Click here to view the embedded video.

The rest of the proposed cast ain’t too shabby neither, with Vanessa Redgrave as the not-to-be-messed-with Volumnia, as well as William Hurt and Jessica Chastain, presumably as Menenius and Virgilia.

Just for fun, here’s a video clip of Toby Stephens as Coriolanus on stage:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

To read the article, Did

David Tennant, better known among non-Shax geeks for his starring gig as Dr. Who and his creepy little turn as Barty Crouch, Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is reprising his famous Hamlet for broadcast on BBC television.

We here at bardolatry are doubly excited in that the role of Claudius is to be played by Patrick Stewart, who was a terrific Claudius almost a quarter of a century ago in the BBC version starring Derek Jacobi. It will be great fun to see what he does with the role this time.

For more on the production, click here for the Telegraph UK article

photo by Jenny Graham

by Debra Murphy

Back in January, before the 2009 season got underway, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival hosted a Town Hall meeting in the Bowmer Theatre. Although the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips that evening was the potential effect of the Great Recession on the Festival, another (not entirely unrelated) topic was the inclusion of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man on the 2009 docket, to be directed by none other than the new AD, Bill Rauch. When Rauch asked the largely townie audience how many were surprised by his choice, I was one of many to raise a hand.

Bill Rauch then went on to ask how many were “pleased” and how many “disappointed” by the inclusion of an American musical, albeit a “classic” one, in the OSF season; I was in the former group, though never a huge fan of The Music Man. My chief cause for joy in the selection was the thought that a successful staging of a musical, any musical, given all the song-and-dance talents among the Festival’s stable of artists, might inspire the OSF to try its hand at other musicals or comic operas. (Me, I long for a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. The Stratford Festival in Ontario, for instance, with only one or two operatically-trained singers, did a Mikado in the eighties to die for. Clan Murphy watches it on video at least once a year. But I digress.)

Back to the Town Hall: there were naysayers in the audience that night, too, and over the last few months I have occasionally heard comments or read op ed pieces in the Tidings espousing a negative interpretation of this little turn. These remarks were invariably accompanied by commentary on the evils of commercialism and concluded with dark allusions to the Decline of Western Civilization. Reading these aloud over the dinner table, I was frequently moved, in the bosom of my family, to quote the crude young Mozart of Amadeus about the musical establishment of his day—overly serious fellows who wrote in so lofty and tendentious a manner that they sounded as if they must (forgive me) “shit marble.”

Well, dang me, I believe I’m as devoted a fan as anyone of what Tony Curtis in Spartacus so deliciously referred to, in perfect earnest (and in a priceless Brooklyn accent) as “de Classics”. Before Clan Murphy lived in Ashland—when we could only come for a week to catch a few shows—we would invariably and unapologeticallly buy tickets to De Classics first, especially Shakespeare. But the notion that Rauch is leading the Festival down the primrose path by offering a musical–count ‘em, one–is beyond preposterous, especially when coupled with the suggestion that this is pandering to some lowest common (boxoffice) denominator.

God forbid that boxoffice should be a consideration in any arts organization not underwritten by Warren Buffett. God forbid a theatre should hope to sell lots of tickets (and stay solvent) in the middle of the biggest economic crisis since the Depression. And God forbid that it should be so at a Shakespeare festival, considering that Shakespeare was himself by all accounts dissed for similar considerations by his Oxbridgian contemporaries. I mean, I ask you, is The Music Man really that much fluffier than Comedy of Errors or Two Gentlemen of Verona?

Either way, Bill Rauch’s Music Man is not only helping keep the Festival solidly and perhaps surprisingly in the black this difficult season, it is also terrific good fun and a creative, lively, warm production. Rauch comes across in person as a mensch, and his temperament seems to color his work with an infectious humanism. Besides, what a showcase for Festival talent! Michael Elich, whom we in Clan Murphy like to refer to as the Hugh Jackman of the OSF, because he can do it all–sing, dance, make you laugh, cringe, cry, and all whilst looking pretty darn cute—was a perfect choice for con man Harold Hill, that walking (talking, whooping, jumping, cavorting) advertisement for The Secret. My personal favorite moments in the show involved Hill’s transformation of the bickering-school board-boys into barbershop-quartet buddies by means of Sleight of Hand and the Power of Positive Singing.

For more detailed discussions of the production’s particulars, which I will not get into here,  I invite readers to check out some of the review links at the end of the article. The main point I wanted to address about this particular show, which carries something of the fairy tale in its DNA, is that for the two and a half hours I was sitting in the audience, I didn’t think about the tanking economy once.

Escapism, you say? Well, it is my fervent view that Escapism (like—oh that word—Entertainment) is one of the primary purposes of theatre; of every manner of storytelling, in fact. It is not, as some think, a negligible species of time-killing at best and at worst, irresponsible pandering. It is the sine-qua-non flip side of the dramatic process of “holding the mirror up to nature”. In my experience, those who don’t get this usually suffer from incorrigible misanthrophy or else have, in pursuit of Wisdom, acquired Foolishness where they misplaced Foolery. Either way, like Puritans of old, they seem to mistake virtue for that famous dread that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

For all such curmudgeons, a reading assignment:  J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic essay On Fairy Stories. A brief excerpt:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Fürher’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot.

In these lean times, a little imaginary escape to River City might be just the vacation we all need.

Links:

to buy tickets to The Music Man, click here.

Daily Tidings review of MM by Robert H. Miller

Vicki Aldous DT article on Bill Rauch

OregonLive’s initially “skeptical” reviewer has a change of heart

He is, in short, the great Romantic hero: individualistic, poetical, brave — but also tragic, lonely, misunderstood. His “deformity” has made him bitterly self-conscious, sensitive to insult, but also a man set-apart, the envy and enemy of many. He battles a hundred men, throws away a year’s pay in one grand gesture, and composes sonnets while matching swords with dim-witted aristocrats. Talk about panache.

Who else could play this character but Gerard Depardieu? With his hulking frame and pudgy potato face, Depardieu’s looks are hardly of the marquee-idol variety. But what charisma! Whether playing Danton or Rodin or Cyrano or the Count of Monte Cristo, Depardieu invests his roles with passion, personality, and, yes, panache. He was made to order for the part of Cyrano. I defy any woman with a hint of Romance in her to resist Cyrano’s immense vitality, largeness of spirit, and a warrior-poet’s way with words. Listening to Depardieu speak Rostand’s lines is like hearing Gielgud intone Shakespeare: an aesthetic experience unto itself.

The movie itself is a handsome period piece with an appropriately lyrical and martial soundtrack. The other actors offer Depardieu excellent support. Rostand, who clearly loved Shakespeare, did not possess Shakespeare’s poetic or dramatic gifts (that said: who does or did?), but he had enough talent to transform the legendary Hercule-Savinien De Cyrano de Bergerac into an indelible icon of the stage and screen. For such a famous part, Depardieu comes as close to giving a definitive performance as possible, and we are the beneficiaries of his, Rostand’s, and Cyrano’s irrepressible panache.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s their initial write-up:

In 2005 the BUFVC, through its association with the Open University, was the recipient of a three-year Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, to create An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio.

The aim has been to deliver an authoritative online database of Shakespeare-related content in film, television, radio and video recordings, international in scope and dating from 1899 to the present day. It offers current and continuously updated distribution information and also identifies the location of copies in archive collections.

For more information on when the database will come fully online, or to search the test database, go here.

Says Hoberman:

A 15-part chronicle that drew upon “Richard II,” the two-part “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” the seldom staged three-part “Henry VI” and “Richard III,” the project was conceived by Peter Dews, a 30-year-old stage director and former schoolmaster, who persuaded the BBC to embark upon its first extended Shakespeare series. Mr. Dews’s production would be additionally remarkable for being broadcast live, with a continuing cast of young, largely unknown players, including Sean Connery as the fiery Hotspur, Robert Hardy (known these days as Harry Potter’s minister of magic, Cornelius Fudge) as Prince Hal and Judi Dench in the role of his flirtatious future bride, Katherine of France.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Buy BBC Hamlet on DVD from Ambrose Video
Buy BBC Hamlet on VHS from Ambrose Video

It is also available from Ambrose Video as part of a boxed set of 5 DVDs of the BBC Shakespeare Tragedies. (Enter “BARD” in the appropriate discount code box for a special $2 discount for bardolatry.com readers!) Or buy the set from Amazon (it is not available individually from Amazon at this time:

BBC Hamlet (1980)
starring Derek Jacobi
directed by Jonathan Miller

reviewed by Debra Murphy (This review was originally published in 2000, which explains the more recent, bracketed, interpolations)

There can be no such thing as a “definitive” Hamlet, let alone Hamlet. Nonetheless this relatively uncut version is the standard by which the Murphy family for many years tended to judge performances of Shakespeare’s most famous play. Notice I say “performances”, not “productions”; this production, like so many of the plays filmed for the BBC in the late seventies and early eighties, has the higgledy-piggledy feel of something thrown together on a very limited budget and in a matter of a very few weeks…which it apparently was.

The sets and costumes are minimal and uninspired, and I, for one, can’t discern much in the way of an overarching directorial vision—not altogether a bad thing, considering what is often done to Shakespeare’s complexities when the director is determined to shoehorn the play into his predetermined conceptual box. Still, this simple production boasts one of the finest collection of Shakespearean actors ever assembled, and every time I see it I come away thinking that acting doesn’t get much better.

So lets ignore production values and concentrate on the performances, beginning with Derek Jacobi’s.

Jacobi’s Prince of Denmark is a complex and embittered intellectual, whose occasional bursts of love, faith and even fury are transformed within an instant into weary skepticism. His first resort in any dilemma is to let fire with irony on his nearest and dearest. In a way, though hardly “innovative”—too many actors seem desperated to find (or invent) something wholly new in this too-famous character— Jacobi is giving us a very postmodern, almost “deconstructed” Hamlet–attractive, sensitive, even high-minded on the surface, but underneath a man whose sanity and even noble intentions are ultimately untrustworthy. The more I see this version of the play, the more I think the Ghost to be a lying goblin damned, or even a trick of Hamlet’s fantasy, and Hamlet himself more scourge than minister. “It hath made me mad” Hamlet cries, staring at his own two abusive hands in the nunnery scene—a reading of the line which makes more sense to me than any other I have heard. And  still we’d forgive this Hamlet anything, wouldn’t we?

Patrick Stewart portrays a Claudius wholly up to the challenge of overturning Hamlet’s world. No lecherous drunkard he, as in many production [cf. Alan Bates in the Zefirelli film version], but the capable CEO of the troubled state of Denmark. Hamlet underestimates him all the way. That Stewart happens to be blessed with one of the finest dramatic voices around underscores this Claudius’ capacity to woo both Queen and Court. In fact, this Claudius is so dangerous that Hamlet’s famous inaction becomes a reasonable reaction to circumstances, and it is no surprise when his only remaining option is direct, and tragic, action—too late.

Claire Bloom is the most beautiful, regal and sympathetic Gertrude I’ve ever seen. Hamlet misjudges her, too, if he thinks this woman is too old for passion. She is also a queen worth killing for, making Patrick Stewart’s job of finding Claudius’ motivations all the easier.

Eric Porter as Polonius also gives a benchmark performance. His Polonius is a generally well-meaning but cunning (and occasionally addle-pated) Chief Bureacrat of the realm. For those who love to suggest that Polonius was drawn from the real-life Lord Burghley, Elizbeth I’s chief-of-state, Porter even looks the part. Last but not least, Porter’s Polonius is likeable enough to make Laertes’ passionate desire for revenge something more than a point of honor.

The one real performance weakness in this otherwise stellar cast is Lalla Ward as Ophelia. Her Ophelia is such a simpering simpleton in the early scenes that one can’t imagine what Hamlet saw in her. Worse, her breathless, sobbing delivery in the big scenes quickly becomes downright irritating.

Least favorite scene: Lalla Ward’s Ophelia hiccoughing her way through the the “while I was sewing in my closet” scene.

Favorite scene: Jacobi [at least until Adrian Lester] gives my favorite reading of “Will you play upon this pipe” while dissecting Guildenstern’s self-serving seemings of friendship. Anyone who has ever felt himself “used” by a supposed friend or loved one will recognize these emotions.