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While “Hamlet” is the Shakespeare play with the most Broadway productions, “Romeo and Juliet,” whose 36th revival is currently on Broadway, has had a more pervasive influence over popular culture. Its enduring, ever-adaptable theme of lovers from warring families pops up repeatedly in films, songs, cartoons and skit shows. See if you spot the references. More
Who can forget the classic first line of “Romeo and Juliet”: “How y’all doin’ today?”Well, perhaps not so classic. But as uttered at the start of the play’s 36th Broadway revival, which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square, the words are certainly more welcoming to the production’s youthful target audience than the traditional iambic pentameter ones: “Two households, both alike in dignity.”Not that there are two households in the director Sam Gold’s rec-room adaptation anyway. Romeo’s parents, along with a clutch of other characters, have been discarded. Juliet’s are both played by one actor, with little more than a change of inflection. And though Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the box-office draws, cover just one star-crossed lover each — he a beagly Romeo, she a beamish Juliet — the other eight cast members take on 17 roles, adorably if often indistinguishably. It’s a puppy pile.But before you wonder whether this production was sponsored by CliffsNotes, with only as much poetry and staying power as an Instagram story, bear in mind that many of the characters are teenagers, and that the play may most usefully be directed at people seeing it for the first time, not the 36th. Certainly Gold has used everything in his formidable toolbox — scissors, hammers, punches, wrenches — to get young people interested in a world that looks more like theirs than Elizabethan London or Renaissance Verona.So after an energetic preshow, filled with flirting, peacocking and snits of aggression, the story begins with that casual greeting from Gabby Beans, the play’s Chorus. Beans, later a hotheaded Mercutio, a beneficent Friar Lawrence and a barely there Prince Escalus, makes a relatable hype woman, introducing the rest of the cast by first name and telling us whom they’ll be playing. If you’re confused — and even a frequent flier might be — you can consult a program insert that visualizes the Montagues and Capulets as a mood board.Feeling the groove: Gabby Beans, far right, leading Tommy Dorfman (center), Kit Connor (far back) and other cast members in a dance in Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” at Circle in the Square.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Punctuation delayed, but not denied: A memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë at Poets’ Corner in the celebrated London church finally gets its accent marks.For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.This week, the error was fixed when six diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about a third of an inch in diameter — were added above the E of the famous last name.It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.“Those three women fought harder than most to have their voices heard, to have their work understood on its own merits, and it endures,” said Sharon Wright, who discovered the mistake while visiting Westminster Abbey in London in January. “We can at least get their names right.”Ms. Wright, who describes herself as a stroppy Yorkshire woman like the literary sisters, was researching her upcoming book “The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar,” when she visited the plaque. Ms. Wright, who also edits the Brontë Society Gazette, a periodical for Brontë fans, compared the plaque with how the women had signed their own names, and saw the discrepancy.“Three of our greatest writers, and their names are spelled incorrectly,” Ms. Wright said at the abbey on Friday. “You can’t make it up.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris.In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.“Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. “Kamala Harris could never.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The event’s best theater production avoided the gimmicks of other shows in favor of well-drawn characters and well-written dialogue.If you say “Edinburgh Festival” to most people, they’ll probably think of the Fringe. But the Fringe — primarily a showcase of up-and-coming acts from English-speaking countries — is actually an offshoot of the more global, highbrow and judiciously curated Edinburgh International Festival, and the two events run side-by-side.The theater offerings in this year’s International Festival showcase the brightest Scottish talent alongside shows from around the world and fall into two categories: While the international plays are overtly political, encompassing disability rights, antiracism and ecology, the homegrown works explored the more personal terrain of addiction, recovery and self-care.One of the most eye-catching items on the bill was a metafictional spin on “Hamlet” by the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza, which ran at the Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh earlier this month. This production, performed by eight young actors with Down syndrome, charts the journey of a similar, but fictional, group as it prepares to put on a production of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. The actors perform snatches of “Hamlet” — there’s a murdered father, a ghost, a play within a play — and try to connect its story line to disability: Polonius’s protectiveness toward Ophelia, we are told, echoes society’s tendency to infantilize people with Down syndrome.But there isn’t much thematic overlap, and this “Hamlet” is mainly a cipher for the power of storytelling. In a key scene, Álvaro (Álvaro Toledo) sees Jaime (Jaime Cruz) trying to replicate Laurence Olivier’s famous performance in the 1948 film adaptation, which plays on the screen behind him. Álvaro upbraids Jamie for trying to play the part “like a statue.” The message, that people with Down’s must carve out their own paths rather than assimilating to normative expectations, is later reiterated in a defiant punk rock routine.Jaime Cruz in Teatro La Plaza’s “Hamlet.”Jess ShurteThe cast appears in casual rehearsal attire, but a dazzling selection of spotlights (by Jesús Reyes) injects a sense of magic. The actors are capable and immensely charismatic, and there are a number of funny moments including a fake Skype chat with Ian McKellen. But Chela De Ferrari’s script fades toward the end as the concept drowns out the story and the play lapses into a cloying mushiness that sits uneasily with its anti-condescension message.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states.Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.”“And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win.That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants.In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “MacBeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead sand snake in “Game of Thrones.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Mr. Culver, who was best known for his demise as Captain Needa in “The Empire Strikes Back,” was also a familiar actor on British TV and in theater.Michael Culver, the British actor best known for one of the memorable death scenes in the Star Wars franchise, died on February 27. He was 85.Mr. Culver’s death was confirmed by Alliance Agents, which posted a statement to social media on Tuesday, and his agent, Thomas Bowington. The agency did not give a cause of death, though Mr. Bowington said Mr. Culver had had cancer for several years.He had a long acting career onscreen and stage that spanned over 50 years and included roles in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” on TV and the 1984 film “A Passage to India.”But his most lasting impact on popular culture came in 1980, with his brief role as Captain Needa in the second “Star Wars” film, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Needa, after losing track of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, apologizes to Darth Vader, who promptly chokes him to death telepathically.“Apology accepted, Captain Needa,” Vader says, walking around the captain’s body and motioning for others to take him away.Mr. Culver also appeared in two “James Bond” films with the actor Sean Connery, “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball.”Michael John Edward Culver was born on June 16, 1938, in London to Daphne Rye, a theater casting director, and Ronald Culver, an actor, according to Mr. Bowington.Mr. Culver performed in several Shakespeare plays and worked regularly with the British director Anthony Page, his agent said.Mr. Culver is survived by his second wife, Amanda Ward Culver, and his children, Roderic, Sue and Justin Culver.His son, Roderic Culver, also became an actor, Mr. Bowington said.Later in his life, Mr. Culver mostly gave up acting to focus on politics and would have likely pursued a political career had he not been an actor, Mr. Bowington said.He still visited Star Wars fan events, notably one in Chicago in 2019, his agency said in its statement.“He was lost for words,” it said, “when he saw his queue line with nearly 200 people waiting to see him.” More
If Fiasco Theater has mixed results in its production of this Shakespearean tragicomedy, it celebrates actors supporting and delighting in one another’s work.“Pericles” is a bit of a mess. Spanning decades and traversing the ancient Mediterranean like some deeply misbegotten Carnival Cruise, this Shakespeare play mingles comedy, tragedy and Christian allegory. There are two assassination plots, two shipwrecks, a brothel, a riddle, a tournament and some very convenient pirates. Deliberately anachronistic, it was described by Ben Jonson, a rival playwright, as a “mouldy tale” and “stale.”So, who better to face down this confusion than a company called Fiasco? A devised theater ensemble founded by half a dozen Brown MFA graduates, Fiasco has a soft spot for Shakespeare’s less loved works. The company broke out in 2011 with a production of “Cymbeline” and later staged “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” (Fiasco’s 2017 production of a crowd-pleaser like “Twelfth Night”? An outlier.)Rather than relying on the published text of “Pericles,” Fiasco has set much of the poetry to music — sometimes supplying original words — and interpolated passages from a prose version by George Wilkins, a pamphleteer and publican. (Wilkins is often cited as the play’s co-author, mostly because scholars disbelieve that Shakespeare could have written anything as patchy as the first two acts.)Ben Steinfeld, a company member and the director, stages this revised text at Classic Stage Company using Fiasco’s poor-theater playbook — a mostly bare stage furnished with charisma, invention, spirit and song. “A miracle may come your way,” an early number promises.Through the hectic first half, this approach falters. Pericles (Paco Tolson at first, then Tatiana Wechsler, Noah Brody and finally Devin E. Haqq) goes to so many places in such a short time that characters and climes blur, especially without the help of scenery to differentiate each country. As Steinfeld’s narrator admits, “Now this is just an empty space/It’s hard to give a sense of place.” (No set designer is credited, though Ashley Rose Horton designed the vaguely Grecian costumes and Mextly Couzin the golden lighting.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
