Bard on the Boards is being overhauled to include theaters' online and virtual programming as well as plans for the tenure of the Covid-19 pandemic. This will take time, so please check back daily. Recent updates: Next Stop Theatre Company New York Classical Theatre New Victory Theater New Orleans Shakespeare Festival National Theatre Montford Park Players Millbrook Playhouse Bedlam Idaho Shakespeare Festival Brave Spirits Actors' Theatre of Columbus Michigan Shakespeare Festival Merced Shakespearefest The Media Theatre Long Beach Shakespeare Company Lincoln Center Theater Lifeline Theatre Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival Laboratory Theater of Florida Kentucky Shakespeare Stratford Festival Hudson Warehouse American Shakespeare Center Babes with Blades Ithaca Shakespeare Company

Special Announcement

Pressed Pause

Shakespeareances.com is on a hiatus until at least September. Everybody here is physically healthy, at least, though COVID-19 struck the cubicle next to my office. Sarah continues her mental decline as she passes into (it's never "through") one Alzheimer's phase after another. That combined with other professional and financial circumstances has overfilled my plate with responsibilities. Shakespeareances.com is a not-for-profit venture—actually, it's currently a not-for-income endeavor—so, Sarah and my other public service duties must take priority.

While I've had to push Shakespeareances.com off to the side, it's still on my plate. Dessert, maybe? I have long considered features for the website that now could especially serve the Shakespeare and theater community in this new epoch we've entered. When I return, my goal is to unveil a new, more resonant Shakespeareances.com, including a new online section, expanding the scope of reviews, and reviving the Shakespearean commentary, as well as catching you up on Sarah's Chronicles and resuming work on Where There's a Will and Shakespearecure.

Everybody keep safe (don't be stupid: wear your mask), stay well (socially distance: I'm Exhibit A), and keep Shakespeareancing.

Eric Minton

Stratford Festival Puts Season On Hold,

Shutters New Tom Patterson Theater

After weeks of consultation and deliberation, Stratford Festival Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino, Executive Director Anita Gaffney, and Board Chair Carol Stephenson have concluded that the Stratford Festival's entire 2020 season must be put on hold, with a plan to revisit programming as soon as it is safe to gather in theaters. While they anticipate that theaters will not be able to reopen until next year, they have not ruled out the possibility of mounting specially scheduled fall or holiday programming should public health conditions allow.

The Tide of Truth

A significant element of my chronicling the Shakespeare Canon Project in 2018 was the onset of Sarah's seizure disorder and a worsening of her cognitive capaiblities. Loyal readers and the theater people Sarah and I encountered during that year began sharing their concern and prayers and taking inspiration in our determination. I continued posting updates on Sarah as her seizures were finally diagnosed as epilepsy, and then, subsequently, she was confirmed to have dementia. The latter has impacted every aspect of our lives, including my efforts to keep Shakespeareances.com going. Meanwhile, Sarah had become a hero in the Shakespeareances.com community, and my accounts, always grounded in some Shakespearean allegorical strand, were appreciated as life lessons. One reader even described it as a "Beautiful script in the process." "Sarah's Chronicles" will be an ongoing account of our journeys' benchmark moments, charting how dementia takes further hold of her and messes with me. It's a Shakespearean-inspired, front-row view in real time into humanity's duality of strength and frailty.

Coronavirus Threatens

Shakespeare Theaters

Shakespeareances.com is on the mailing lists of 239 North American, European, and Australian theaters on our Theater Links page, and I've received a large number of emails the past couple of weeks related to coronavirus and COVID-19. They've pretty much said the same things: how the theater is still open for business, is monitoring the status of the virus’s spread, is following the guidance of local public health service, is taking extra sanitation procedures, and asks patrons to do the same when attending plays. The tune and tone changed today in an avalanche of messages announcing cancellations and postponements. But one message, hearkening to how Shakespeare himself handled theater-closing pandemics, offers hope and guidance.

Shakespeare Meets

Arrested Development

Call this the reluctant review. Sarah and I are sitting in the lounge of the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Staunton, Virginia. We’ve just come from a show at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Playhouse, A King and No King, a 1611 play written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Per our normal routine, we settled into the hotel’s lounge for a glass of wine and to relax, reflect, and converse about the show. For myriad reasons I wasn’t intending to review this production. Yet here I am, hot wife opposite me, bedtime beckoning, and I've got my iPad set up on the marble tabletop writing this review. Some productions and performances simply are worth scaling a mountaintop to proclaim their merits to the world. The brilliance we’ve just experienced is in the play itself, in the actors’ individual and ensemble interpretation of the material, and in the performances, especially as this was a first outing for the cast, demonstrating how talented and tight an ensemble this is.

Hark! How These Angels Sing

My parents and I shared similar cultural tastes, including Shakespeare, though I came to the Bard independently of their lifelong appreciation for his works. They influenced my love for classical music, and my brothers and I turned them on to rock ‘n’ roll. They especially loved opera, but that was the one genre I couldn’t cotton to. I tried over the years, and when I was a professional music critic I at least came to appreciate the skills if not the art form itself. Finally, my father got through to me. After Mom died, I, being the good son, accompanied Dad to a Met Live production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madam Butterfly and had the transformative moment that great art can lay on a man. All of which comes into play every time I attend a Shakespeare Opera Theatre performance, the company's current production of William Shakespeare’s and Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet being my fourth. Shakespeare Opera Theatre productions can expand your Shakespearean dimensions (sometimes to a frustrating extent, as with Hamlet) while exposing you to opera’s prevailing glory, especially those pieces, well known or not, inspired by Shakespeare. And, as always happens with Shakespeare Opera Theater, this production has some glorious moments.

A Passion Play

Of all the existential questions I’ve pondered in my sixty-one-and-a-half-year journey through life, this is the most difficult I’ve yet addressed: How’s Sarah? The query comes once or twice a week. How’s Sarah? I am never sure how to answer because “She has dementia” sounds so stark, though honest. The intent behind the question dictates my answer, and now I'm ready and able to tackle one intended purpose of the question How's Sarah?—when it is used to mask the question, How's Eric?

Review and Interview

Crowning Chutzpah with Crutches

The stage, hemmed in on three sides by blackish metallic walls, is bare except for a steel barrel at the back and a shovel off to the side. A skull inside a glass box hangs from the center ceiling. A woman wearing a white shroud, bent under the wearying weight of a tragic life but fiercely determined to not yet die, shuffles across the stage. This ghostly figure finishes her passage, and the theater lights go out. When the stage lights come back up, a grave has opened up near the front of the dirt-covered floor. We wait. Richard pops out of the grave like a delighted Dick-in-the-box.“There’s a different Richard every night,” says Aaron Monaghan, who plays the title character in DruidShakespeare’s production of William Shakespeare’s Richard III at John Jay College’s Gerald W. Lynch Theater as part of the Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. With a glorious command of Shakespeare’s verse that he sometimes plays like a jazz musician’s approach to a Mozart score, Monaghan presents a Richard living in the moment: his moment, the character's moment, and the real Richard III's moment. “Literally, when I pop my head up, I don’t really know what way it’s going to come out.”

DruidShakespeare's Aaron Monaghan

Channels a Memory and the Real Richard

In an exlusive interview with Shakespeareances.com, Aaron Monaghan describes how the ghosts of Antony Sher and the historical King Richard factor into his performance of Shakespeare's iconic, monarchal villain. We discuss the Ireland-based DruidShakespeare's approach to Shakespeare, the actor's night-to-night approach to Richard, and Richard III's haunting approach to politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Flies to Wanton Boys Are We to the Gods

Attending a World Series has been high on our bucket list for decades. When our Washington Nationals evolved into contenders, we became annual season ticket holders expressly to get priority seating and discounts for postseason games. We were in the stands for the team’s tragic meltdowns in the division series of 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017. Tonight, finally, the World Series comes to Washington, D.C. And this morning, as I write this, Sarah and I are on an airplane heading for Honolulu, Hawaii. We’ll be on O'ahu through next week. This is not a trade-off of one paradise for another, I assure you. Instead, we’re at the mercy of, and paying devotion to, the baseball gods. And so are the Washington Nationals, I dare say.

King Lear's Sad Time:

What Must We Obey?

A reader, after watching the Anthony Hopkins portrayal of King Lear on Netflix, puzzles over the play's last quatrain, which happens to be the only passage in William Shakespeare's entire canon that I've memorized. To read our discussion in The Bardroom,

A Tragedy Overtakes a Blissful Comedy

Now to answer several pressing questions. How is my wife, Sarah, doing? Why has Shakespeareances.com lay fallow for more than three months? What’s next? And, perhaps the primary question for readers of Shakespeareances.com, what was William Shakespeare’s most popular play the past year? These questions all are interrelated because Shakespeareances.com resides at the intersection of all things Shakespeare and all things life. Not all the answers are within my grasp, but as Shakespeare does, we can present life’s pressing questions, and do so by starting with a stupid joke.

Digging Up Shakespeare Gold in Alaska

William Shakespeare coined so many famous phrases that at least one or two popped into your head as you read this sentence, maybe four and then a fifth. Some readers might already have left off this review altogether to recite dozens more. I bet, though, that one particular 2 1/2-word phrase hasn’t yet entered any readers' minds as a famous Shakespeare quote, even though it can be one of the funniest three words in Western literature. “A buck-basket?” Granted, conditions have to be just right for this phrase to attain immortality, and in this Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, conditions create a perfect storm of laughter. On an outdoor stage in a stockade-like, 200-seat theater surrounded by skyscraping pines on the University of Alaska–Fairbanks campus, a hardy company of actors performs in the universal light of the almost-midnight sun, presenting a slap-happy but serious-edged Merry Wives, audacious in presentation but textually pure in execution.

Tom Hanks as Falstaff; And Vice Versa

When I mention seeing the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, the first question that comes my way is “How was Tom Hanks as Falstaff?” The query generally carries an attitude mingling hope with suspicion. Movie stars, even the most decorated (as Hanks is with two Oscars and three other nominations), seldom make good Shakespearean actors or good stage actors or, even more seldom, good Shakespearean stage actors. This being Hanks, who seems such a good guy and is unquestionably a pro, you hope he proves the exception. I’ll answer that here right off. Hanks is a good Falstaff, a performance that reminds us he got his professional start with Shakespeare roles at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Nevertheless, I learned many Henry IVs ago that a good or even a great Falstaff does not a good Henry IV make without an equally strong or stronger Prince Hal or Henry IV. As larger than life a character as Falstaff may be, his part does not make up the sum of the rest of the play.

A Weekend at the Blackfriars Playhouse

Reflecting on Shakespeare

In a House of Mirrors

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton's new play has two titles, 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale. Note that the latter is not a subtitle relegated to parenthesis. This play features two distinct but intertwined tracks, a story about 16 winters and a tale told by a bear. Its most engaging relationship, though, is with another play, William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. This is the second offering in the American Shakespeare Center's ambitious Shakespeare's New Contemporaries initiative to solicit new plays that pair with each of the 38 plays in the traditional Shakespeare canon. 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale sets an exemplary standard while the production offers three paths to satisfaction: Hamilton's clever script and its perceptive themes, the play's carnival house-of-mirrors reflection on The Winter's Tale, and one heckuva cast.

Watching the Cat's Cradle Unravel

Antigonus has just exited with the newborn daughter of Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicily in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Leontes believes with zero evidence that his best friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is the baby's father and has imprisoned his wife and intended to outright kill the kid. When court counselor Antigonus intervenes, Leontes orders him to abandon the baby in some wilderness. “Blessing against this cruelty fight on thy side, poor thing, condemn'd to loss!” Antigonus says to the baby. Leontes softens in Ronald Román-Meléndez's interpretation of the role in the American Shakespeare Center's production at the Blackfriars Playhouse. He appears to be reconsidering his edict and, perhaps, all of his actions that have brought him to this point. He glances around the theater's audience, pausing on faces and steeling his resolve as he does so. “No, I'll not rear another's issue,” he says, a conviction he seems to draw from us. We have become complicit in the still unfolding tragedy. This production has three things going for it: The way it converses with its companion new play, 16 Winters, or The Bear's Tale, the way Director Kevin Rich uses the Blackfriars playing conditions to get us inside Leontes (and on his side), and one heckuva cast.