Sydney Shakespeare Fest
Jan. 5-Feb. 12, Sydney, Australia: In its fifth year, Sydney Shakespeare Festival stages Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew in an outdoor theater that overlooks the Sydney harbor. For more info, click here.
Perth’s Bard in the Park
Jan. 6-Feb. 4, Perth, Western Australia: Shakespeare WA presents The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in Shakespeare in the Park. For more info, click here.
Noises Off in Pasadena
Jan. 6-15, Pasadena, CA: A Noise Within theater company stages Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, a farce about the bumbling attempts of some veteran actors to premiere a new play. For more details, click here.
STC from Cuba to Rock Opera
Jan. 7-Mar. 4, Washington, DC: Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Cuban-set Much Ado About Nothing closes this month; The Two Gentlemen of Verona opens, with a straight rendition and a concurrent rock version. For more info on Much Ado, see article on right; for more details on both shows, click here.
Clybourne Park in LA
Jan. 11-Feb. 26, Los Angeles, CA: The Center Theatre Group presents Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun and Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park. For more on Norris's play, see article on the right. For tickets, click here.
U Toronto's Cabaret
Jan. 13-28, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto's Hart House Theatre presents Cabaret, based on the play by John van Druten, with stories by Christopher Isherwood. In Nazi Germany, people take refuge from reality in the pleasures of the cabaret. For more details, click here.
Cyrano at Wayne State U
Jan. 13-March 10, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Theatre stages Frank Langella’s Cyrano, an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Wordsmith Cyrano, himself smitten with Roxane, helps the handsome Christian woo her. For more info, click here.
Georgetown U One Acts
Jan. 19-20, Washington DC: Georgetown University stages an evening of three one-act plays: Neil LaBute's Liars Club and Coax, and Wendy Wasserstein's Waiting for Philip Glass. The common thread: the idea that all human interactions involve performance. Click here for further info.
New Taming at Stratford
Jan. 19-Feb.10, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: The Royal Shakespeare Company debuts its 2012 Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio (David Caves) attempts to tame wild Katharina (Lisa Dillon). Click here for more info.
Henry IV Revised in Frisco
Jan. 20-21, San Francisco, CA: A.C.T.'s (American Conservatory Thearte) Master of Fine Arts students perform Thieves--an adaptation of Henry IV, Part I including drama, live music, prose, and physical storytelling. Click here for more info.
Chekov’s Seagull at Yale
Jan. 24-28, New Haven, CT: Yale School of Drama stages Paul Schmidt’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Dubbed a "comedy" by Chekhov, the play features "years of petty squabbles and thwarted love affairs" that "breed miserable hilarity in the countryside." For ticket info, click here.
U Notre Dame's Twelfth Night
Jan. 25-27, Notre Dame, IN: Five "Actors from the London Stage" perform Shakespeare's comedy about shipwrecked twins, unlikely love, and mistaken identity at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. For more details, click here.
South African Shakespeare
Jan. 27-28, Cape Town, South Africa: High-school actors stage a fundraiser on behalf of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, South Africa, starring in abridged performances of Macbeth and As You Like It. Click here for more info.
Northwestern U's Bluest Eye
Jan. 27-Feb. 5, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University performs Lydia Diamond’s adaptation of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. As in the novel, Pecola yearns for blue eyes that will make her beautiful and ease her way. For more details, click here.
Lear’s Follies in Portland
Jan. 28, 30, Portland, OR: Portland Shakespeare Project premieres Lear's Follies. An adaptation of King Lear, the play, by C. S. Whitcomb, depicts a tobacco-empire family in 1929 Virginia.
For more details, click here.
WRITING CONTESTS Ohio State U Short Fiction
Jan. postmark deadline; Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press welcomes original short fiction of 150 to 300 typed pages. The prize consists of publication, including a $1,500 cash advance against royalties. Click here for more details.
A Consensus on Best Novels of 2011
Opinions fly over what the 10 best novels of 2011 are. To see which titles the reviewers had in common, we correlated several "best novels" lists (Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, NPR, Slate Magazine, The Guardian, and Los Angeles Public Library). Here, in reverse order of popularity, is the result:
10. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
Fifth book in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, the fantasy, among other threads, involves King Stannis Baratheon's struggle for the Iron Throne.
9. Open City by Teju Cole
A young Nigerian doctor wanders Manhattan, examining his own life and encountering people of all cultures and classes.
8. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Published posthumously, the unfinished novel, set largely in an IRS office, concerns the meaning of life, value of work, and nature of boredom.
7. The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
An aristocratic Cambridge student writes a poem on the inside of a 16-year-old girl's autograph book and changes their families' lives forever.
6. The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
A doctor who arrives in the Balkans seeks answers regarding the death of her grandfather and, in doing so, recalls his folktales.
5. There but for the by Ali Smith
Midway through a dinner party, a guest gets up from the table, locks himself in a room, and refuses to leave.
4. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
A research scientist at a pharmaceutical company is sent to the jungles of Brazil to track down her mentor.
3. The Marriage Plot by Jefferey Eugenides
In an atmosphere charged with theory and literary figures (Derrida, Tolstoy, Austen, and Hemingway), an English major must choose between two men.
2. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
A middle-aged man is forced to reconsider what he understands to be true when confronted with childhood friends.
1. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
A baseball player at a Midwest liberal arts college looks forward to success in the major leagues but gets thrown off his path
Chad Harbach and top-pick novel.
Cuban Much Ado Stirs Controversy
Lately two theater companies have modified the setting of Shakespeare comedies to 1930s Cuba. How curious! Two U.S. productions in the same theatrical season make the same modification. This fall in Pasadena, California, A Noise Within adapted Twelfth Night to the Cuban setting (to mixed reviews). Also, Shakespeare Theatre Company did likewise in its rendition of Much Ado About Nothing in Washington DC (to mostly high praise). In Much Ado's case, the shift involved adding some touches: a few Spanish words (Havana, pesos, cha-cha), conga drums, sleek 1930s dresses, a haciendas. We still get the original tale of two pairs of lovers: Claudio and Hero (she is falsely accused of infidelity), and Beatrice and Benedick (they compete verbally). Though the performers have won high accolades for their verbal banter, and other pluses, the run has gone less than perfectly. The "Latinization" of two names (in italics below) has stirred controversy. (Officer Dogberry speaks to the First Watchman about who most deserves to be leader of the watch [Act 3, Sc. 3, 10-11]):
DOGBERRY: "First, who think you the most desartless man to be constable?
1ST WATCHMAN: "Hugh Oatcake, sir, or George Seacoal; for they can write and read."
The names are a riff on regional rustics in Shakespeare's England, puns on food and industry from the characters' places of origin. In this vein, Shakespeare Theater Company replaced the names with Juan Huevos (i.e., eggs) and Jose Frijoles (i.e., beans), to objectionable effect. Latino theater artists protested—loudly, whereupon the company promptly restored Shakespeare's original names. An inadvertent mistake, they explained, reverting to the originals mid-run. A complainant (director Jose Carrasquillo) clarifed the objection: if the setting had instead been switched to the antebellum South, he observed, names such as Johnny Fried Chicken or Johnny Gumbo would likely never have been used (The Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2011). More generally, the incident illustrates the lessons one can learn from theatrical daring.
R: Ryan Garbayo as Claudio and Kate Hurster as Hero. Photo Scott Suchman.
2011 Pulitzer Prize Winner Questions Racial Progress
L.A.'s Center Theater Group has orchestrated a dual opening. Now showing at the Music Center is Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, about a black family's struggle to make it in white America circa 1950. The work takes its title from the Langston Hughes poem "Harlem." A second play, Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park, follows suit. Set in 2009, Clybourne Park is the fictional white neighborhood that the black Younger family is moving into at the end of A Raisin.
Norris's later drama has wowed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, winning the 2011 Olivier Award in London and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the U.S. Debuting Off Broadway in February 2010, Clybourne Park took the West Coast by storm a year later in a San Francisco performance by the A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater). "Bitingly humorous," said San Francisco's The Examiner; "brilliant ensemble," added The Huffington Post. The play centers on two transitional periods in the suburban Chicago neighborhood: 1959 and 2009. In Act 1, a Caucasian couple (whose war-veteran son has committed suicide) becomes first in the neighborhood to sell to a black family. In Act 2, the same home's African American owners have sold to a white couple, who plans to upgrade (i.e., gentrify) the residence. The only character taken from A Raisin is Karl Lindner, who in Act 1 tries his best to convince the black family not to buy into the white neighborhood. In Act 2, Lena, a grandniece of the black family has reservations about selling to the white couple. Reviewers agreed that A.C.T.'s production, directed by Jonathan Moscone, did fine credit to the racially vexed issues brought out by such incidents in the play. This month's L.A. staging offers a special treat: the production features the original Off-Broadway director (Pam MacKinnon) and cast. See the listing on the left for details; click below for an A.C.T. performance clip.
