The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(Abridged) [Revised] (Again)

Completing Shakespeare’s
Complete Works At Last (Again)

You’ve not seen all of Shakespeare until you’ve seen the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. That’s a rule I’ve derived from the times I mention seeing a Shakespeare play and oh-so-subtly brag that I've seen all 42 plays connected to Shakespeare’s pen. The reply I inevitably get is, “Have you seen The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)?” referring to the winking, satirical spin on the Bard’s works by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Well, I’ve finally seen it, the Again version, at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, a venue perfect for such a semi-improvisational, audience-participation show. Furthermore, the cast comprised three of my favorite Shakespeareans. To read the full review, click here.

Shakespeare News

Epic Shakespeare's Histories Enterprise
Resurrected as You Tube Audio Production

Brave Spirits Theatre's ambitious staging of Shakespeare's eight-play War of the Roses history cycle—interrupted by Covid and the theater's subsequent closure—has been resurrected as an online audio production. Artistic Director Charlene V. Smith, who put years of creative effort into her Shakespeare's Histories enterprise, never gave up on bringing it to full fruition and created audio performances with much of the original casts. The productions will be streamed in 24 episodes for free on You Tube. For details, click here.

The Comedy of Errors

Pair of Deuces, 3 of Hearts
Equals a Winning Hand

Dromio prances onto the stage and launches into a high-kicking, body-twisting, hand-raising, disco-flavored song and dance. They are soon joined by the entire cast for a full-on dance number to conclude the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. Foremost in my mind watching this finale is not the great production values of the show I'd just experienced, or the succinctly subtle acting choices across the talented ensemble, or the out-of-nowhere humor working in tandem with on-target Shakespearean verse readings. What I'm thinking is how the heck are Alex Brightman and David Fynn as, respectively, Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus still standing, let alone singing while dancing, given what they've accomplished physically and endured choreographically over the past 2:10 hour's traffic on the stage with only a 15-minute rest for intermission? To read the full review, click here.

Venus and Adonis

An Elizabethan Peep Show

Taffety Punk Theatre Company is a small but brightly shining gem in the Washington, D.C., theater scene, a richly talented acting company displaying a brilliantly inventive willingness to explore conceptual stagings of William Shakespeare’s works. This includes those narrative poems at the back of your edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works. Having staged The Rape of Lucrece in 2012, they have now undertaken Venus and Adonis, which could well have been Elizabethan porn. The two narrators, Tonya Beckman and Lise Bruneau, gave Shakespeare's vividly descriptive verses a cheeky resonance. For the review, click here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Putting On the Putin

When Joel Coen released The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2022, did he know he had filmed a biopic of Vladimir Putin? When Denzel Washington turned his calculating Macbeth into a regicidal despot in one pivotal scene, was he channeling the Russian dictator raging at Volodymyr Zelensky’s government? When William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606, did he have the war in Ukraine in mind? The first two questions, probably not, but I can definitively answer that last question. Shakespeare portrayed human nature in all its dimensions, dimensions that haven’t changed in 500 years. That’s the thrilling yet unsettling relevancy of Shakespeare’s composition emerging out of the darkness of Coen’s film. Even with textual cuts bringing his movie in at 108 minutes, Coen unpacks Macbeth’s universal truths in traditional and novel ways. For the complete review, click here.

Macbeth

War’s Tomorrow

Look at the face. As you walk through the door on your way to the theater, you pass a soldier—British, American, or from some other 2024 army—hanging out by a burned-out car. As you take in the whole battle-scarred landscape, be sure to look at the soldier’s face: a face we’ve seen in photographs from the American Civil War through two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and into Ukraine and Palestine. Minutes later you’ll see another such battle-weary soldier’s face, though one familiar to you not as a soldier but as one of the supreme Shakespeare actors of our time, Ralph Fiennes, playing Macbeth in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production in Washington, D.C. Listen to that face as it takes you into his mental chambers where you will vividly see what is in the minds behind the faces from Antietam to Afghanistan. To continue reading this review, click here. (This review updated upon second viewing with clarifications and correction of scene order.)

Addendum: Filmed Version:
Shakespeare Theatre Company filmed this production and screened it at Harman Hall, May 17-19. My review of the film version has been attached to the bottom of the production review.

In Memoriam: Carol Adele Kelly. 1931-2024

A Love of Words, Words, Words

My tribute to Carol Kelly, Shakespeareances.com's copy editor since the website's inception in 2011, became an in memoriam this morning, April 7, 2024. Carol was 94 years old. Cause of death was gall bladder cancer. Upon learning of her prognosis in February, I visited her in Cincinnati, Ohio. Following that visit (I would visit her again one last time a couple weeks later), I wrote this tribute to my teammate, an outstanding grammarian, a good comrade, a special mother, a most-loved grandmother, and a constant inspiration for me the past 18 years—ever since I tried to fire her. For the full tribute, click here.

Pericles

A Quadruple-Quality Life

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players," William Shakespeare wrote in his play As You Like It. "And one man in his time plays many parts”— parts meaning roles, which, theatrically, are individual persons. Turn that conceit around, and you could say many parts make up one man. As we grow older, our individual selves combine to create an increasingly complex but unified whole self that is greater than the sum of its parts. Shakespeare addresses this redirection with his late-career play Pericles. At least, that’s the metaphor Fiasco Theater teases out of this much-maligned play in their fascinating production at Classic Stage Company in which four men each play one part of Pericles. To read the full review, click here.

Desperate Measures

Riffing on a Problem Play's Problems

Desperate Measures, Peter Kellogg's and David Friedman's M-rated Disneyesque musical comedy set in the 19th century American West, is "inspired by"—but not an adaptation of—William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Important distinction. Yet their work, while using rhyming couplets for its spoken script, makes its most significant contribution to Bardology by virtue of just six lines in Shakespeare's play through which their "inspired by" gushes. That premise may merely be highfalutin Shakesgeek navel-gazing though, as the musical is fun in itself with its uniquely rich characters, clever humor, and catchy tunes that Constellation Theatre Company delivers in a well-acted, well-sung production at the Source Theatre in Washington, D.C.To read the full review, click here.

A Commedia Romeo and Juliet

Fools Revisit a Landmark Production

One of my great rewards doing Shakespeareances has been experiencing the connection between William Shakespeare and commedia dell’arte, the masked and hyperphysical street theater tradition that originated in early 16th century Italy. I owe this discovery to the Washington, D.C., Faction of Fools, theater company and their landmark 2012 production of A Commedia Romeo and Juliet. The images of that production have romped through my memory ever since and returned in present flesh as Faction of Fools remounted the show at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in January. With some script adjustments and two casts, it's a twin bill with threefold delights. For the complete review, click here.

My Ever-Ending Hiatus

It’s Time

"We must keep moving. If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving." Martin Luther King Jr. said this in 1960, a month before I turned two. Yesterday, his words came to me when I stalled on making a decision I thought I was ready for. It gave me the push I needed. Fitting, for I honor the national holiday commemorating his birthday by engaging in some form of public service. It's the right time to announce that Shakespeareances.com is officially coming out of a nearly four-year hiatus and back to full operational status. For my formal statement, the hiatus history, and my plans going forward, click here.

On Stage: As You Like It

A Magical Mystical Tour de Force

Blasphemous, some might call what Daryl Cloran has done to William Shakespeare's As You Like It, blending it with 23 classic Beatles songs. Brilliant, I say. Though it is not totally textually Shakespeare’s As You Like It, it is enriched Shakespeare metaphorically in the way it combines the Fab Four of Liverpool’s compositions with the Swan of Avon’s text. Nor is this an academic appreciation of two great artistic forces blended into one. This Bard on the Beach production, now running at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harman Hall in Washington, D.C., is a two-hour, 40-minute (including preshow) laugh-in with great singing, dancing, and wrestling, too. Not often you get an Orlando whose talents combine Shakespeare, Paul McCartney, Gene Kelly, Ann Margaret, and Cactus Jack in one performance. For the complete review, click here.

And for a summary of the Beatles songbook used for the play, click here.

In Print: Cutting Plays for Performance:

Cutting Up

Cutting plays is a foundational practice in theater, especially with the scripts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. With their book Cutting Plays for Performance, Toby Malone and Aili Huber pull the curtain on that practice. In addition to explaining the many purposes and parameters for making cuts, they offer practical tips and anecdotal experience for new hands at what is a daunting and can be a dangerous task. For the complete review, click here.

On Stage: The Winter's Tale

Shaking Booty and Hearing Voices

There’s a lot of Bohemian booty shaking at the Folger. That is the lasting impression of the Tamilla Woodard-directed production of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale—perhaps unfortunate, depending on your theatrical tastes and tolerance for booty-shaking. I’m wide open on my theatrical tastes and indifferent to booties that shake, but Bohemia is not where this play ends. Besides, it was the production’s first impression that spoke more profoundly to me—spoke being a literal term, for I've been hearing voices lately, too. For the full review, click here.

On Stage: Shakespeare Everywhere Festival

12 Washington D.C. Institutions Stage
23 Shakespearean Productions and Events

World-class productions, fascinating debates, amazing opportunities to get behind the scenes, and all on your doorstep. This fall in Washington, Shakespeare will truly be everywhere. Shakespeareances is covering the event in (almost) its entirety. For a list of productions and other events, click here.

On Stage: Evita

A Rice-Webber "History" Play

How many earworms can you stand? I drove home from Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of the Tim Rice–Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita with “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” playing on a loop in my mind. Each day thereafter, a different earworm: “High Flying, Adored,”“And the Money Kept Rolling In,”“Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,”“A New Argentina,” and even “On This Night of a Thousand Stars”—yep, a deliberately cheesy song can be an indelible moment in Evita. This production of the Rice-Webber masterpiece is loaded with indelible moments, from its musical compositions and performances to its perspective, which director Sammi Cannold has wrested from its white Anglo male creators and mixed in a woman’s worldview and Argentinian authenticity. But how authentic is the portrayal of Eva Perón nee Eva Duarte? For that, we turn to Shakespeare's Henry V nee Prince Hal. For the complete review, click here.