From the monthly archives: January 2014
A couple of days ago, Howard Sherman, a US “arts administrator and producer,” “communications, marketing, and branding consultant,” and “theatre pundit” published a blog post in which he excoriates directors and theatre companies for their invidious practice of “improv[ing] playwrights’ work” — altering words, adding or cutting characters, removing (the horror, the horror) […]
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So, Mark Rylance.
It may be a bit contrary of me to say that Rylance is the single most remarkable — really, the only remarkable — thing about the current Broadway productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III. Both shows, and particularly the comedy, have after all been hailed by US critics as virtually unprecedented […]
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Three of the shows I saw in New York had something in common: all were remarkable and memorable although none of them took an especially interesting, inventive, innovative, least of all radical approach. Like Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, all these productions refrained from adopting much of a discernible position vis-a-vis the text they were […]
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Needless to say, this is a spoilerfest.
I had my problems with all of Season 3 of Sherlock, to be honest. “The Empty Hearse” was overstuffed with endless montages of swooping shots of Central London and hectic jump cuts around the Tube, all of which seemed designed to illustrate mental activity but really only worked […]
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One of the most striking aspects of my current New York theatre binge: the programs theatres hand out around here. Or rather, don’t hand out. Judging from the standard-issue brochure, audiences here are supposed to care, first and foremost, about actors. What little specific information there is about any one show is typically printed as […]
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Visually, this is a stunning production. The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, opened this season, is a remarkable space — a broad and deep thrust four stories high, configurable with all sorts of trap doors and hydraulic elements, and Julie Taymor, unsurprisingly, makes highly effective and imaginative use of all these features. The central element in the […]
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Recent Comments
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
