Word: papp
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...surest way to persuade a movie or TV star to appear onstage for minimal pay is to offer a juicy part in Shakespeare: the prestige seems to be all but irresistible. That stratagem has worked time and again for producer Joseph Papp for the 33 summers that he has staged free shows in New York City's Central Park. Rarely if ever has it reaped him a richer harvest of celebrities than in the Twelfth Night that opened this week...
...L.A.T.C.'s Bushnell readily concedes an inspirational debt to Davidson, and to Joseph Papp, whose Public Theater in Manhattan is a similar urban complex. But Bushnell has fashioned an institution all its own, against perhaps tougher odds than faced either of the others. Like the Public, the L.A.T.C. tends to excuse artistic lapses on the grounds of good intentions: its present offering of a black South African tract, Bopha!, performed by the authors, is exuberant but crude. The other show now running, however -- the debut of Kingfish by local writer Marlane Meyer -- is an adroitly staged, intelligently acted...
...ended in the commercial theater. Practically everything that comes to Broadway nowadays is funded by committee and imported wholesale from somewhere else. Off-Broadway, however, the American theater's boldest, most ambitious, quirkiest, most pedantic and at times most infuriating showman holds sway more forcefully than ever. Joseph Papp has built, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a personal barony more than an institution. Although he sometimes describes his $14 million annual operation as the biggest "regional" theater in the nation, its six-theater complex and staff of 125 stand in the shadows of his outsize personality and mercurial...
Last week Papp unveiled what he described as his biggest project yet: a six-year, 40-show plan to stage the complete plays and poetry of the writer to whom he has remained unwaveringly committed throughout all his kaleidoscopic activity, Shakespeare. Said Papp: "There are fewer new plays I want to do, audiences are enthusiastic for these classics, and actors need to play these parts to become great...
Actors seem to agree. Julius Caesar is in rehearsal with Al Pacino and Martin Sheen, each working for $400 a week. Papp is lining up Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline for Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where he regularly mounts a summer season. And A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose opening last week officially launched the series, features F. Murray Abraham (Oscar winner for Amadeus), Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime, Ordinary People) and Carl Lumbly (TV's Cagney and Lacey...