“What makes me a Christian to you, makes you a Jew to me.” So says the title character in Nathan the Wise, directed by Adam Immerwahr. Originally written in the 18th century as a morality play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Michael Bloom has written this adaptation making its world premiere. A morality play can have a tough line to walk, especially to a modern audience – to be empathetic and entertaining without being moralizing and pat –
Amanda N. Gunther | TheatreBloom
“Just think,” says our heroine to the
playwright John Dryden. “You can write about real women, real emotion, real
feminine feelings and they will all be played by a real woman!!” The men glance
at one another in quizzical, wide-eyed shock: who on earth would want to see
that?
Well, our Nellie knows. We all do. After all, wink, it’s the year
of the woman: 1665.
The real King John of England has a murky reputation. We know him for the Magna Carta. We know him as a villain from the tales of Robin Hood. And, at a stretch, we know him as Shakespeare’s earliest monarch, chronologically. Folger Theatre capitalizes on a chance to tell the rarely-told tale of this questionable king in its current production of Shakespeare’s King John, directed by Aaron Posner.
As the Folger describes,
Macbeth at the Folger Theatre is unlike any production you will have seen before. That’s a guarantee the Folger can make as they stage for the first time since its origination Macbeth by William Davenant, a Restoration-era adaptation of Shakespeare’s text. Director Robert Richmond, in a collaboration with scholars and the Folger Consort musicians, presents a production that is the result of years of research and work to present something unseen by a modern audience.
He that loves to be flattered with worthy of the flattery. What if that being flattered is deserving of the flattery? Are they too then still worthy of the flattery? Perhaps even more so! Folger Theatre, in particular Director Robert Richmond, deserves a great deal of flattery for the current production of Timon of Athens, closing out the 2016/2017 season upon the stage inside the great Folger Shakespeare Library. Under Robert Richmond’s judiciously rendered vision and modernization,
Love is merely a madness; there is a madness running rampant through the forest of Arden— strewing its favors hither and thither, mostly in the form of poetic verse all about the stage and the house of The Folger Theatre. As You Like It, the Bard’s great love story among the comedies, comes to the 2017-side of the season under the Direction of Gaye Taylor Upchurch and brings with it a thorough examination of love in many flavorful varieties.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. On the Folger Theatre stage, they have their entrances and their exits, all overseen, given form and structure, and creatively envisioned by Director Gaye Taylor Upchurch. In a TheatreBloom exclusive interview, we sit down with the show’s Director to get her take on what’s up with As You Like It.
Thank you for giving us some time,
Away in a manger, a fluffy sheep lies; a thief and his wifey have hidden their prize! The sheep it was stolen from shepherds at night, the thief and his wifey shall pay for their slight! Not exactly the Christmas Story everyone remembers when the angel came to announce the babe in the manger in Bethlehem, but quite the merry tale of revelry and celebration, this Second Shepherds’ Play. Returning to The Folger Theatre,
The truth within a lie. Isn’t that a quaint little sentence that sums up Shakespeare or most of it at any rate? It is if you’re playwright Aaron Posner and you’ve been commissioned to step away from your exceedingly brilliant modern riffs on Chekhov and step into a variation on the Bard’s The Merchant of Venice. Closing out the 2015/2016 season at Folger Theatre, Posner’s latest world premiere District Merchants,
Lords and ladies, sinners and saints, draw close your ear and may to it the Folger Theatre bring pleasure with their presentation of The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production of Pericles. Neither comedy nor tragedy nor history but well containing aspects of all, this exceptional production is a delightful incarnation of the way Shakespeare intended his work to be experienced. Seen, heard, felt, and absorbed, this mythical tale, as Directed by Joseph Haj,