Pennington, who played Moff Jerjerrod in Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, died on Sunday (10 May). No cause of death was given. Born in Cambridge in 1942, Pennington found a passion for the stage as a member of the National Youth Theatre. Studying at Cambridge University, he appeared in 30 undergraduate plays and made his debut as Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Animal Wisdom: Experimental theater favorite Heather Christian returns with an intensely personal music-theater piece inspired by her upbringing in Natchez, Mississippi, blending Catholic ritual, Southern Gothic storytelling, seance and folk-rock concert. Through June 14 at Pershing Square Signature Center, signaturetheatre.org.
Playwright James Ijames has transplanted the story to a backyard family barbecue in North Carolina, and placed a Black gay man at the center of his play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2022.
Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story.
A movie about a visionary man whose genius made him one of the greatest figures in literature. William Shakespeare is played by Paul Mescal, an actor who leaves no demographic unravished by his outrageous levels of magnetism. And yet Hamnet is a film that sidelines both of these men to supporting roles. The film is about Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, long viewed as a dumpy, illiterate woman unworthy of attention abandoned by Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon when he swanned off to London.
For those of us who love the works of William Shakespeare, his reputation is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, there are abundant fellow travelers along the lifelong road of understanding his plays, and you rarely have to justify your passion for him, even to our anti-human tech overlords. And yet, it can be nearly impossible to see his plays clearly underneath the thick crust of received wisdom that covers them,
Not so much for the carnal stuff, but for the way every word he utters is taken to be as beautiful as he is. Intoxicated by their admiration, his admirers leap headfirst into the still waters of his pronouncements apparently certain of hidden depths thereunder. So it has been with the reaction to how he comforted his director when she confessed, in so many words, that she couldn't always grasp what Shakespeare was on about.
This week's quote comes from Duke Senior's speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1. Let's enjoy the hidden experience that attentive time in nature reveals. It can unlock wonder, awe, and insight. "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land-some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares are led by a glover, whose business has seen better days. His eldest son-William, of course, though he is not immediately identified as such-defrays his father's debts by tutoring Agnes's younger brothers in Latin,
My last week in overlapped with the first week of rehearsals for . I've done that before, but I'm 45 now, and it's harder than it was even two years ago when I did it for . And that was really hard: two musicals. So I'm a little tired. But it's good. This bounty of work is something I've always been trying to get; being able to go between varying roles was the dream when I was getting out of school.
If you close your eyes and picture an artistic genius, chances are that the portrait will be framed by a Romantic ideal that took shape 200 years ago: an artist dedicated solely to his (almost always his) muse and transgressive appetites, breaking his era's rules both moral and artistic, remaking society with his art. But this vision of genius is a poor fit for many great artists, and it tends to obscure what makes them and their work special.
Maggie O'Farrell's lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare's family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O'Farrell's so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloe Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.
