This week, my boss Jan Powell announced that she would be stepping down as artistic director of Quill Theatre due to an illness in her family. Although I know it will not be the end of our friendship, and hope it will not be the end of our collaborations together, I thought that the end…
A couple years ago, I was asked to write an article for a straight edge zine that never came out. Rather than let an interesting piece languish unpublished, I recovered from the depths of my hard drive and present it here, a loosely organized meditation on being a straight edge bardolator. No More Cakes and…
There are few things more unpleasant to watch than a director who thinks he or she is going to “fix” Shakespeare. Canadian Stage’s production of King Lear demonstrates all the pitfalls of thinking that you know better than the Bard. Director Alistair Newton displays a rare degree of arrogance, playing so fast and loose with…
There is a broad debate about Shakespeare that I find endlessly frustrating: whether Shakespeare belongs on your bookshelf or in the theatre. There is intense partisanship on both sides, but my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that the theatre crowd is the more numerous and influential one. I can’t count how many times I’ve…
A few weeks ago, at the end of January, I took a week off from my day job to attend the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Baltimore. STA — pronounced acronymically as “stah” by everyone — is a large, international meeting of directors and theatre company managers who get together annually to discuss the future…
I had the pleasure of seeing Richmond Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet twice this weekend. Once last night and once tonight. I’ve never seen a ballet of Romeo and Juliet, so I went into it without any expectations, aside from having heard the Prokofiev score once or twice. The version performed by the Richmond Ballet was…
Complexity and especially ambiguity are what make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. The Bard has many strengths: the grace of his verse and the ease with which he coined the perfect phrase or word, the ability to make esoteric and highly specific situations universally understandable, the prolific speed with which he wrote powerful and enduring plays, and the…
Last year, I sat drinking coffee with a friend. I was talking about something I was reading, and she looked down at my BOOKWORM knuckle tattoos and asked me how it was that I became such an avid reader and such an intense believer in literature. She asked if I had always loved books or…