“All the world’s a stage,” a hoary cliché, is also, it’s worth remembering, the start of a soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In New York these days, it threatens to shift from Shakespearian metaphor to Shakespearian fact.
So what to think about a British company that comes to town to put on Read More
Last night Champagne was the beverage of choice at Nespresso’s Madison Avenue salon. After a special preview of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s As You Like It, the Young Patrons of Lincoln Center gathered for cocktails and canapés.
The crowd, composed almost exclusively of financiers under thirty, hobnobbed around the stainless steel espresso machines, sharing Shakespearean Read More
It’s great news that Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore is to transfer to Broadway. Not only is Wilson Milam’s production of the dark comedy for the Atlantic Theater Company perfect, but Mr. McDonagh has written the most laughably staggering play I have ever seen.
Now, it could well be that there are better Read More
It’s great news that Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore is to transfer to Broadway. Not only is Wilson Milam’s production of the dark comedy for the Atlantic Theater Company perfect, but Mr. McDonagh has written the most laughably staggering play I have ever seen.
Now, it could well be that there are better Read More
“Now you’ve got my adrenaline going,” Sir Peter Hall is telling me.
I’d got him onto the subject that is his personal crusade, his virtual obsession in the realm of Shakespearean playing: just how to speak the speech, or “verse-speaking,” as it’s known in the trade. It’s a crusade he’s now brought to the New Read More
One Macbeth in a week is reasonable; two looks like conscientiousness. But I’m afraid we must blame the unfortunate Kelsey Grammer, whose brief appearance as Macbeth on Broadway had me speeding up Interstate 95 to catch Anthony Sher’s lauded Macbeth at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Mr. Sher is a true Shakespearean and Read More
Richard Nelson’s Goodnight Children Everywhere is a disturbing and lovely domestic drama about the loss of childhood. With this fine American playwright, who has made a habit of understanding the English better than the English, we are invariably in good, nicely unsafe hands.
His latest play, first produced two years ago at his de facto Read More
It always staggers me when New Yorkers-and New York theater critics, to boot-prostrate themselves before the altar of British theater, howling: “Thank you! Thank you! We are so inferior! Show us the way! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
To which the English, hurrying home with sacks full of awards and cash, reply: “No, Read More
