When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
Now is a time to speak, I harken! Can my heart consent to let my tongue throw out such words? Such words as Jacobean Comedy? Quizzically oxymoronic in its nature, the notion that something humorous came out of the era of brutal bloody tragedies often circling like flagrant vultures around things like depravity and incest is preposterous. Until you see A King and No King, appearing now as the lighter half of The Incest Rep at Brave Spirits Theatre.
Let’s face it: Parma is a nasty, nasty place. It’s got people cheating on their spouses, and plots of revenge, even before it gets all incesty. Which, of course, it does, this being part of Brave Spirits’ Incest Rep, along with A King and No King, by Beaumont and Fletcher. Those Jacobeans liked their plays dark, and that’s perfect to help Brave Spirits’ pledge of “Verse and Violence”.
The most available bachelorette in Parma is the beautiful Annabella,
If the good truth were known, it would be spoke aloud that The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory has an impressive production of The Winter’s Tale to trod upon its boards the full month of April this year of 2016. What makes it so impressive, you ask? Not the fact that like at all BSF shows there is universal lighting a plenty and live music before during and at the end of the performance— both tools of the Bard’s day which serves well this merry band of players in their authentic Shakespeareance,
Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona is, by turns, hilarious and horrifying, and it’s hard to know which of these is more daunting to a director approaching the play. Annapolis Shakespeare Company‘s Sally Boyett conquers both with flying colors. Her 1920’s-inspired Two Gents is sharp, incisive, fearless, and polished.
Proteus and Valentine (Patrick Truler and Joel Ottenheimer) are young friends on the verge of manhood. Proteus loves Julia (Amy Pastoor),
Tis indeed summer and that to the world of the Bard means Much Ado About Nothing. And the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory is no exception to that rule as they mount their first in-the-round production this summer. Taking the well recognized comic back to its simplistic basics, the BSF strips away the scenery and all the other convolutions that can often clog-up Shakespeare’s wittiest comedy and present it in its original essence.