Word: shakespeareanly
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Interviewer: Of course, you went on to write the masterpieces of Otello and Falstaff, so your Shakespearean credentials are well in order. And Sir Peter, director of Britain's National Theater, obviously knows the Bard. His staging is almost cinematic in spots, using dissolves from one scene to another and staging a climactic final battle in stop action. What advice did you give...
EVER SINCE CONTEMPORARY SPEECH ceased to resemble Shakespeare's glorious language. every Shakespearean production anywhere-regardless of setting, costumes, or American accent-has unfolded in its own particular fantasy world. No extremity of stripling down or jazzing up can create the illusion that a Hamlet or a Romeo and Juliet takes place in the modern world; on the other hand, only the most through and scholarly accumulation of historical trivia can even hope to transport the audience back to the actual world the Bard wrote in. Between the two extremes fall the infinite ways Shakespeare is actually played-each...
Such missteps are rare. The bulk of the show-bulky indeed at three and a quarters' hours running time-is authoritative despite a setting and idiom which differ emphatically from the Shakespearean, the modern, or anything yet between the two. This Verona, though at times unsubtle suburban in tone, also glitters with an extra vagina sense of the exotic...
...ONLY TWO SPOTS does Rush trip over the illusion he has created--and in each case the self-consciousness of the directorial gesture, not its content, spoils the effect. Before the play starts, a spotlight focuses on the stage's real rolling un Shakespearean tones what the audience's curiosity as to "what's behind the curtain," game show style. Far bit for this reviewer to reveal what in Fact happens when the curtains part later on. But if the admittedly stunning effect is intended to be integral to the production, why bill it to all intents and purposes...
...first Shakespearean role after 46 years of acting, Anne Baxter, 59 (The Razor's Edge, All About Eve), managed in one falling swoop to live up to two of the stage's hoariest bywords: "Break a leg" and "The show must go on." At the opening of Stratford, Conn.'s American Shakespeare Theater production of Hamlet, Baxter, playing Queen Gertrude to Christopher Walken's Hamlet, was maneuvering herself and her 20-lb. dress down a darkened backstage staircase when she tumbled, breaking her foot and spraining her ankle. Baxter then made it through the second half...