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Friday, July 15, 2011
Arts A summer of Shakespeare
Posted By Perry Tannenbaum on Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 12:40 PM
Over the space of two or three days, you can see as much Shakespeare at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival has presented in the past five years. Up in the mountains of Ashland, Oregon, where temperatures are also 30º cooler than you’ll find in the sweltering Tarheel State, I saw productions of Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry IV.2, and Julius Caesar last week while attending the annual American Theatre Critics Association meeting.
Productions of the Bard have become more daring at OSF than they were when I last visited in 2002 – to the great discomfiture of purists, I’d assume. All kinds of Spanish music infiltrated Measure as OSF’s artistic director Bill Rauch transported the action to an American Vienna that might have been possible in the time of Zorro, though costume designer ESosa was not on that wavelength. If the brilliant 2002 Caesar accentuated the pro-democracy politics of Brutus and his party – in strong contrast to the fascist tyranny of Antony – the 2011 production, directed by Amanda Dehnert, was even more intrusive and ahistorical, virtually changing the title.
Are you ready for Julia Caesar? Dehnert doled the role of Julius to Vilma Silva, while Caesar’s spouse Calpurnia was axed from the chronicle.
Back at home, as NC Shakes rebrands and regroups, not presenting any Shakespeare in 2011, the center of gravity in our state’s Elizabethan output has emphatically shifted westward from High Point to Asheville and Charlotte. In our mountains, Montford Players is already deep into its 39th season, including a unique double feature last month that paired Comedy of Errors with one of the first US productions of Double Falsehood, a comedy newly determined to have been partly written by Shakespeare. All’s Well That Ends Well is currently running in free performances outdoors at the Hazel Robinson Amphitheatre, with Julius Caesar to follow on August 12.
That will be a prime time for Bard, for Collaborative Arts Theatre is continuing their summertime Charlotte Shakespeare Festival with King Lear, August 3-14 at Spirit Square, with a Charlotte acting legend in the title role. I’ve already caught Graham Smith as the mighty, more-sinned-against-than-sinning king in High Point when NC Shakes presented their Lear in 2008, so I’d advise against missing it here.
Down in Rock Hill, Shakespeare Carolina at Winthrop will be winding up its summer with a parallel run of The Tempest that same week, August 3-7, at Johnson Theatre, a rather handsome classical venue if you haven’t explored the Winthrop U campus recently. Meanwhile you can catch up with Shakespeare Carolina’s freewheeling approach to the Bard right now, since Two Gentlemen of Verona is currently at Johnson Theatre through Sunday afternoon, transposed to 1980s Milan. Gender-bending and fashion runways are involved in the zany concept. Now that’s Italian!
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