Final analysis: Cutting Ball’s Tempest is a head-shrinker
High-concept Shakespeare gives me a rash. I should modify that. Most of the time, when directors impose some great new twist, time period, setting, the result merely obscures rather than heightens the play itself.
That said, my favorite Merry Wives of Windsor of all time was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version, which was set in an “I Love Lucy”-like 1950s. The laughs were so big the actors had to hold and hold and hold. I was sure they had tinkered with the script, but when I ran to my Riverside Shakespeare after, it was all word for word. If a director’s concept pulls you deeper into Shakespeare’s world, I’m all for it.
When I heard that director Rob Melrose, one of the brilliant minds behind Cutting Ball Theater was turning The Tempest into a three-person chamber piece set in a psychiatrist’s office at the bottom of a swimming pool, I was hesitant but intrigued.
Marvelous Much Ado closes Cal Shakes season
Much Ado About Nothing can be one of Shakespeare’s trickier romantic comedies. It’s full of sparring lovers, great lines and thoroughly entertaining comic bits. But it also contains some harsh drama, faked death and edgy mischief making. Capturing just the right tone can help ease the audience through all those shifts, and that’s what eludes so many directors of the play.
Thankfully, California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone finds fresh ways to meld all of Shakespeare’s fragments into a seamless and captivating whole.
Roger Rees ramps up What You Will
"I'm so old people will say, `Is he still alive?'"
That's Roger Rees exaggerating people's response to his arrival in San Francisco with his one-man show What You Will, an evening of Shakespeare, stories about Shakespeare and about performing Shakespeare, that begins performances today (July 18) at the American Conservatory Theater.
The Welsh-born Rees, 64, is one of those extraordinary actors who can seemingly do anything. He won a Tony Award in 1982 for his work in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a gargantuan, two-part undertaking in which Rees played the leading role. He's also familiar from his many TV appearances – Robin Colcord on "Cheers," Lord John Marbury on "The West Wing" and more recently, Dr. Colin Marlow, the surgeon who patted Cristina Yang's ass on "Grey's Anatomy."
Rees also co-wrote, with his partner, Rick Elice (co-writer of Jersey Boys) a hit comedy thriller called Double, Double (which ran for a year in London's West End with Rees starring opposite Jane Lapotaire), and he ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts for three years.
As previously stated, the man can do just about anything.