Month: August 2011

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday, August 7, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

All the best parts of Julius Caesar happen before intermission, which generally falls after Mark Antony's rabble-rousing public address. The conspiracy, the assassination, the dueling eulogies—that's all over and done with, leaving only the frenzied descriptions of off-stage battles and the inevitable suicides. It is, I suppose, a tribute to director Lucy Bailey that the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the play retains some energy through what sometimes feels like a very extended denouement. I can never muster much sympathy for Brutus, but this time I at least felt some of the drama.

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, August 6, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Shakespeare's go-to plot device of women passing themselves off as men always requires some suspension of disbelief, but As You Like It, which features the strangest example of the ruse, requires more suspension than most. Not only does Orlando, who met and became infatuated with Rosalind when she was a lady of the court, not recognize her when she's presenting herself as a boy named Ganymede, he also accepts Ganymede's eccentric suggestion that he woo Ganymede as if the boy were Rosalind to prove his love for her. To be fair, Orlando is supposed to be naïve and uneducated (that is, in fact, why Rosalind is interested in correcting some of his sillier ideas about love under her guise as Ganymede), but honestly, is he blind too?

Of course this is a comedy, not naturalistic drama, and the Royal Shakespeare Company makes Rosalind's subterfuge—and by extension her relationship with Orlando—more compelling than in any other production I've seen. The performances are lovely, for starters, but beyond that, the production as a whole creates a magical, increasingly optimistic mood—like sunlight slowly breaking through clouds. Under that spell, accepting the absurd premise doesn't seem so hard, and besides, it's worth the leap.

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Friday, August 5, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Romeo and Juliet can be a dreamy, romantic play, but it doesn’t have to be. That is, in fact, one of the things that makes the play so fascinating, so rewatchable: the lovers, their relationship, and the world around them shifts with every actor, every director.

Personally, I like a coolly clear-eyed interpretation, never glorifying the lovestruck teenagers for their heedlessness, perhaps going so far as to subvert the very idea of “love at first sight,” but even I found director Rupert Goold’s Romeo and Juliet a bit harsh: still tragic but also deeply cynical, in a way that undermines the drama of the play. I enjoyed the production immensely, and the staging was spectacular, but his star-crossed lovers didn’t capture my imagination the way others have.