Friday again. My Wall Street Journal drama column again. I’m in a v. good mood, thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in which I am well pleased:
In theater as in all other art forms, believe what you see, not what you’re told. On paper, Shakespeare Theatre’s production of “The Tempest” sounds like the worst kind of politico-intellectual stew, Shakespeare run through the theory mill and turned into a Statement for Our Times. On stage, it’s a fantastic procession of sights and sounds that will set your head to spinning. Kate Whoriskey, the director, may fancy herself a purveyor of ideas, but in fact she’s something infinitely more precious–a natural-born stage magician….
I can’t think why we haven’t seen more of her in New York. In fact, I’d like to see her “Tempest” in New York, ideally at the Public Theater, where I’m sure it’d knock everybody sideways. Don’t wait for it, though–instead, go to Washington and let yourself be enraptured by the most imaginative Shakespeare production I’ve seen since Propeller’s all-male “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, I was scarcely less delighted by a new revival of She Stoops to Conquer:
Lest we forget, there’s more than one way to skin a classic. The Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “She Stoops to Conquer,” which opened last night, is a resolutely unfantastic, straight-down-the-center staging of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 farce, devoid of the slightest trace of trickery and played on an old-fashioned drawing-room set whose walls are festooned with no less than 65 gloomy-looking paintings (yes, I counted them). The actors and actresses are bedecked in periwigs and petticoats–and the results couldn’t be more pleasing….
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