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      Theater to Stream: 'Notes on Grief' and Russell Brand's Take on Shakespeare

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      An adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Notes on Grief,” Russell Brand’s take on Shakespeare and a two-day event anchored by a Milo Rau film are among the highlights.Productions from the multidisciplinary Manchester International Festival often end up traveling around the world, making pit stops at well-heeled performing arts centers. This year, we don’t have to wait, as the festival is making some of its offerings available online — an approach we hope will become commonplace among international gatherings.Of particular interest to theater audiences is “Notes on Grief,” Rae McKen’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay-turned-book about her father’s sudden death. The show is bound to be compared to the Joan Didion memoir-turned-play “The Year of Magical Thinking.”One day in June 2020, Adichie learned that her father — with whom she had chatted just a day earlier — died. “My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone,” she wrote in an essay that The New Yorker published in September. McKen’s show stars Uche Abuah, Michelle Asante and Itoya Osagiede. Audience members lucky enough to be in Manchester can see it in real life through July 17, and the rest of us can watch from home from July 15-18. mif.co.uk.‘Our Little Lives: Shakespeare and Me’Those who associate Russell Brand only with his excesses and shock tactics may be surprised by his quieter mien these days — he’s become the kind of guy who occasionally finds life lessons in sonnets. He is now reprising a one-man show he conceived with the director Ian Rickson and developed in 2018, in which he uses Shakespeare’s writings to illuminate his own story. Brand promises an appearance by his dog, Bear (perhaps timed to his exit, so he can be pursued by Bear). Through July 14; live-now.com‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder’CollaborAzian is streaming an abridged version of this Tony Award-winning musical from 2013 with an all-Asian American cast and production team. Karl Josef Co takes on Monty Navarro, who sets out to kill multiple members of the D’Ysquith family, all of them to be portrayed — often in lightning-fast succession — by Thom Sesma. It should be interesting to see how the director Alan Muraoka and his actors handle the show’s high-farcical style online. Look also for a special appearance by Lea Salonga. July 15-22; collaborazian.com‘I Hate It Here’Last year, Studio Theater presented the Chicago playwright Ike Holter’s anthology of vignettes as an audio drama; now the Goodman Theater is producing it as a fully staged livestream, directed by Lili-Anne Brown. The stories cover various aspects of life during the peak of the pandemic year, touching on Covid-19, racism and activism, and possibly even hope. July 15-18; goodmantheatre.orgThe New Solidarity: Art, Organizing and Radical PoliticsPresented by various institutions and organizations across the country, including the Foundry Theater in New York, this two-day event is anchored by a streaming presentation of the Milo Rau film “The New Gospel.” Rau, an audacious Swiss director whose production company “for theater, film and social sculpture” is called the International Institute of Political Murder, set the Passion of Christ in the context of 21st-century conflicts about migration; the Jesus character is played by the activist and writer Yvan Sagnet, who was born in Cameroon and then later moved to Italy to study. Rau will also participate in a couple of panels: “How are artists seizing power today?” and “How are artists and organizers building solidarity between art and movements?” (Sagnet will participate in the latter one as well). July 9-10; howlround.com‘Lines in the Dust’Nikkole Salter emerged in 2005 with the play “In the Continuum,” which she and Danai Gurira wrote and starred in. Since then, Salter continues to make theater that inspires and engages, stirs and advocates. The New Normal Rep company is reviving her 2014 play “Lines in the Dust,” in which a working-class New Jersey mother alters her residency paperwork so her daughter can attend a good school. July 8-Aug. 8; https://www.newnormalrep.org/next-up‘Silent’Pat Kinevane in “Silent.” Ste MurrayThe respected Dublin company Fishamble celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of its biggest hits, “Silent,” from the writer-performer Pat Kinevane, with a virtual American mini-tour of a filmed version: It’s presented first by Odyssey Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles (July 9-11) then by Solas Nua in Washington (July 11-18). Kinevane portrays a mentally ill homeless man who emulates the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. Praising “Silent” in The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that “there is breath and blood to spare in this carefully wrought production.” fishamble.comDiscover Imitating the DogThe explosion of streaming theater last year allowed us to discover many artists doing stellar work in their corners of the world. One such outfit is Britain’s Imitating the Dog, whose shows make inventive use of multimedia techniques and translate remarkably well online. Luckily the company remains proactive in making its catalog available. Check out, for example, “Dr Blood’s Old Travelling Show,” from October 2020, or the collection of shorts “Street,” which smartly spruces up the aesthetics of documentary theater. http://www.imitatingthedog.co.uk/at-home/2021 Short New Play Festival: RestorationRed Bull Theater, in New York, has made a name with such zippy revivals as “The Government Inspector,” which gave Michael Urie a golden opportunity to display his comic timing, but the company is not stuck in the past. For this year’s edition of its festival dedicated to short new plays, Red Bull commissioned a work from José Rivera (“Cloud Tectonics” and the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries”) and selected six entries from hundreds of open submissions. The winning playwrights are Constance Congdon, Rosslyn Cornejo, George LaVigne, David Lefkowitz, Abigail C. Onwunali and Charlotte Rahn-Lee, and their pieces should be in good hands with the directors Margot Bordelon and Timothy Douglas. July 12-16; redbulltheater.com‘Possible’The Welsh writer and performer Shôn Dale-Jones’s new solo show has been compared to Bo Burnham’s Netflix special “Inside”: both are autobiographical works that explore lockdown life while occasionally reaching further back in time. Dale-Jones refers to digital interactions he’s had in the past year, including WhatsApp group chats and Zoom calls, and includes tough discussions about his mother’s mental well-being. After a livestreamed run, the National Theater Wales production is available on-demand. Through July 13; nationaltheatrewales.orgEast to Edinburgh Goes VirtualEvery year, 59E59 Theaters in New York presents a showcase of productions headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. While the United States have made great steps toward a return to a theatrical normal (whatever that might be), the new edition of East to Edinburgh is still virtual, with nine shows you can watch from home. Among the titles that caught my eye is Priyanka Shetty’s docu-theater solo “#Charlottesville,” about the events that roiled the Virginia city in August 2017. Borrowing from Anna Deavere Smith, Shetty built her text from interviews. Other intriguing entries in the showcase include “Testament,” in which Tristan Bernays (“Frankenstein”) imagines what would happen if four biblical characters lived now; and Somebody Jones’s “Black Women Dating White Men,” whose title is an apt description of the show. July 15-July 25; 59e59.org More

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      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Onstage. A Nightmare Off It.

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      Shakespeare’s Globe survived Elizabethan plagues. Today’s version got through the coronavirus pandemic, but tough times lie ahead.LONDON — At the Globe theater in London one recent Thursday was a sight Shakespeare could have related to: 11 actors larking about onstage rehearsing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” while beneath them stood the director Sean Holmes, looking furious.“Listen please, everyone,” Holmes said. “Can we do the scene again, even if it’s a bit of a car crash?”Everyone stopped joking and got into place. Then Peter Bourke, playing the fairy king Oberon, started singing: “Now until the break of day, through this house each fairy stray.” Soon, the rest of the cast took over, and everyone crept offstage through two huge doors, getting quieter and quieter, as if trying to lull onlookers to sleep with their song.The performance was perfect. But Holmes didn’t look happy. That day’s rehearsal, he said, wasn’t about the onstage action, but ensuring the 11 actors could get off, change costumes quickly in a small backstage area, then get back on, all while staying two meters (about six and a half feet) apart to maintain social distancing.If they got it wrong, he’d have to do it again, and again, until they found a solution.“It’s been the hardest thing,” Holmes said. “I think it finally broke me today.”When the coronavirus pandemic shut Britain’s theaters last March, Shakespeare’s Globe, as it is officially known, might have been the one institution expected to survive.An audience member being checked before admission into “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesIt’s one of the world’s iconic theaters, with supporters worldwide drawn to the idea of a modern recreation of Shakespeare’s stomping ground on the banks of the Thames, complete with a thatched roof open to the elements.In Shakespeare’s time, his Globe was repeatedly closed as the plague hit London, especially between 1603 and 1613, though the Bard kept writing even during the closures. If the original Globe survived that, surely its updated version could manage Covid-19?But within weeks of coronavirus hitting Britain, the Globe — heavily reliant on tourism (17 percent of its audience are international tourists, many American) and without the public subsidy that goes to venues like Britain’s National Theater — was losing 2 million pounds, about $2.8 million, a month.The 180 freelance actors and crew who were on its books at the time, some in the final days of rehearsing a new “Romeo and Juliet,” had to be let go, Neil Constable, the theater’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. He also had to furlough 85 percent of his permanent staff, meaning the British government paid most of their wages. On top of that, he canceled a multimillion-dollar refurbishment project.Even with those moves, Constable was soon having to consider mothballing the theater entirely. “We’d have had to shut to 2023,” he said.In May, he submitted a document to British politicians pleading for emergency funding. Without it, “we will not be able to survive this crisis,” it said. That would be “a tragedy for the arts, for the legacy of England’s most famous writer, but also for the country.”The news made headlines, including in The New York Times. A few weeks later, Oliver Dowden, Britain’s culture minister, went to the Globe to announce a $2 billion arts bailout package. The government eventually gave the theater almost £6 million, about $8.5 million, of that money.That didn’t stop need for further cost saving, Constable said. Staff took salary cuts, up to 50 percent.But the bailout money did mean one thing: The theater could finally reopen this month, if only to a socially distanced audience of 400, rather than the normal 1,600. Audience members would also not be allowed to become “groundlings,” the term for people who stand in the pit beneath the stage, like normal. Instead they’d have to sit on shiny metal outdoor chairs.The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” production features Mardi Gras-style music.Adama Jalloh for The New York Times“It doesn’t make financial sense to do this, but it’s important,” Constable said. “It’s what we’re here for.” He hoped British tourists would make up for the shortfall of international visitors.At the rehearsal, Holmes — who is also the Globe’s associate artistic director — said the theater had decided to reopen with a revival of his 2019 production of “Midsummer” precisely because it was cheaper than doing a new show.The onstage social distancing was also as much for financial as health reasons, he said. Under the British government’s rules, if one person gets ill in a theater, everyone they’ve been in close contact with also has to isolate, so keeping people apart prevents that. “We have to protect the show,” he said, adding it’d be “incredibly damaging financially” if they had to pull it.A play about mistaken lovers turned out to be surprisingly easy to stage in the age of distancing. “There’s passion and extremity in the language,” Holmes said, “so you don’t need as much physical action.”He still had to make some changes. In one scene, four of the play’s many lovers fall asleep in a wood. In 2019, they did so “piled on top of each other,” Holmes said. Now, they each got a corner of the stage to themselves (one lover, Lysander, gets a blowup mattress at one point, much to his lover Hermia’s annoyance).A scooter driven by Titania waits for its moment in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesThe biggest challenges all involved keeping people apart offstage. At one point in the rehearsal, Holmes went through a scene where the actors run onstage — all playing the fairy Puck — then fire blow darts at one another. Shona Babayemi kept missing her cue.“Is there a reason you’re always late?” Holmes asked. “There were, like, seven, eight people in the way,” Babayemi replied. “Oh, God,” Holmes said. “Sorry!”Last Wednesday night, Holmes and the cast were back at the Globe for their first performance in 14 months.The mood in the lines outside was ecstatic, despite London being cold and damp even by the standards of a British summer. There were groups of drama students waiting to get in, as well as a fishing society and a mother and daughter celebrating a birthday.None were foreign tourists, but several attendees said they had traveled over an hour to get there, suggesting the Globe may not have to worry too much about attracting people from outside London.“I’ve got six tickets already for this year,” said Peter Lloyd, 61, who’d journeyed from Brighton on England’s south coast. “It’s the only authentic Elizabethan theater in the country, it feels so close to Shakespeare’s time,” he added. Was he OK with distancing in the plays? “Oh, I didn’t know about that,” he said, worried. “Are they wearing masks, too?”Shona Babayemi, who portrays Helena, awaits her entrance in the show.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesInside, the eager atmosphere didn’t let up, helped by Holmes’s carnivalesque staging of the play — with Day-Glo costumes and a band playing almost constant Mardi Gras-style music. At one point, Titania, the fairy queen, wove in and out of the audience on a scooter (the cast pulled up masks sewn into their costumes whenever offstage). A bemused-looking audience member was even roped into the play, made to read out lines and ride on an exercise bike (it helped power the production), much to his partner’s apparent amusement.The Globe depends heavily on international tourists.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesOn the few occasions that coronavirus rules intruded into the staging, the cast played the scene for laughs. When two characters had to stab themselves with the same knife, the actor playing Flute pulled an antiseptic wipe from his sock, then cleaned the blade, before plunging it into his chest.The play ran without an intermission — another effort to reduce risk — but few people left to use the bathroom or buy a drink. When it finished, to cheers, about 30 audience members even stayed behind, forming a polite queue to take selfies on the ramp leading up to the stage.Holmes stood nearby, watching. He looked as annoyed as during rehearsals. “That’s clearly just my resting face,” he said, with a laugh.“It’s just great we’re back and people are hungry for it,” he added. “We can’t sustain at this level of audience by any means,” he said of the theater being only a quarter full, “but I’m feeling optimistic.”Then, without the frown disappearing, he headed toward the crew, to find out if the distancing had worked as planned, after all. More

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      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Meets the Hot Vax Summer

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      A lusty new production is both an enticement and a warning as we tentatively explore intimacy after a year of forced solitude.What will be the idiom, in my modest estimation, to best define our relationship to sex during the Covid-19 pandemic? “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thicc” — so say the boys of Tinder.It’s not quite Shakespeare — or is it? I’m willing to bet that if they lived in 2021, Romeo and Juliet would quickly become fluent in our contemporary language of lust and seduction. After all, sex has always been an element of Shakespeare’s play, though portrayals of it have changed in productions over the last 400 years, depending on trends and cultural attitudes.So it would make sense, after the pandemic year we’ve had, that we’re in for a spate of sexy Shakespeare — frilly ruff and all. And “Romeo and Juliet” — including the lusty new filmed production that premiered last week on PBS — looks like it’ll be the play of this spicy summer to come.I’ve already encountered other renditions in the last couple of weeks: the Public Theater’s bilingual “Romeo y Julieta,” the Actors Theater of Louisville’s “Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020.” An interactive production is forthcoming from England’s Creation Theater.Though a play about intimacy, yearning and death feels right for the moment, I have to admit my discomfort with all those honeyed kisses and sweet nothings: The pandemic has left me unprepared for lovers meeting at any distance closer than six feet.The sexiness of “Romeo and Juliet” depends not just on a director but on the temperature of the times, whether the drafty climate of a chaste family dinner with Granny or the febrile blaze of a Friday night date set to a playlist of ’90s R&B jams.Though the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time were down for lewd wordplay and suggestive winks in the text, stage depictions of physical intimacy were a step too far. The Victorians? Stuffier than a mouth breather during allergy season, they tended to shift the story toward innocent love rather than lust.Romeo and Juliet got a movie makeover in the 1960s, however, when the director Franco Zeffirelli premiered his sensual adaptation, including a famous nude love scene, during the peak of the sexual revolution.And if you had a pulse in the ’90s you caught Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s wistfully romantic “Romeo and Juliet,” which seemed charged by the melancholic sighs of disenchanted youth — appropriate for the decade of irony and grunge.Orlando Bloom, left, and Condola Rashad in the 2013 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhich presents the question of where we are now. (The dull and curiously sexless 2013 Broadway production, starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, had little to add.) Have dating apps and the sex-positive and body-positive movements brought us to a new age of uninhibitedness?Honestly, I’m not sure. Many of our austere cultural standards around sex, cuffed to religious conventions, economics and antiquated notions about gender, still haunt us behind closed doors — even as much of our media uses sex as consumer currency. But a pandemic that made isolation the rule surely has changed our relationship to physical intimacy.That — not personal prudishness or naïveté — is why too sexy of a “Romeo and Juliet,” like the new filmed edition starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, leaves me scandalized, as though I didn’t grow up in a household with HBO.The fabric of the film feels cut from the central couple’s marital bedsheets — the intimacy is that palpable. Scene after scene feels like it’s taking place by candlelight. The hovering camerawork peeks over shoulders to catch a kiss or embrace.Cutting many of the play’s crass euphemisms (including the nurse’s many opinions on matters of the heart and, well, other parts of the body), this “Romeo and Juliet” builds from the physical tension among the characters.They tease one another, as Mercutio does Romeo and Benvolio in his Queen Mab’s speech; then he draws in Benvolio (depicted here as his lover) for a single electric moment before promptly shoving him away.Simon Godwin’s direction is tactile, obsessed with hands and the ways an open-palmed welcome, a single-finger caress, the taut-knuckled hardness of a fist can signify romance, or violence, or both.The confidential meeting of the lovers in the tussle of bodies at the Capulet shindig, the hesitant first touch of their fingers and, later, the urgent consummation — none of this is surprising. Neither is it risqué.And yet, to me, it felt alarming — pornographic even — given how we have spent the last year painfully aware of what threats proximity could breed.Last spring NYC Health released a much-mocked guide to safe sex during the pandemic, encouraging masturbation as the most Covid-friendly alternative to, in Shakespearean terms, sheathing one’s dagger. No more sweaty tangling of limbs in a dark bar, no more post-date kiss on the sidewalk outside a restaurant. Or at least not without risk.Even as more of us get vaccinated, intimacy will likely feel like a fresh adventure, for good and for bad. Some singles are emerging from their quarantine bubbles anticipating a “hot vax summer” of horny hookups and experimental exploits. Others are circumspect, our social skills atrophied and our inhibitions increased in response to a lethal disease.For the next several months, as we recover from a kind of intimacy-deprived PTSD, Shakespeare’s sexiest play — a play that links lust to violence, even death — may read as extreme, even subtly subversive.That’s the magic of the Bard, isn’t it? Racy enough for reprobates and rakes, or priggishly read by a congregation of stately stiff-backs, the work is spacious enough to accommodate any disposition. I might be too shy to subscribe to Romeo and Juliet’s steamy OnlyFans, but, hey, there are plenty out there who aren’t. More

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      Review: ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Cut in Half and Twice as Good

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      Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley star as the star-crossed lovers in a compelling stage-film hybrid adaptation.What’s written in haste may be repaired in haste. Or so the fine and fleet new “Romeo and Juliet” from Britain’s National Theater, available here on PBS’s “Great Performances,” convinces me.At 90 minutes, it is even shorter than the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised in its first lines but rarely honored in performance. (The entire play normally takes about three hours.) Yet as directed by Simon Godwin, this emotionally satisfying and highly theatrical filmed version scores point after point while whizzing past, or outright cutting, the elements that can make you think it was written not by Shakespeare but by O. Henry on a bender.If the cutting merely left what remains with a much higher proportion of penetrating insight and powerful feeling, that would be enough; “Romeo and Juliet,” at its best, anticipates the great later works in which complexity and ambivalence are made real and gorgeous in language. But the speed serves another function here: telling a story that’s mostly about teenagers with a teenage intensity and recklessness.Not that the stars are anywhere near their adolescence. Though Romeo is 17 or so and Juliet, 13, Josh O’Connor, who played mopey young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” is 30, and Jessie Buckley, the mysterious star of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” 31. Still, there’s a reason they’re called actors: They can perform the acts a play requires of them. Onstage, at any rate, that would be sufficient.Under Simon Godwin’s direction, the masked ball in this “Romeo and Juliet” is closer to a rave.Rob YoungsonOn film, we need an extra push, which Godwin and Emily Burns, who adapted the text, provide by grounding us in a theatrical world before escorting us into a filmic one. The production begins unceremoniously with the cast in street clothes, entering a theater, unmasked and vulnerable, none more so than O’Connor, with the low-slung, “sticky-out” ears he says earned him his role on “The Crown.” Sitting on three sides of a small, square, scuffed playing space, the actors are barely past the greeting phase — O’Connor and Buckley smile shyly at one another, as if across a Veronese piazza — when the play leaps out of the gate.Purists not already offended will soon have plenty to set them off. The masked ball at which the lovers meet is not exactly courtly; it’s more like a rave, and Romeo is given just two lines (instead of 10) to fall for Juliet, who is moaning at the mic like Lana Del Rey.But impurists will be satisfied that the erotic intensity between them is so palpable, even when Godwin dissipates it by cutting away from the theatrical moment to a filmed montage in some other dimension. Similarly, the introduction of a passionate gay pairing among the supporting roles makes up in thematic coherence — the plot turns on forbidden love — what it lacks in textual fidelity.The trade-offs continue throughout. The most fascinating one finds Juliet’s parents inverted, Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) getting most of the lines Shakespeare wrote for her Lord (Lloyd Hutchinson). Greig, so funny on the Showtime series “Episodes,” is spectacularly entertaining as she explores what besides the habitual assertion of male power might motivate a parent to threaten a daughter with expulsion. Her interpretation, underlined by “evil” music, nevertheless denatures one key feature of the play, which now suggests that the Capulets are monsters when the really terrifying thing is that they’re not. They are upstanding citizens doing what’s expected.It is that atmosphere of immutable custom and inherited hatred that the lovers are desperate to escape. But Godwin’s staging makes clear by physical proximity and by judicious intercutting that these elements are related: Romeo and Juliet’s passion is as rash and irrational as the other characters’ repression and violence. As the outlines of their love are filled in, so is the hatred around them — and so are the set (by Soutra Gilmour) and props; swords that were simple wooden dowels in Act I by Act III are knives that look menacingly real. In youth, it seems, enmity precedes an enemy just as love precedes a lover.Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet and Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet.Rob YoungsonAt every turn we are offered insights like that until, suddenly, we aren’t. Nothing Godwin can do to make the play rough and unfamiliar — whether by having Tybalt (David Judge) urinate on a wall or by excising greatest hits like “parting is such sweet sorrow” — can help it get past the place where the lovers’ ingenuity fails along with Shakespeare’s. The plot thread by which Juliet’s fake death prompts Romeo’s real one is so absurdly flimsy that adaptations have tried for centuries to fix it; Arthur Laurents’s workaround for “West Side Story” is especially strong.For me, though, no production of “Romeo and Juliet” survives the potions of Friar Laurence; they are a lot of magick to swallow in a play about such real and serious things. That Laurence is portrayed here (by Lucian Msamati) with great dignity, not as a nutty professor, helps, raising the profound if wishful idea that faith can correct for society’s failings. Even more movingly, Deborah Findlay, as Juliet’s fond nurse, is able to temper the role’s comic elements with an immutable loyalty to her mistress, and then temper that with something darker and arguably in fact disloyal. It’s a perfect trifold performance.That’s the thing about Shakespeare, at least for me: There comes a moment in many of his plays when only the actors can preserve the emotion the plot keeps leaking. Happily, that happens here: As the tragedy narrows, O’Connor and Buckley flood with feeling.Stars will do that. In the same way an enemy is just a receptacle for enmity that already exists, a starring role is whatever a star can pour ambient emotion into. O’Connor’s essence is a silent yearning — the kind that is not extinguished but fanned by satisfaction. (This is what made his otherwise insufferable Charles almost sympathetic in “The Crown” and the nearly silent young farmer in his breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” so expressive.) Buckley, whose face seems transparent at times, is more about wonder; her Juliet clearly wants Romeo but, more than that, is amazed by her good fortune in getting him.Even in a more conventional production — this one was meant to be performed live onstage but was retooled for the pandemic — you need that kind of incandescence to make the play make sense. Remember that Shakespeare was a young star, too, albeit 30 or so himself, when he wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” Indeed, it often seems that his title characters, in haste and passion, wrote it for him.Romeo & JulietThrough May 21; pbs.org/gperf More

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      Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

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      With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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      ‘Romeo y Julieta’ Review: Young Love in Two Languages

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      Lupita Nyong’o and Juan Castano star in a podcast adaptation that delivers the poetry — in Spanish and English — but not the fire.The scheme is so harebrained that it belongs more to farce than tragedy, but Shakespeare decided otherwise. In “Romeo and Juliet,” a trusted friar gives the desperate Juliet a potion to drink so she can fake her own demise.For a good “two and forty hours,” she will seem dead, he tells her, “and then awake as from a pleasant sleep.”Awake in a tomb full of corpses, he means, but that’s a mere detail. In countless productions, the hatching of this plan is where the plot flies off the rails. What is he, nuts, suggesting this to a teenager who’s come to him for help?Yet in the Public Theater’s bilingual audio production “Romeo y Julieta,” the extraordinary Julio Monge portrays Friar Lawrence with such warm ease and steadiness that the ploy seems — well, still exceedingly unwise, but almost persuasive. And the clergyman has his usual fine motive for aiding Julieta and her Romeo: to ally their warring families, turning their “rancor to pure love.”The program note for this production suggests that the Public, the most populist of Off Broadway theaters, has a similar motive concerning our own fractured culture. If this free podcast is better at conveying the poetry than the pulse of Shakespeare, its intention is laudable anyway.Starring Lupita Nyong’o as Julieta and Juan Castano as Romeo, the play is spoken in English and Spanish. It’s not a Sharks and Jets arrangement, either; the Montagues and Capulets are fluent in both languages. Switching nimbly from one to the other, midspeech or midsentence, is a means of welcoming speakers of either into the audience, and uniting us there — albeit at a distance from one another.Directed by Saheem Ali, the play is gently adapted by Ali and Ricardo Pérez González, and based on a Spanish translation by Alfredo Michel Modenessi. Presented with WNYC Studios, the recording (with original music by Michael Thurber and sound design by Bray Poor and Jessica Paz) comes with a downloadable script showing every line in Spanish and English, making it easier to follow along.Each actor in the cast of 22 takes great care with verbal clarity. Interpretive depth is harder to come by; textures of humor and passion, joy and grief, are scarce. Any scene where Monge appears, though, finds the others upping their games.That includes the tantalizingly paired Nyong’o and Castano, whose lucid performances never ignite the rebellious adolescent fervor that drives these just-met, I-would-die-for-you lovers to their irrational extremes. Romeo and Julieta are kids, with all the tendencies toward personal drama of people their age, yet we don’t sense that in them or in Romeo’s friends.It’s not a lack of talent on anyone’s part. What it feels like, largely, is a pandemic side effect. This show’s many artists couldn’t gather in a room to dig into characters and relationships; they rehearsed and recorded over Zoom. And when we listen to the podcast, and need the script to figure out who’s who in a crowd or a fight, we yearn for costume and gesture, for bodies in space.This “Romeo y Julieta” is a production in need of a stage, when that’s possible again. For now, it’s waiting on its third dimension.Romeo y JulietaAvailable at publictheater.org, wnycstudios.org and on all major podcast platforms. More

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      Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone

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      Gorgeous but thin, this half-hour experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company turns Puck into an avatar and “theatergoers” into fireflies.Do you know of a site where the wild thyme blows? You do now.“Dream,” an interactive experience from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which runs through Saturday and lasts about as long as a power nap, transports its thousands of viewers to a sylvan grove, then to a rehearsal space in Portsmouth, England, for a live Q&A. Tickets are free, though those who prefer a lightly interactive experience can purchase seats for 10 British pounds (about $14) and appear onscreen as fireflies.Inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — in the wispiest, most gossamer way imaginable — “Dream” signifies a bounding leap forward for theater technology and a short jog in place for theater itself.A different “Dream” was meant to open in Stratford-upon-Avon about a year ago, as a showcase for Audience of the Future, a consortium of institutions and tech innovators assembled in 2019 and tasked with exploring new ways to make and deliver theater remotely. (Theater on your phone? They saw it first.) The 2020 “Dream” would have played to both a live audience and a remote one, integrating actors, projections and live motion-capture into a verdant whole.Jamie Morgan as Peaseblossom, a character rendered as sticks and flowers.Stuart MartinBut in-person audiences are rare these days, and this remote “Dream,” however gorgeous — and it is gorgeous, enormously gorgeous — feels thinner for it, less a forest of imagination and more a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees. It begins with Puck (E.M. Williams), that merry wanderer of the night, imagined here as an assemblage of pebbles in the approximate shape of a human body. Why render Puck — nimble, fleet and girdling the earth in the time it takes most of us to load the dishwasher — as a pile of rocks? Dunno. Looks cool.In traveling around the forest, Puck encounters Shakespeare’s other fairies, like Moth (an accumulation of moths), Peaseblossom (sticks and flowers) and Cobweb (an eyeball inside a squirrel’s drey). Apparently, Puck also met Mustardseed (more sticks?). I missed it. And the singer Nick Cave contributed some voice acting! I missed that, too.“Dream,” performed live, is exquisite, denatured and almost entirely contentless. It isn’t quite theater, and it isn’t precisely film, though it could pass for a highbrow “Avatar” short. For stretches, it resembles a meditative video game, but it isn’t that either, mostly because the interactive elements (clicking and dragging fireflies around the landscape) are wholly inconsequential.Those who purchase tickets are represented onscreen as fireflies.Paul MumfordWatching it, I felt inexplicably cranky, like a toddler who has been offered a variety of perfectly nice snacks but doesn’t want any of them. Because maybe what the toddler really wants is to safely see an actual play in an actual theater with an actual audience. And that just isn’t available right now.So I don’t really know what to say about “Dream.” Because it represents an obviously fruitful and seemingly happy collaboration among top-of-their-game actors, directors, designers, composers and technicians, many of whom assumed some physical risk in the making of it. (Among them are Robin McNicholas, credited with direction and narrative development; Pippa Hill, credited with script creation and narrative development; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the production’s music director and co-composer.) It also signals real progress in the use of live motion-capture (something the Royal Shakespeare Company has already experimented with) and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how that technology might be used when proper in-person theater returns.But this isn’t proper theater. Or even improper theater. It’s a sophisticated demonstration of an emergent technology. Shakespeare is the pretext, not the point. The pentameter, pushed into random virtual mouths, helps us better appreciate the software architecture — which is great if you like software and less great if you like the language itself, or the original play’s plot or characters or keen insights into our big, dumb, desiring hearts. This “Dream” is beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wake up now?DreamThrough March 20; dream.online More

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      A ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History Books

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewA ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History BooksThe International Theater Amsterdam presented Ivo van Hove’s exhilarating Shakespeare marathon in a one-off, livestreamed production.Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra giving in to grief at the death of Mark Antony in Ivo van Hove’s staging of “Antony and Cleopatra,” part of the director’s “Roman Tragedies.”Credit…Jan VersweyveldFeb. 18, 2021, 4:05 a.m. ETSix hours have rarely passed so quickly, or been so smart.That was the immediate take-away from the livestream last Sunday of the director Ivo van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies,” an exhilarating distillation of Shakespeare’s three Roman plays performed throughout an afternoon and into the evening as part of the International Theater Amsterdam’s ITALive program.This marathon, modern-dress sequence of “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” first performed in the Netherlands in 2007 and widely toured since, was revived for one mid-pandemic performance. And where similar offerings often remain online for later viewing, in this instance live meant live. If you blinked last weekend, you missed it — though six hours, to be fair, is quite a long blink.Van Hove wasn’t yet a Broadway and West End favorite when “Roman Tragedies” was first produced, but the Belgian maverick has since moved into the mainstream, winning Olivier and Tony Awards for his searing reappraisal of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” Now as much of a star as the actors he draws to him, van Hove had just overseen the opening of his first Broadway musical, a production of “West Side Story,” when the pandemic shut down New York theaters almost a year ago.Despite van Hove’s gathering renown, I can’t think of a later production than “Roman Tragedies” that better exemplifies his skill for eliding past and present so that centuries-old texts acquire a hurtling immediacy. Precarious governments rocked by political infighting are common to all three plays, and van Hove links those machinations to our current age by playing video footage of contemporary world leaders in the background.The stage is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail. And there are cameras at the ready — another favorite van Hove device. (At one point in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Bart Slegers’s anxious Enobarbus broke the fourth wall to bolt outside into Amsterdam’s wintry streets, catching dismayed passers-by unaware.) But what has perhaps become predictable about his aesthetic over time works stirringly here, as does his insistence on the timelessness of the plays, which seem more apposite now, perhaps, than ever.The stage for “Roman Tragedies” is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail.Credit…Jan VersweyveldHe could never have guessed, in 2007, that talk of advancing upon the Capitol in “Julius Caesar” would link the death throes of the Roman Republic to events in Washington last month. When Hans Kesting’s bearish Mark Antony in the third and longest of the plays spoke of “a sudden passion for mutiny,” you couldn’t help but think of assaults on democracy then and now, from the classical world to modern-day Myanmar.The smoothed-out rendering of Shakespeare’s text — Sunday’s streaming was presented in Dutch, with English and French subtitles — dispensed with Elizabethan archaisms, allowing the plays’ meanings to emerge afresh. Key lines remained intact — woe betide anyone who messes with “Et tu, Brute?” — but elsewhere Tom Kleijn’s translation streamlined and brought clarity to the proceedings, highlighting themes that connect the plays without letting the obfuscations of language get in the way.Only in Cleopatra’s death scene did I miss the luxuriant wordplay of the original, which contains some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. And yet that cavil fell away with Chris Nietvelt’s piercing performance as an Egyptian queen so poleaxed by the death of her Roman lover that she let rip with a series of screams. Could this have been the same actress from the opening play, “Coriolanus,” where she embodied a TV anchorwoman always smiling, no matter how grievous the news she had to report? Nietvelt completed a tremendous theatrical hat trick with her performance in “Julius Caesar” as a Casca full of foreboding about the chaos to come.If Nietvelt stood out amid an astonishing cast of players from the International Theater Amsterdam’s ensemble, no praise is too high, either, for Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Coriolanus. He played the Roman leader not as some blood-spattered action movie hero but as a graying figure of great volatility who won’t be reined in by a jacket and tie when his natural habitat is the battlefield.Both Cassius and Octavius Caesar were played by women, and a neat reordering of the scenes in “Coriolanus” allowed a determinedly macho play to begin with a conversation between the mother and wife of the prideful general of the title: Van Hove, in a clever touch, grants these women voices well before the play’s surrender to toxic masculinity.How thrilling, too, to see a large cast onstage, unfettered by the constraints of social distancing. (The theater said in a statement that Sunday’s show “complied with all current governmental measurements surrounding the regulation of livestreaming for cultural institutions in the Netherlands.”) Shakespeare demands intimacy, but I’ve never seen such a hyper-affectionate “Antony and Cleopatra,” with so many lingering smooches, and not just between the title characters.And yet it’s the countdown toward extinction and death, whether politically or individually, that unites these three plays. “Roman Tragedies” began and ended to the strains of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a song that looks forward to a waiting calamity. The implication, as van Hove made plain, is that the times haven’t really changed at all.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More