Category: theatre

Imagine taking a call that goes something like this: Hello, sir. Did you know that here on the other side of the country, a theater is staging an entire musical based loosely on one particularly exciting day in your life that happened nearly 20 years ago?

“I thank Echo for allowing me the time to fully understand my situation and consider this difficult admission,” the playwright said. “I am sorry that the public had to be involved at all.”

“However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.”

The outcry that has greeted this announcement has been as ferocious as you might imagine, or more. Though artistic director Bill Rauch and literary manager Lue Douthit have taken pains to say these aren’t replacements but companion pieces, and have preemptively assured critics that these new “translations” will not be the versions of the Bard that will show up on OSF’s stages (for the time being, at least), their proposal has been treated as the worst kind of sacrilege and profanation, a sign of the cultural end times, a capitulation to dumbed-down mass culture, etc.

“For poets, playwrights, editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention. … Shakespeare’s script was the first problem that a production had to remedy. … So what changed? How did Shakespeare’s original texts regain their popularity?”

“Look around the country this theatre season and you see activity from coast to coast – with intensive new musical development in Toronto, a resurgent Charlottetown Festival flexing its muscle, and the Vancouver scene absolutely exploding with musical-theatre activity.”

“The pliancy of the space was essential to Ms. Feldman — keeping the Civil War-era warehouse wide open, using curtains to adjust the stage into different shapes and sizes. ‘We wanted to recreate that same flexibility that seemed to be the thing that made St. Ann’s useful for the last 36 years in New York,’ Ms. Feldman said.”

“It takes only one listen to figure out that Donald Trump will not be one of the show’s numerous fawning audience members or backstage guests. In fact, I’m convinced that every time you listen to the cast recording straight through, one of Trump’s Horcruxes is destroyed.”