The hefty tome of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, a nondescript table, two chairs and a turquoise feather boa is apparently all one needs to stage all of the Bard’s output: if you skip a few things. With The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Chesapeake Shakespeare pulls a rabbit out of a tattered hat with […]

Chesapeake Shakespeare’s production of Dracula is just what’s needed for this season of dying leaves and chills down the spine. Playwright Steven Dietz has taken the original Bram Stoker novel and transposed it nearly scene for scene. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing: this is no Hollywood Dracula, all polish and Art […]

In Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s She Stoops to Conquer, a skilled cast with a script that has stayed light and funny for over two hundred years makes for a great night out, hour after hour after hour.

Ah, the quintessential play set in the magical woods… and performed there as well. Park in the town lot, walk up the hill (or if you or your theatre date wore heels, take the complementary shuttle van) to the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute where Chesapeake Shakespeare Company – an institution itself – has […]

Alice in Wonderland is so well known that it’s easy to forget the original two books—Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass—were written in 1865 in Queen Victoria’s England. This version reminds us of that, merging the best of both books so that we get to tangle with all of their classic, wild […]

The earliest recorded reference to The Winter’s Tale is a 1611 performance at the Globe. Letting my romanticism momentarily override my scholasticism, I find so many elements of the play that echo Shakespeare’s own later life. If it was indeed written around 1611, it would mark 14-15 years (not 16, alas that would be just too […]