlet is hardly news — the French star Sarah Bernhardt performed the role back in 1886 — Jatahy’s premise looks promising for the first few scenes.Slouching on a couch, Hesme cuts a grave figure as she rewinds a video: the message Hamlet receives from her murdered father, here projected on a large scrim. After the ghost blames his brother, Polonius, the scene transitions seamlessly into a wedding — that of Polonius and the widowed Gertrude, who seals her new life with a karaoke rendition of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Michael Culver, ‘Star Wars’ Actor and Victim of Darth Vader, Dies at 85

      by

      Mr. Culver, who was best known for his demise as Captain Needa in “The Empire Strikes Back,” was also a familiar actor on British TV and in theater.Michael Culver, the British actor best known for one of the memorable death scenes in the Star Wars franchise, died on February 27. He was 85.Mr. Culver’s death was confirmed by Alliance Agents, which posted a statement to social media on Tuesday, and his agent, Thomas Bowington. The agency did not give a cause of death, though Mr. Bowington said Mr. Culver had had cancer for several years.He had a long acting career onscreen and stage that spanned over 50 years and included roles in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” on TV and the 1984 film “A Passage to India.”But his most lasting impact on popular culture came in 1980, with his brief role as Captain Needa in the second “Star Wars” film, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Needa, after losing track of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, apologizes to Darth Vader, who promptly chokes him to death telepathically.“Apology accepted, Captain Needa,” Vader says, walking around the captain’s body and motioning for others to take him away.Mr. Culver also appeared in two “James Bond” films with the actor Sean Connery, “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball.”Michael John Edward Culver was born on June 16, 1938, in London to Daphne Rye, a theater casting director, and Ronald Culver, an actor, according to Mr. Bowington.Mr. Culver performed in several Shakespeare plays and worked regularly with the British director Anthony Page, his agent said.Mr. Culver is survived by his second wife, Amanda Ward Culver, and his children, Roderic, Sue and Justin Culver.His son, Roderic Culver, also became an actor, Mr. Bowington said.Later in his life, Mr. Culver mostly gave up acting to focus on politics and would have likely pursued a political career had he not been an actor, Mr. Bowington said.He still regularly visited Star Wars fan events, notably one in Chicago in 2019, when “he was lost for words” when he saw nearly 200 people waiting in line to see him, his agency said in its statement.In a 2023 interview on the “Making Tracks” podcast, he recalled that he “knew nothing about” the movie before auditioning, and marveled that its extraordinary appeal meant he was still asked about it well into his 80s.“When I did ‘Star Wars,’ it just seemed to be, ‘Oh, they’re doing a movie about starships.’ So I did it. I just thought, ‘Well, I hope it’s successful,’” he said, adding: “You don’t expect 40 years later to be still signing autographs for it.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Fiasco Theater’s ‘Pericles,’ the Cruise of a Lifetime

      by

      If Fiasco Theater has mixed results in its production of this Shakespearean tragicomedy, it celebrates actors supporting and delighting in one another’s work.“Pericles” is a bit of a mess. Spanning decades and traversing the ancient Mediterranean like some deeply misbegotten Carnival Cruise, this Shakespeare play mingles comedy, tragedy and Christian allegory. There are two assassination plots, two shipwrecks, a brothel, a riddle, a tournament and some very convenient pirates. Deliberately anachronistic, it was described by Ben Jonson, a rival playwright, as a “mouldy tale” and “stale.”So, who better to face down this confusion than a company called Fiasco? A devised theater ensemble founded by half a dozen Brown MFA graduates, Fiasco has a soft spot for Shakespeare’s less loved works. The company broke out in 2011 with a production of “Cymbeline” and later staged “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” (Fiasco’s 2017 production of a crowd-pleaser like “Twelfth Night”? An outlier.)Rather than relying on the published text of “Pericles,” Fiasco has set much of the poetry to music — sometimes supplying original words — and interpolated passages from a prose version by George Wilkins, a pamphleteer and publican. (Wilkins is often cited as the play’s co-author, mostly because scholars disbelieve that Shakespeare could have written anything as patchy as the first two acts.)Ben Steinfeld, a company member and the director, stages this revised text at Classic Stage Company using Fiasco’s poor-theater playbook — a mostly bare stage furnished with charisma, invention, spirit and song. “A miracle may come your way,” an early number promises.Through the hectic first half, this approach falters. Pericles (Paco Tolson at first, then Tatiana Wechsler, Noah Brody and finally Devin E. Haqq) goes to so many places in such a short time that characters and climes blur, especially without the help of scenery to differentiate each country. As Steinfeld’s narrator admits, “Now this is just an empty space/It’s hard to give a sense of place.” (No set designer is credited, though Ashley Rose Horton designed the vaguely Grecian costumes and Mextly Couzin the golden lighting.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant: Two Very Different ‘Macbeths’

      by

      Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant take Shakespeare’s psychodrama along divergent paths in two simultaneously running shows.There is more than one way to tell a story. In England, two equally impressive new productions of “Macbeth” prove this, both featuring major stars in the title role and adopting strikingly different approaches to Shakespeare’s classic tale of hubris and betrayal.The first, starring Ralph Fiennes (“The Menu,” “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), runs at the Depot, a cavernous converted warehouse on an industrial estate in Liverpool. Despite its grittily authentic set design and costumes, it is for the most part a conventional, realist treatment. The second, at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, and starring David Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Des”), is a rather more high-concept affair, heavy on ambience and atmospherics.The leading men are, likewise, a study in contrasts: Fiennes’s Macbeth is a hulking, lugubrious presence, whereas Tennant’s is a gaunt, energetic bundle of angst.The Fiennes “Macbeth,” directed by Simon Godwin, runs through Dec. 20 at the Depot in Liverpool, before moving on to Edinburgh, London and Washington, D.C., in 2024. The makeshift playhouse features an immersive set: To get to their seats, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape of rubble and burned-out cars, suggestive of a war zone. The stage set is an elegant geometric structure in forbidding gray, comprising a number of doors, balconies and stairways, representing the various Scottish castles in which much of the action unfolds. Thin, vertical streaks of blood gradually materialize on its walls as the story progresses.The plot will be familiar to many. Three clairvoyant witches tell Macbeth he will become King of Scotland. With further encouragement from Lady Macbeth (Indira Varma), he proceeds to murder the reigning monarch, Duncan (Keith Fleming), forcing his heirs into exile and taking the crown for himself. He has to carry out several more murders in order to cover his trail, and the guilt starts to consume him; Lady Macbeth urges him to man up, but her own conscience catches up with her in the form of somnambulistic terrors and, eventually, suicide.To get to their seats in Liverpool, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape suggestive of war’s aftermath.Matt HumphreyIn this production, Macbeth and his male co-protagonists appear in 21st-century military fatigues; when we see them, intermittently, in civilian attire, it’s understatedly stylish contemporary get-up. (The costumes are by Frankie Bradshaw.) That stark juxtaposition drives home the brutal reality of strongman politics: The ruling class and the military elite are one. There are some deft visual effects — the disappearance of the three witches in puffs of smoke is particularly pleasing — and the acting is consistently strong. Ben Turner is a powerful Macduff, and Varma brings a subtle, darkly comic energy to Lady Macbeth during the famous scene in which Macbeth, confronted with the reproachful ghost of the murdered Banquo, has a meltdown in the middle of a dinner party.A markedly different aesthetic was on offer in the compact, intimate environs of the Donmar, where theatergoers were required to put on headphones upon entry. In this “Macbeth” — directed by Max Webster, featuring Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth and running through Feb. 10, 2024 — the actors wear discreet headsets and their speech is transmitted to the audience digitally.Another “Macbeth,” at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, through Feb. 10, 2024, features David Tennant in the title role, with set and costume design by Rosanna Vize.Marc BrennerI was predisposed to dismiss this as a gimmick, but was pleasantly surprised. The transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy — the deep aural texture of a radio play. The conceit comes into its own in the scenes featuring supernatural elements (the witches, Banquo’s ghost) and during Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, when eerie vocal echoes are overlaid on the dialogue. At times, the sound alternates abruptly between the left and right earphones.The set and costume design, by Rosanna Vize, are strikingly abstract. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, who wears a white formfitting dress, the cast are clad in an austere uniform of gray or black tops — turtlenecks, vests or collarless jackets — with dark kilts and black Chelsea boots. The stage is a simple white rectangle, at the rear of which, in a boxed-off section behind a transparent screen, a small troupe of musicians provide the play’s soundtrack: a gorgeous blend of Gaelic song and religious chant, composed by Alasdair Macrae and featuring beautifully haunting vocals by the Scottish singer Kathleen MacInnes.Fiennes and Tennant are both outstanding talents, but very different in corporeal stature and bearing. Just a few months ago, Fiennes’s brother, Joseph, delivered a compelling turn as an England soccer coach in “Dear England,” at the National Theater, in London, and there were echoes of that performance here: a certain tentative, beard-stroking pensiveness and lumbering indecision. Ralph’s frame as Macbeth is bearlike, and his turmoil is a slow burn. (I was also reminded of the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ill-fated uprising against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and subsequent demise, had shades of Shakespearean tragedy.)Tennant, left, and Cush Jumbo, who plays Lady Macbeth.Marc BrennerIn contrast, Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go. An unlikelier warrior, perhaps, but a more convincing worrier.The truth, of course, is that “Macbeth” doesn’t really require too much jazzing up, because its themes resonate easily enough without embellishment. One is always struck, in particular, by the prescience of the play’s pointed depiction of machismo, long before “toxic masculinity” became a buzz-phrase. Almost every misdeed is incited with an appeal to virility, whether it’s Lady Macbeth goading her husband into going through with their murderous plan (“You will be so much more the man!”), or Macbeth using similar rhetoric to persuade his hit men to kill Banquo.A light touch is key. What these two productions get right is that they conjure just enough novelty, in their visual and aural landscapes, to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Short, Shallow ‘King Lear’

      by

      The veteran actor directs and plays the title role in a brisk and curiously weightless London production.“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,” Lear famously lets rip in an open-air encounter with the elements that should strike at the heart.But in a new West End revival of “King Lear,” directed by its leading man, Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare’s most nerve-shredding tragedy doesn’t sweep us headlong into savagery or sadness. It sounds good, as you might expect with a seasoned Shakespearean actor at the helm, but too rarely succeeds in stopping the heart.The notably brisk production, which opened Tuesday night at Wyndham’s Theater, in London, runs straight through at just under two hours. It is a tough ticket to get during its limited run through Dec. 9, with a New York run at the Shed scheduled for next fall. Time may well deepen the production’s sense of pathos, if the company can connect more with the roiling fury of Shakespeare’s text. As it stands, a central urgency is missing, from the leading man on through the rest of the cast.The production feels like an accomplished rhetorical exercise that doesn’t run deep, when this, of all plays, needs to rattle the soul. The litmus test of any “Lear” is whether you emerge from the theater moist-eyed, and my cheeks were dry throughout.The set, designed by Jon Bausor, evokes the jagged and austere English countryside.Johan PerssonReturning to his theatrical roots, Branagh speaks the verse with crispness and clarity, articulating the journey of the mentally wayward ruler who wreaks havoc by setting his three daughters in competition with one another.Branagh offers a growing awareness of Lear’s verbal command faltering, and a silent scream late in the show will surely resonate with anyone who has seen dementia up close. Yet a more visceral sense of the play’s power remains out of reach.You have to wonder about the demands of juggling a role such as Lear from the dual perspectives of director and star. On film, of course, you can look at footage along the way, but it must be tricky for Branagh to get a sense of the production when he is at its center. How can he tell what’s landing, or isn’t?Onstage, the visuals are suitably austere. Jon Bausor’s set evokes Stonehenge, or the English coastline, with jagged outcrops of rock underneath a circular disc, and the costumes, with fur boots and collars, give off a “Game of Thrones” vibe.The acting ensemble, made up of graduates from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Branagh’s alma mater), many in their West End debuts, transmits a feral, take-no-prisoners energy appropriate to a play that famously includes an eye-gouging scene. That atrocity leaves nothing to the imagination, and as its victim, the stricken Gloucester, Joseph Kloska stands out among a variable supporting cast.Edmund, played by Corey Mylchreest, battling with Doug Colling as Edgar.Johan PerssonWonderful though it is to give newcomers a chance, the overall impression is of a company that has yet to jell. Corey Mylchreest is impressive as Edmund, the schemer at odds with the virtuous Edgar (Doug Colling), whose baleful pronouncements close the play. Deborah Alli’s imposing Goneril has an instantly striking stage presence missing from her sisters, though Jessica Revell is better when she shifts from playing the tongue-tied Cordelia to the witty, if woebegone, Fool.At 62, Branagh is relatively young to be playing a character who speaks of an “unburdened crawl toward death.” Appearing bare-chested at one point, he looks more likely to be riding a mountain bike toward the grave, and when he comes in carrying the dead Cordelia, it looks as if she were no burden at all.And for the first time ever, I had to wonder whether brevity in Shakespeare — an attractive idea, in principle — wasn’t working against the play. The full majesty of “King Lear” needs time to unfold, and I’ve often seen productions twice as long that flew by. This one was over when many of those would be having their intermission, and emerging onto the street after the show, I found myself pondering a curiously weightless production in which the wellsprings of human emotion have yet to be tapped.King LearThrough Dec. 9 at Wyndham’s Theater, in London; kinglearbranagh.com. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

      by

      In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesRecords show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesDuffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

      by

      For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic

      by

      A joyful, bumpy musical version of Shakespeare’s late romance closes the Delacorte Theater before an 18-month renovation.“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Helicopters, radios, sirens and birdsong were competing to be heard in the Manhattan air.Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. (It runs only through Sunday.) The seventh in the Public’s series of Public Works productions, it will also be the last for the time being; this fall, the Delacorte begins much-needed renovations that will put it out of commission until 2025.“The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. This new “Tempest,” adapted by Benjamin Velez (whose songs are tuneful and sweet) and Laurie Woolery (whose staging is bumpy but joyous), continues the tradition but emphasizes a new note: the pang of goodbyes.The goodbyes are generally the same ones Shakespeare plotted around 1610. Prospero, a sorcerer living for 12 years in exile on an enchanted island, must forswear the magic that has helped him survive and, with it, his fury over the betrayal that landed him there. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban. And when his daughter, Miranda, having little experience of men, falls for one who washes up on shore, Prospero, deferring to love, must give her up too.“Am I not the liar/If I deny her?” he sings in the oddly named “Log Man,” a highlight of the nine-song score.Actually, make that “she sings,” because in this production, Prospero, played by Renée Elise Goldsberry in gorgeous voice, is a woman, and not gratuitously so. Her interactions with Miranda are specific to her gender. “Innocence flies like the last gasp of summer/Childhood dies in the arms of a lover/And no one tries to hold on like a mother,” she notes in a later verse of “Log Man,” getting a big laugh on the inevitability of that last word.Renée Elise Goldsberry, as Prospero, knows how to shape a moment for maximum impact, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least for the first half of the 100-minute show, the Shakespeare is effectively translated to musical theater — perhaps not so surprising given that musical theater is in many ways a translation of Shakespearean templates to begin with. (Songs and monologues often do similar structural work.) Here, Velez’s poppy melodies and gentle slant rhymes usually serve a second function, crystallizing the themes in quickly recognizable and memorable gestures, as the harsh economy of musicals requires.So Prospero’s opening number, “Cast a Spell,” sets up her conflict instantly: She must “finally be free of the tempest in me.” When Miranda (Naomi Pierre) meets Ferdinand (Jordan Best), the Disneyesque “Vibin’ on to You” characterizes their instinctual infatuation in its first funky measure. A merry operetta drinking song (“A Fool Can Be King”) gives Joel Perez, as the soused clown Stephano, a rousing production number, and the song that introduces Sebastian (Tristan André) and Antonio (Anthony Chatmon II) might as well have “comic villain specialty” stamped on it.Of course, those villains aren’t so comic in the Shakespeare, where their threats recall the culture of deceit and violence bred by greed and politics. But that’s one of the trade-offs of Public Works. You do get to see charming nonprofessionals like Pierre (from the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn) work side-by-side with Broadway talent like Jo Lampert (who makes an acid-queen Ariel) and Theo Stockman (a piteous Caliban). But you’re not likely to see any of them get the chance to dig terribly deep.The production’s rushed second half shows why, as the late-night subway schedule bears down and the plot gets ruthlessly trimmed to beat it. We don’t miss the cut scenes so much as the connective tissue that might hold up what’s left. Also missed: the rich language that creates emotional context for a story that, with its spirits and spells, can otherwise seem almost inhuman.And though there’s a lovely finale called “A Thousand Blessings” — with members of Oyu Oro, an Afro-Cuban experimental dance ensemble, flooding the stage — the songs now come too close together to represent peaks of feeling. A landscape with only peaks is flat.Woolery, who leads Public Works and directed its terrific “As You Like It” in 2017, too often exacerbates that problem. With as many as 88 people moving about, plus five musicians in a tipped-over house remaindered from this summer’s “Hamlet” (the sets are by Alexis Distler), the stage can sometimes look like a busy airport instead of a nearly deserted island. And the clown scenes, so dependent on imaginative physical comedy, exceptional timing and an understanding of pathos, are not reliably funny.But one of the nice things about watching nonprofessionals in the limelight, especially the children, is that they don’t cover their excitement, which is funny (and moving) in itself. And one of the nice things about watching professionals in the limelight is that they know how to shape a moment for maximum impact.This is something Goldsberry does over and over, no more so than near the end, when Prospero must act on her insight that “the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” As she breaks her magic staff in two, several feelings — fear, wonder, resolve — seem to scud across her face. Has she done right in making that choice?Has Public Works done right in making a similar one? Producing work that by traditional measures lacks polish, it has prioritized the virtue of engagement with actual people, and lots of them, over the secret magic known only to a few.As a critic, I feel obliged to ponder the trade-off. But as a citizen I have no doubts. Even in its lesser outings, Public Works makes its own kind of magic: a communitarian charm sorely missed these furious days. We need the series back in the park as soon as possible — albeit with better seats, more accessible bathrooms and raccoonless backstage facilities — to keep making beautiful music for our beleaguered isle of noises.The TempestThrough Sept. 3 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More