Commonwealth-Shakespeare-Company
There are powerful intimations of modernity in the writhings of Edwin Booth’s psyche.
There is much to like in this outdoor production of Love’s Labor’s Lost — the time passes by quickly and there are plenty of smiles along the way.
For all of its sound and fury and smoke, the CSC’s version of King Lear is solid rather than surprising or exciting.
Brooke Adams portrays Winnie as the ultimate smiley face; her husband, Tony Shalhoub, is little more than another prop weathering her on-going babble.
There are laughs in this production of Twelfth Night, but the romantic payoffs are scarce, perhaps because the sit-com rhythms tend to swamp all else (including some of the poetry).
The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is spunky and engaging — but the play is spun in one direction, away from its weird edginess.
Updated Aug. 9 at 3 p.m. In the second week of August, the power of percussion is much in evidence, with Mikael Ringquist and Marcus Santos, Manolo Mairena, Gary Fieldman, and Vicente Lebron. New Orleans adds some flavor with Christian Scott and Galactic, and Berklee Summer in the City just keeps rolling along.
Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” deals with the difficultly of recognizing superiority at a time of radical social breakdown, specifically when it is democracy that is in extremis.
The likable Commonwealth Shakespeare Company staging leans very heavily on the comedy in ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, minimizing the Bard’s melancholic undertow.
Shakespeare’s tragic characters, on the other hand, suffer from the Christian sin of pride: knowing you aren’t God, but trying to become Him—a sin of which any of us is capable. — W. H. Auden on Othello in Lectures on Shakespeare Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company…
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