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 […]
Review: Dracula at Chesapeake Shakespeare
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 […]
Review: She Stoops to Conquer at Chesapeake Shakespeare
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.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed midsummer in the open air
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 […]
Review: Alice in Wonderland at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theatre
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 Winter’s Tale at Chesapeake Shakespeare (review)
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 […]
The Fantasticks still charms, if you pardon its age (review)
There may be no local theatre with a house style more suited to The Fantasticks than Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. Before every show, and during every intermission, representatives of the company come up on stage and welcome the audience into the show, as neighbors and friends.
Chesapeake Shakespeare’s next season punctuates classics with the story of the boldest Shakespeare production ever
Chesapeake Shakespeare Theatre’s six-play 2017-2018 season will feature a production of Red Velvet, the story of an extraordinary production of Othello, within a schedule of three well-loved Shakespeare plays, a Christmas classic (I bet you can guess which one), and a tale told by a mathematician, designed to blow your mind.
Oh, what a tyrant: Richard III at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (review)
The part of King Richard in Richard III is a plum for any actor lucky enough to be cast in the role. Part stand-up comic, part perennial outsider, and part moustache-twirling villain, Richard is equally delectable and murderous. Get a good Richard in any production, and you’re set: get someone who only sees the evil in […]
Anne of the Thousand Days at Chesapeake Shakespeare (review)
Sexism, and the responses women make to it, do not seem to have evolved in any simple or linear way, if Anne of the Thousand Days is any indication. Written in 1948 by Maxwell Anderson, some of its depictions of the relationship between Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII are shockingly modern – you almost want […]
Othello at Chesapeake Shakespeare (review)
Othello is one of the crown jewels of Shakespearean plays. The tragedy of Othello, a black general in the ranks of the Venetian army, is one of an eminent outsider who falls in love and marries a white noblewoman, Desdemona. His right hand man Iago dupes him into believing Desdemona has been faithless, and leads […]
The Three Musketeers amidst the Ruins (review)
The Three Musketeers, as performed by Chesapeake Shakespeare Company-in-the-Ruins receives a spirited and entertaining outdoor staging that will please many family members, although the adaptation and the acting are too broad to be fully satisfying.
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