Elisabeth vincentelli biography of william shakespeare
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In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Florida show, Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s production of a new, modernized “translation” of Pericles. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s that the 1929 film version of “The Taming of the Shrew” was credited to “William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” Not so, alas—that particular Hollywood tale is too good to be true—but it’s certainly the case that few Shakespeare plays are staged as written. Cuts are customary, scenes frequently rearranged. Nor is such tinkering a purely modern notion: Nineteenth-century actors often interpolated new lines and, on occasion, turned sad endings into happy ones, a practice at which no one seems to have boggled overmuch. That’s why I can’t claim to have been struck dumb with righteous horror when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced last fall that it had commissioned “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays into “contemporary modern English” in the hopes of making them more intelligible to today’s audiences.
I did, however, wonder why anyone thought such an undertaking useful, much less necessary. Shakespeare, after all, is the world’s most frequently performed playwright, and though the elaborate language of his plays can be intimidating and
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New Shakespeare tragedy
Peter Sellars loves Shakespeare so much, he’s “improved” him.
It’s clear the director, long opera’s bad boy, has read “Othello” very closely. You might want to bring the same level of attention to the lengthy program notes before the play starts.
It’ll help you figure out that Bianca Montano (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) is an amalgam of the prostitute Bianca, the Clown and Governor Montano. And that Emilia (Liza Colón-Zayas), the wife of the treacherous Iago (Philip Seymour Hoffman), keeps fiddling with water and flowers in the background because she’s into Santeria. Okaaaay.
And all this for what? Sellars’ wretched show is both too much and not enough.
In actuality, this supposedly daring Public Theater/Labyrinth Company production is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. There’s nothing genuinely radical onstage, only a cosmic void free of passion, insight and imagination.
Surprisingly, considering some of the talent involved, the most basic level of craft is lacking.
The only thing you’ll find in abundance is time: The glacially paced show takes four hours to go nowhere.
Modern dress is a common option by now, but here it’s leaden with clichés (much yellin