The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
TheaterSeptember 2009 Tarting up the bard On A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound and The Europeans at Atlantic Stage 2. Shakespeare in the park is a summer tradition that at its best can be really quite lovely: blankets, Bordeaux, all the world’s a freshly mown stage. But summer is also a time of sundry discomforts, and to go piling avant-garde pretensions on top of the humidity and mosquitoes and the hideous khaki shorts is an act of artistic sadism. Scold us in March if you must, challenge our comfortable middle-class cultural assumptions with Coriolanus in a cocktail dress on a brisk evening if you feel it obligatory, but in the summer, only entertain us. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an inescapable favorite in the muggybuggy evenings: It is an undemanding play, so it is not too much work to produce, and it is as gay as a Dutch window, so it is a cinch to cast. It can seduce costumers and set-designers with an inviting canvas—trees! shrubbery! fairies! The gentle whimsicality of the story, which might strike more severe theater types as insuffi ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 September 2009, on page 35 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Tarting-up-the-bard-4189
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
On Jude Law in Hamlet, the Atlantic Theater Company's Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, Collaborative Stages's House of Yes, and The Retributionists by Daniel Goldfarb. On After Luke & When I Was God at the Irish Repertory Theater, New York, A Lifetime of Burning at e59e, New York & The Bacchae in Central Park. by Brooke Allen On Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre, The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, 33 Variations at Eugene O'Neill Theater, and the closing of Forbidden Broadway.  The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices 
New from The New Criterion: "Free speech in
EventsNovember 24 2009 OPEN EVENT: Laura Jacobs reading December 02 2009 Friends Event: The Swallow Anthology Reading December 17 2009 Friends Event: New Criterion Holiday Party Webcasts
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 4
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 3
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 2 Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}