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.
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.
Not a minute of our lives should stretch without some pleasure in it. The Folger Theatre is stretching nearly two and a half very deliberate minutes of theatrical pleasure into their current production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. One of the Bard’s tragic histories, or historical tragedies as it straddles both categories soundly, this alluring and tempting production is an enticing start for the 2017/2018 theatrical season at The Folger. Directed by Robert Richmond,
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,