In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review American Shakespeare Center’s webcast of Othello. Here’s an excerpt.
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Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center was one of the first theater companies in America to grapple with the pandemic lockdown by streaming webcasts taped in its 300-seat Blackfriars Playhouse, a modern historical recreation of the wood-and-plaster interior of an Elizabethan-style theater built in London in 1596. Now ASC has become one of the first American companies to resume live performances, mounting indoor and outdoor stagings of “Othello” and “Twelfth Night” that can also be viewed online….
Having just written about Florida Repertory Theater’s “Twelfth Night” and longing to see a show of a seriousness befitting the gravity of the present moment, I chose to view “Othello” from the comfort of my apartment in Manhattan. I’ve been impressed by all of ASC’s webcasts to date, but this one, directed by Ethan McSweeny, the company’s artistic director, stands out boldly from its predecessors. Taped with a four-camera setup, it conveys with satisfying clarity the experience of seeing a show in ASC’s Blackfriars Playhouse, and it approaches “Othello” in a way that puts across its immediacy without imposing an anachronistic high-concept overlay on a masterpiece that needs no help to make its ever-relevant points about the viciously corrosive power of racism.
At first glance, this looks like a traditional “Othello,” played without scene breaks on an open stage. The Elizabethan-style costumes are colorful but conventional and the stage is decorated mainly by candles (which are put to show-stopping use). But Mr. McSweeny pulls one jaw-dropping surprise: Othello is played by a woman, Jessika D. Williams, who is more than up to the challenge posed by one of Shakespeare’s most demanding parts and puts her bold stamp on every line….
“Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray.”
Itzhak Perlman plays a movement from Wieniawski’s Second Violin Concerto on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was broadcast on May 10, 1964, when Perlman was nineteen years old:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
I went to the new Snapple Theater Center Fiftieth and Broadway to see a press preview of the new revival of The Fantasticks. As anyone who knows anything about theater can tell you, the original production of The Fantasticks opened in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a 153-seat off-off-Broadway theater down in Greenwich Village, where it ran until 2002, racking up 17,162 performances before it finally posted its closing notice. (The building has since been sold and is about to be converted into a luxury apartment house.)
As I walked into the theater, I realized that it had been thirty-four years to the day since I’d last seen a performance of The Fantasticks. I always meant to catch it at the Sullivan Street Playhouse but never got around to doing so, just as I’ve never been to Radio City Music Hall or the Central Park Zoo. Like most New Yorkers, I figured it would run forever, and so took its existence for granted until it was too late….
