TT: Lincoln Center buys British

Lincoln Center Festival has announced plans to bring the Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford-upon-Avon to New York next summer for a six-week season of five Shakespeare plays–and to build a replica of the auditorium of the RSC’s nine-hundred-seat Courtyard Theatre inside the Park Avenue Armory, where the season will take place.
Charles Isherwood of the New York Times likes this idea, but he thinks the replica auditorium should be left in place permanently at the armory and used as the home of a new resident classical theater company. I have a different idea: I’d like to see a half-dozen of America’s best regional theaters invited to perform on the RSC stage as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2012.
Both ideas, needless to say, have their merits. But why is Lincoln Center Festival undertaking so spectacular and costly a venture in the first place? Is it solely because the RSC is artistically deserving of such lavish treatment? Or are other, less admirable factors in play? These questions are the subject of my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. To find out what I think about the RSC’s coming New York residency, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.