TT: Toga party

The 2007-08 Broadway season (about which more here) is over at last, and I’m on the road again. My first stop was Washington, D.C., where the Shakespeare Theatre Company is performing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in repertory in its new theater. I saw both productions last Saturday and reviewed them in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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What does a “traditional” Shakespeare production look like? If the phrase still makes you think of Brits in tights, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you haven’t been to a theater lately. Ever since Orson Welles tossed convention out the window in 1936 and turned “Macbeth” into a voodoo orgy set in Haiti, the old-fashioned way of staging the Bard has grown less and less common with every passing season. Nearly all modern-day directors now treat his plays as unfinished canvases on which they paint their own up-to-date theatrical pictures, sometimes to unforgettably individual effect and sometimes to unforgettably fatuous effect. Most of the best Shakespeare productions I’ve reviewed in this space–and all of the worst ones–have been revisionist stagings executed along Wellesian lines. As far as my generation of playgoers is concerned, this is what it means to be traditional.
That’s why I was excited to hear that the Shakespeare Theatre Company would be performing “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Julius Caesar” in repertory at its brand-new 775-seat downtown theater here–and that the two productions would feature a single cast dressed in traditional Roman costumes. The idea of presenting these plays in tandem may seem obvious, since they share some of the same characters, but I’ve never seen it done before, and Michael Kahn, the company’s artistic director, has opted to emphasize their commonality still further by using the same costume designer, Jennifer Moeller, for both shows and performing them on the same unit set, a stylized rendering of an Elizabethan open stage created by James Noone….
Mr. Kahn, who directed “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a smart craftsman whose past productions include a straight-down-the-center “Othello” that ranks high on my list of memorable Shakespeare productions–as well as an unintentionally comical Gen-X “Hamlet” that ranks near the bottom. This time around he’s skipped the nonsense and opted for a speedy, uncommonly vivid staging in which Suzanne Bertish plays Cleopatra as a woman of a certain age who is sexually besotted with a visibly younger Mark Antony (Andrew Long). Ms. Bertish, who made a tremendous splash on Broadway a quarter-century ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of “Nicholas Nickleby,” gives a performance of thrilling and alarming intensity…
David Muse, the company’s associate artistic director, has staged “Julius Caesar” to somewhat less potent effect, in part because his production lacks the clean, uncluttered directness of Mr. Kahn’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” But the results still work very well, and the cast is every bit as impressive….
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Read the whole thing here.