NYTimes.com: Your responses to the question of whether Shakespeare is best appreciated in productions that dress up the original plays in modern settings, or hew more closely to “classical” tradition, contained almost as many viewpoints as you’d get if you gathered a hundred theater directors in a room and started them arguing.
3 comments:
Shows work, except when they don't. I feel that with any production there is room for something, or many things, about it to fail. This goes for not only modern adaptations of classic plays, but for pieces developed recently as well. Any time you strive to do something innovative with a work, you are taking a risk. Sometimes those risks turn out to be better than you expected, and sometimes they turn out to be terrible. However, once a concept has been put into motion, the show must go on. Due to deadlines and budget constraints, there is a point in time where revisualization is no longer an option. So yes, sometimes ideas that weren't that great make it to the stage. However, those times are well balanced by times when ideas that are that great make it to the stage.
I like that the author of this article is being very open to several opinions about how Shakespeare could be interpreted, because there are a billion ways to do Shakespeare and that means there are so many ways that could really work. I didn't know that that cutting dialogue in Shakespearean plays was such a convention, but that may be because I've only seen a couple productions that weren't educational theatre. I do encourage directors to be bold and when it comes to setting up the time and place of a Shakespearean show, but not when the choices become so old that we as an audience start to lose the themes intended to come with the play. Shakespeare was great for a reason and there's a reason he still is.
Ah, re-inventing Shakespeare. I read the article that preceded this one in which he asked readers to express their opinions on modern adaptions of Shakespeare. I'm pretty conflicted about this, but I do know one thing: we have seen more than enough versions of Romeo & Juliet with gangs and studs in leather jackets speaking Shakespeare's words. It was cool, original and risky the first time. Now it's a huge cliché, and possibly a flop. I am open to any modern adaptations of anything, but I think that too many directors have fallen into the trap of using a flashy concept without truly revisiting the show.
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