Archive: July, 2011
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Nobody had a makeup artist in the Elizabethan theater, or a lighting designer, choreographer, or even a director.
Or a publicist — although Patrick Mulcahy, the head of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, has been doing a pretty good job spiriting audiences to the production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which the festival is staging as if Shakespeare had just written it.
“The actors are doing it more or less under the same circumstances they would have experienced 400 years ago,” Mulcahy told the audience at the curtain speech of another festival show, explaining just what that means: five days of rehearsal as opposed to the usual nearly month-long period standard at the festival, no designers, no director. You learn it, you block out the movements on stage, you open it.
Shakespeare may laugh today at the legion of stagecraft artists and the bureaucratic machine that keeps a theater company in motion — but he’d also probably marvel at the polish that all those elements rub on a production. Still, there’s no doubt that audiences at this year’s festival, at DeSales University near Bethlehem, are getting a big bonus.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Pity poor Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, fictional parents of five fictional but very real girls. Five daughters will give any parent gray hair or none at all, what with hormones racing though the house, all those clothes, all those rivalries. And all that boy talk.
Never mind that the Bennets and their girls’ entanglements came on the scene just shy of two centuries ago, in Jane Austen’s sprawling Pride and Prejudice. And never mind that the rigidity of an unforgiving British class system colors the common Bennets’ every aspiration; the girl thing in American culture today comes not by birth, but ownership — the right shoes, sheets and shades. (Boys are not immune.)
So when I saw the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s sweet production of Pride and Prejudice, which sweeps straight through the novel, it all seemed very current, even given its 19th-century language that was talky for the time, but is charmingly prosaic now. The show has a bang-up cast — the exact same players who alternately perform Hamlet, making a true repertory and the first the festival’s done in its 20 years.
The endearing stage version of Pride and Prejudice is adapted by Jon Jory, the former head of Louisville’s Actors Theatre and a prolific adapter of two-ton novels; he also brought Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to the stage. If you’re a Jane Austen fan, you’ll be especially delighted, because Jory’s dialogue and smart narrative flows straight from Austen’s pen. Even the verbal seams he creates to stitch scenes together could have been written by Austen.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
