Children's & Family Emmy winner Kit Connor (Heartstopper) and Golden Globe winner Rachel Zegler (María in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story) will star in a new Broadway production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in the fall at a theatre to be announced.

Tony winner Sam Gold will direct Romeo + Juliet, which will feature music by Grammy winner Jack Antonoff and movement by Tony winner Sonya Tayeh.

Director Gold said in a statement, “With the presidential election coming up in November, I felt like making a show this fall that celebrates youth and hope, and unleashes the anger young people feel about the world they are inheriting."

Field Marshal Lord Kitchener was Britain’s great recruiting sergeant of the First World War. His pointing finger was leveled at manipulable young men throughout the shires of England. A stirring quotation from Macbeth — “Stand Not Upon the Order of Your Going, but Go at Once” — was deftly inserted into a recruitment poster for Kitchener’s New Army, and copies of The Kitchener Shakespeare were given to wounded and disabled soldiers. 

I was confused upon finishing the novel, to say the least. Where was the angry, independent, driven, feminist main character I had so loved in “10 Things I Hate About You?” Why would Tyler, a modern writer, go through the effort of reimagining Shakespeare’s version of the story and not even bother to alter the more traditional messaging with a take that directly addresses the societal expectations of women? The original work objectifies and subjugates its female lead, so the logical next step would be for a modern retelling to directly combat this instead of addressing the standards of toxic masculinity, as “Vinegar Girl” does. I had heard of the speech Kate’s character delivers at the end of the play, detailing how wives should strive to obey their husbands and a woman’s proper place in a marriage — why would Tyler blatantly avoid any discussion of this theme? I was annoyed, but I was also curious. Shouldn’t we be updating the classic stories that don’t align with our modern cultural values by directly challenging the original offensive material?

Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a lecturer in Shakespeare studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, has discovered “striking similarities” between phrases recited by Thorello in Every Man in His Humour and those in Shakespeare’s Othello, Hamlet and Twelfth Night – all written between 1600 and 1603.

He told the Guardian: “What I’ve found are some really interesting connections in terms of language, which suggest that Shakespeare was, perhaps unconsciously, remembering his own lines.”

Well, this one was more Shakespeare. It’s funny because even my favorite of all the Letterboxd reviews say, “Oh, there’re so many cringe scenes.” I say, “Well, which ones are cringe?” “Oh, the goofy part when the dad and the brother over-act loudly.” And then I just have to say, “That is directly from William Shakespeare.” All the cringe scenes in this movie are taken directly from William Shakespeare. The tropes that all the romantic comedies have now, he started it back in sixteen-whatever. That’s where they began. So, yes, you’ve seen it millions of times, but this was honoring the goofiness of that.

Another historically ambitious multi-part Shakespeare project is taking shape at the Guthrie Theater. The storied Minneapolis institution is currently performing the Bard’s epic trilogy, Richard II, Henry IV (its parts 1 and 2 have been condensed into a single evening), and Henry V, in rotating repertory. A company of 25 actors is bringing the story to life, swapping characters and costumes depending on the show and night.

In development for years, the project’s scope first turned heads when it was announced pre-pandemic in 2020. But considering the challenges that theaters now face in 2024, the endeavor has reached a new level of dramatic novelty.

“In this moment, with some retraction in the field—and the Guthrie is not outside of those challenges—I felt it was important that we as an organization plant a flag here,” said Guthrie artistic director Joseph Haj, who is helming the plays. “We wanted to show that we’re still very much capable of work of scale, of ambition and of intelligence.” 

When director Robert Icke was still at university, he attended a talk given by Ian McKellen in which the actor said he wanted to play Romeo and Juliet’s Mercutio as an older man who wouldn’t accept his time was up and so hung out with the younger guys. Icke recalls listening and thinking: “I would not want to see Mercutio played that way, but I did think that character he was describing was clearly Falstaff.”

...On the first day of rehearsal for Player Kings, McKellen arrived with a copy of his script in a briefcase that had once belonged to Laurence Olivier. “I’m so romantically attached to theatre history,” says Icke. “I spent my teen years reading about theatre history and Ian turning up with the script in Olivier’s briefcase felt so touching, so humbling because Ian has a direct connection to that legacy; he can tell you stories about being directed by Tyrone Guthrie. I love hearing those stories. I can’t get enough of them.”

Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,” he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”—“pause us till these rebels now afoot / Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth perform at Ford’s. 

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Long before Lincoln became President, “Macbeth” had been his favorite play. As a young lawyer, he carried a copy of it in his pocket. John Wilkes Booth had often played the title role. “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” Lincoln had said, days before his death, reading a speech from the play. “After being hunted like a dog . . . I am here in despair,” Booth wrote in his last diary entry. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for.”

Booth, the overactor who knew only rage and self-pity, was best known for his performance as Richard III, scheming, enraged, crippled, doomed. A horse! A horse! He performed it, as was standard on the nineteenth-century stage, using a loose seventeenth-century adaptation that cribbed from other Shakespeare plays. “All quiet—after Richard twice tries to rise and cannot,” he once scrawled on a blank page in his prompt book, across from Richard’s dying lines (borrowed from “Henry IV”): “Now let the world no longer be a stage / To feed contention in a lingering act . . . On bloody actions, the rude scene may end, / And darkness be the burier of the dead!” Long after Lincoln’s death, as one tale has it, Edwin Booth opened his brother’s trunk and found inside theatrical costumes that had belonged to John Wilkes and their father, many stitched by his mother. He tugged them out and burned them: Iago’s ruffed tunic, Mark Antony’s flowing toga, Richard’s long cloak, each by each, in the dead dark of an American night.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson died a poet’s death. His son Hallam wrote that, after listening to a prayer taken from his own verses, he lay in bed, a ‘figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through his oriel window’, clasping a volume of Shakespeare as he expired. If this sounds too picturesque to be true, then it probably was. 

He left school — “secondary modern,” meaning catering for children considered academically inferior — at the age of 15 without any qualifications. But he displayed a talent for writing and had an apotheosis that encouraged it: a school visit to see a performance of “Macbeth.”

“For the first time I found something beautiful and exciting and alive,” he said of that production. “I met someone who was talking about my problems, the society around me. Nobody else had said anything about my life to me at all, ever.”

...Prebble told me, “Macbeth,” with its gradual accumulation of immoral acts, was a more important referent for “enron” than Marlowe’s play. Prebble said of her Shakespearean borrowings, “If you take something that has lasted an incredibly long time, and that everyone says is good, and then use that as a sparse backbone, you might be protecting yourself to some extent—or helping the narrative be stronger.” 

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-story/a-new-poem-by-rita-dove-invites-visitors-inside/?

Dove replied enthusiastically to these “beautifully thought-out designs,” noting that one option “aligns most closely with the poem’s verbal cadence,” with a “breathtaking” turn at one corner. Another had perfectly placed seams at the end. To bring together both solutions, she offered another idea, which she joked might be “radical”: slightly editing the text. She suggested deleting a single word: “all” (it had appeared in the phrase “all the jumbled perfumes”). With it gone, the rest of the words fell satisfyingly into place, forming the final version of the poem. “That was so much fun to do,” she recalls today. “It was torturous, but it was fun. I’m a fan of jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles, so this is probably adjacent to that.”

“I don’t think either of us ever had ‘movie star’ set in our sights,” said Dan Stevens, her co-star in “Godzilla x Kong,” who met Ms. Hall as students in Cambridge when they were both cast in a stage production of “Macbeth.” “Rebecca always had ‘artist’ written all over her.”

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Ms. Hall’s Hollywood star turn came in 2008, as the conservative brunette to Scarlett Johansson’s more impulsive blonde in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a role for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. Before that, she had apprenticed under her father and, notably, made her television debut at the age of 10 in “The Camomile Lawn.” Sir Peter would later cast her at 21 as Rosalind in an acclaimed production of “As You Like It.”