York Shakespeare Festival Research Articles

‘The first black battalion’: Casting in Hamilton

This article places the casting practices in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in a trajectory of casting practices utilized by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and highlights the difficulty of pinpointing which particular casting practice is utilized in Hamilton. It also places the Hamilton casting concept in conversation with August Wilson’s famous arguments about colour-blind casting, and considers how these conversations have changed. It considers the criticisms that have arisen in response to the casting of Hamilton. Finally, the article examines the City Center’s Encores! production of 1776 in 2016, which was produced to be ‘in the style of Hamilton’ but argues that the production of 1776 was not particularly successful at recreating the Hamilton-style casting. In the end, the article questions if there is such a thing as a successful production of 1776 with Hamilton-style casting.

Twelfth Night (review)

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night Yu Jin Ko Twelfth Night Presented by the Public Theatre at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, June 10–July 12, 2009; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; music by Hem; fight director, Rick Sordelet; choreography by Mimi Lieber. With Raúl Esparza (Orsino), Herb Foster (Valentine), Anne Hathaway (Viola), Jay O. Sanders (Sir Toby Belch), Julie White (Maria), Hamish Linklater (Andrew Aguecheek), David Pittu (Feste), Audra McDonald (Olivia), Michael Cumpsty (Malvolio), Charles Borland (Antonio), Stark Sands (Sebastian), and Jon Patrick Walker (Fabian). Twelfth Night Presented by Shakespeare and Company in the Founders' Theatre, Lenox, Massachusetts, July 24–September 6, 2009; directed by Jonathan Croy; sets by Jonathan Croy; costumes by Govane Lohbauer; lighting by Les Dickert; music by Robert Biggs, Bill Barclay and Alexander Sovronksy. With Robert Biggs (Feste), Ken Cheeseman (Malvolio), Johnny Lee Davenport (Antonio, Valentine), Nigel Gore (Sir Toby Belch), Merritt Janson (Viola), Corinna May (Maria), Elizabeth Raetz (Olivia), Duane Allen Robinson (Orsino), Alexander Sovronsky (Fabian), Jake Waid (Sebastian), and Ryan Winkles (Sir Andrew Aguecheek). Twelfth Night is driven by crushes of multiple varieties. Whimsical fantasies, extravagant indulgences, but especially crushes of the most painful kind that hit unawares and prove all-consuming. Because the play is a romantic comedy, the crushes have a way of working out, at least for the so-called "upstairs" characters, but they do so in a particular way. The crushes ultimately prove transformational, ending in forms of self-discovery, awakening, indeed illumination of a general nature. The sorting out of mix-ups and the clarification of mistaken identities get accompanied by the ineffable sense that the characters have, to use a metaphor common to the play and the modern rehearsal room, gone on meaningful journeys. If all this sounds a little too much like the stuff of pulpy romances and Hollywood chick-flicks, one could suggest that these genres have inherited their material to an important degree from Shakespearean comedy. [End Page 600] Which is why it was a brilliant choice by the New York Shakespeare Festival to cast the film actress Anne Hathaway as Viola in its lively and cheerful summer 2009 production of Twelfth Night. At the simplest level, she's the perfect physical type for the role, as she can be at once boyishly dorky and stunningly beautiful. But these physical characteristics have as much to do with the cinematic persona that has developed from playing heroines in coming-of-age stories in which, generally, romance is accompanied by self-discovery and radical transformation. In The Princess Diaries (2001), she plays a gawky teen who learns that she's actually the princess of a fictitious country and, under the tutelage of her royal grandmother (played to comic perfection by Julie Andrews), becomes the swan no one could have imagined, all the while discovering that her true heartthrob is none other than the boy-next-door type she has known all along. Analogously, in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), she's the raggedly dressed and androgynously named Andy Sachs who lands a job in the fashion industry in New York where her dress size—8!—becomes a moniker indicating how distressingly "fat" she is; but true to the genre, she undergoes a fashion makeover (under the tutelage this time of her demonic boss, played by Meryl Streep) that also opens up a whole new way of living. Once again, however, a fling with a new love interest (a hunk of a fashion writer played by Simon Baker) ensues, but she goes back, in the end, to the guy who loved her when she didn't think anything of wearing sweatpants. The film could have been called Sachs, or even Saks, and the City. Finally, in Becoming Jane (2007), she plays a young Jane Austen who discovers love and its entanglements, which then inspire her to write Pride and Prejudice. The romance lines of the films obviously don't mesh entirely with Viola's story, but other elements clearly do: taking on new personas that expose hidden elements of the self and open up new emotional and erotic possibilities; experiencing love with new enlightenment; and...

As You Like It (review)

Reviewed by: As You Like It Patricia Lennox As You Like It Presented by The Public Theater: Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theatre, Central Park, New York City. June 25–July 17, 2005. Directed by Mark Lamos. Set by Riccardo Hernadez. Costumes by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Original music by William Finn & Vadim Feichtner. Sound by Acme Sound Partners. Choreography by Sean Curran. Fight Choreography by Rick Sordelet. With Al Espinosa (Oliver), James Waterston (Orlando), Herb Foster (Adam), Alec Beard (Dennis), Gregory Derelian (Charles, William), Jennifer Ikeda (Celia), Lynn Collins (Rosalind), Richard Thomas (Touchstone), Philip Kerr (Le Beau), David Cromwell (Duke Frederick, Duke Senior) Bob Stillman (Amiens, Sir Andrew Martext), Helmar Augustus Cooper (Corin), Michael Esper (Silvius), Brian Bedford (Jaques), Vanessa Aspillaga (Audrey), Jennifer Dundas (Phoebe),Enver Gjokaj (Jacques de Boys). As You Like It was the first of this year's two Shakespeare in the Park productions presented by the New York Public Theater. (The other was a well-received revival of a John Guare and Galt MacDermott's Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Musical, written for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1971). Performances of this play always seem to challenge the viewer's memory. The problem is that the memory of the play rarely matches the experience of actually watching it performed. Reviews make it clear that the play is never quite as wonderful as the critics expected it to be—though they are often not quite certain why that is so. One reason may be that, although Rosalind is arguably one of Shakespeare's greatest roles, even the best Rosalind has a hard time living up to the reputation of delight fostered by nineteenth-century reviewers, who had the charming distraction of the actress in tights to get them through her more loquacious moments. The other reason for discontent may be, as Director Mark Lamos pointed out, "the narrative drive all but stops an hour into it." Michael Feingold's Village Voice review is worth looking at for a longer discussion of how the play can bring out the "curmudgeon" [End Page 98] in even the most knowledgeable critic, leading them to declare that there are a lot of "mashed turnips" in the play. Actually, the Public's production deserved higher marks than it received from the critics. This is a surprisingly difficult play; the Shakespeare comedy of which almost every production is endearing (at least for me) is A Midsummer Night's Dream, and not, as everyone expects, As You Like It. Contrary to popular belief (a false memory really), Rosalind is not automatically endearing. She can be an awfully self-satisfied bore. The Public's Rosalind, Lynn Collins may have been a bit too giggly and full of girlish romp. She said, in an interview in Theater Mania.com, that she felt Portia (her role in the Al Pacino film) was about intellect, but Rosalind was "more about frivolity, love, infatuation and youth"—which I think is a bit unfair to Rosalind, but a pitfall that has tripped up some of the most experienced of actors. The critics, despite their reservations, agreed to love Collins's Ganymede; tradition and memory would have been betrayed had they not. Still, Rosalind's adventures in the forest are trickier to pull off than Hermia's or even Helena's, and Shakespeare in the Park's production acquitted itself admirably. Lamos, who seems to direct Shakespeare productions everywhere but New York, was in charge of this As You Like It, a play he had directed only once before, twenty years ago. This time he wanted to avoid being overly conceptual and to give the play a chance to "breathe and be as simple as it is." He achieved this by keeping to a single, unchanging set, and by trusting the play to the extent of letting characters come on, do their piece, and just get on with it. He also made sure that it visually resembled a fairy tale, so the magic was not lost. The fast-paced production was very clearly, and often intensely, spoken, with a great deal of physical action that never, however, seemed frenetic or gratuitous. There are no clocks...

Pleasure Gardens. Performing Arts Resources, vol. 21. Edited by Stephen M. Vallillo and Maryann Chach. New York: Theatre Library Association, 1998; pp. 105. $30 cloth; Their Championship Seasons: Acquiring, Processing, and Using Performing Arts Archives. Performing Arts Resources, vol. 22. Edited by Kevin Winkler. New York: Theatre Library Association, 2001; pp. 142. $30 cloth.

The annual publication of the Theatre Library Association is designed “to gather and disseminate scholarly articles dealing with the location of resource materials” relating to all media as well as popular entertainments, the evaluation of those resources, and to include as well “monographs of previously unpublished original material.” The volumes are slim ones, so we should not expect coverage of the many theatre collections available to scholars and practitioners, but rather a highly selective series of essays reflecting the priorities of the Association or of the individual volume editors. This certainly appears to be the case here: the 1998 volume concerns itself with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American pleasure gardens, whereas, after a publication hiatus of three years, the 2001 volume is focused around the acquisition, scope, and use of four major archives—those of the Joseph Papp/New York Shakespeare Festival and of Lucille Lortel in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, and the holdings of the Weill—Lenya Research Center in New York. As a consequence, the tones of the two volumes are very different, as is their utility. The first volume appears to be directed toward a disinterested readership; the second addresses those who might actually use the particular collections.

The Wild Party, and: The Wild Party (review)

The Wild Party. Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, Book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe. The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. Virginia Theatre, New York, New York. 19 April 2000.

Unmasking the Minstrel Mask's Black Magic in Ntozake Shange's "spell #7"

. the minstrel may be banned as racist / but the minstrel is more powerful in his deformities than our alleged rejection of him,' writes Ntozake Shange in her foreword to spell #7. In the foreword, she reveals that the audience at the original production of the choreopoem at the New York Shakespeare Festival (1979) failed to detect her ironic, critical use of the minstrel tradition; rather, they delighted in and grandly applauded2 the familiar spectacle of the minstrel's singing, dancing, and posing as Al Jolson and Bert Williams. Minstrelsy, then, had not lost its psychic power or its entertainment value for the dominant culture. As Tania Modleski points out, the minstrel tradition is still operative in contemporary Hollywood films.3 If minstrelsy is still a popular form of entertainment, what constitutes the pleasurable appeal of this banned form of theatrical performance?

Jazz Form and Jazz Function: An Analysis of Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage

Aisha Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While Bird Dies in Gilded Cage is an underground classic which has played in college and university theaters throughout the United States since its publication in Margaret Wilkerson's 1986 anthology Nine Plays by Black Women. Although the play has rarely received professional production since its premiere at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977,1 it has received several college and university productions and is highly respected among theater scholars and practitioners who have recognized its unique structural, thematic and theatrical qualities. The play's title states simply yet poetically the script's primary concerns. The unfinished are five teenagers who are confined (both literally and figuratively) to the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers, no man's land where men are not allowed. The date is March 12,1955, the day they must decide whether to keep their babies or surrender them for adoption. Their guardian is Nurse Jacobs, an unwed mother herself who hides this fact by calling her daughter her niece and insisting upon moral rectitude among the women. Significantly, March 12,1955 is also the date of the death of Charlie Parker, the highly-acclaimed jazz saxophonist who died in the apartment of wealthy European baroness. Parks and his pasha, (a fictionalized version of Parker's patron) occupy the gilded cage of the title, described by Rahman as a lush fragrant love bower (205). The play follows the young women as they are propelled toward their moment of decision while simultaneously showing Parker's final hours and eventual death. Rounding out the cast is Charlie Chan, black man in blackface, minstrel who acts as Master of Ceremony.... (205). This synopsis demonstrates that Rahman's play does not follow traditional linear patterns common to western dramatic structure. The play lacks logical cause-and-effect development; instead it is episodic, almost cinematic, in its structure movement. While episodic structure

Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival: an annotated bibliography

Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival: an annotated bibliography

Hamlet: New York Shakespeare Festival

Journal Article Hamlet: New York Shakespeare Festival Get access Arthur Ganz Arthur Ganz Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 1987, Pages 209–211, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870562 Published: 01 July 1987

Joseph Chaikin the Actor

The eight-week run of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre in March and April saw his first major acting since his days with The Living Theatre.In the ten years (1963-1973) that Chaikin served as director in The Open Theatre, the company he founded, he rarely acted. He had very little interest in performing, and yet “I still defined myself not as a director, but much more as an actor. I still do.”Chaikin is still uncertain as to why he was drawn to acting, except perhaps as an escape, a way to “get out of this crummy Brooklyn context that was my life, whereas the theatre and the radio and the movies seemed like they were these other orbits of existence.” Determinism also played a role, since Chaikin did—and still does to a certain extent—view acting as a chosen lifestyle, a way to “pick the kind of life you'd want to work in.” Acting provided a tremendous sense of freedom.

Shakespeare in Central Park, 1975

MAOST TWENTIETH-CENTURY DIRECTORS OF SHAKESPEARE have seen themselves as heirs to the tradition of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker. They claim a profound respect for the text of the play and hesitate to rearrange or omit scenes as was done so often in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite their claims of authenticity, however, modern Shakespearean directors have not let the plays alone. They have attempted various devices to make them more appealing or accessible. One popular approach is to shift the locale and period of the play. Troilus and Cressida, Tyrone Guthrie reasoned, is a difficult play, but if we place it in post-Edwardian England, on the eve of World War I, it will be easier to grasp. The play was presented, therefore, in a world of grand pianos, men wearing tuxedos and drinking cocktails, and women in long skirts carrying cigarette holders. Another favorite device in recent years has consisted of taking a look at the play and developing a new interpretation. Such a new interpretation is not seen as rewriting the play but rather as finding a modern metaphor for the original meaning. The avowed aim is to get closer to Shakespeare than ever before. Taking a cue from the essays of Jan Kott, British director Peter Brook, the best known proponent of this approach, fashioned his abstract, somewhat antiseptic versions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the latter half of the twentieth century, these two approachesthe shift in time and place and the fresh interpretation-have become widely accepted as inventive ways of presenting Shakespeare while still remaining true to both the letter and the spirit of the original. The method is best described by the single word When a director presents a play in the manner of Guthrie or Brook, he is said to have a directorial concept. Among the more important devotees of this method is Joseph Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Through the twentyone years of the Festival's existence there have been a number of

New York Shakespeare Festival, Summer 1974

Journal Article New York Shakespeare Festival, Summer 1974 Get access Jack J. Jorgens Jack J. Jorgens University of Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 4, Autumn 1974, Pages 410–414, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868943 Published: 01 October 1974

The New York Shakespeare Festival 1973

Journal Article The New York Shakespeare Festival 1973 Get access Jack J. Jorgens Jack J. Jorgens University of Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 4, Autumn 1973, Pages 423–427, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868613 Published: 01 October 1973

The New York Shakespeare Festival--1970

The New York Shakespeare Festival--1970 Get access Foster Hirsch Foster Hirsch Brooklyn College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 21, Issue 4, Autumn 1970, Pages 477–480, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868441 Published: 01 October 1970

The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1969

Journal Article The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1969 Get access Mildred C. Kuner Mildred C. Kuner Hunter College, The City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 20, Issue 4, Autumn 1969, Pages 451–454, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868547 Published: 01 October 1969

Joseph Papp's Happening and the Teaching of "Hamlet"

The following article was occasioned by Hamlet as a Happening, presented by Joseph Papp, director of Shakespeare in Central Park, for his New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in The Village. The daring nature of the Happening-with its song and dance routines, Puerto Rican accented to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy, and rock and roll background-provoked a series of articles in The New York Times, which in turn resulted in passionate letters from educators, scholars, and parents.

The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1968

Journal Article The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1968 Get access Mildred C. Kuner Mildred C. Kuner Hunter College, The City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 4, Autumn 1968, Pages 385–386, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868496 Published: 01 October 1968

The New York Shakespeare Festival 1965

O OR the 1965 summer season at the open-air Delacorte Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival bravely-and successfully-presented three of Shakespeare's less popular plays: Love's Labour's Lost, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida. Admission is free to the Central Park productions, whose audience is a varied one as to age and social and economic strata. As has been true of the Festival since its inception, the season was better as a whole than in its parts. The complex technical production has steadily improved until it is now almost perfect. A necessary evil of the outdoor stage is amplification by microphones hidden in small blocks jutting at the edge of the hexagonal stage, but the quality of reproduction is good. To the credit of Joseph Papp, the producer, the Festival since the beginning has always approached Shakespeare with great honesty, letting the merits of the play speak clearly for themselves, rather than overlarding the play with such tricks as changes of period, devices which call attention to themselves rather than to the action and dialogue, and the general hoking up which modern productions often employ. There is always an atmosphere of excitement about a production at the Delacorte, partly because the producers realize that Shakespeare is exciting theater and partly because productions on the excellent permanent open stage designed by Eldon Elder by their very use of that stage generate such an atmosphere. Clarity always has been the keynote of the Festival productions: action and dialogue are assisted by gesture and stage business to explain lines that might be difficult, and the decor and spectacle serve the play, rather than the other way around. Like every other American Shakespeare production, the festival plays are weakest where a Shakespeare play should be strongest, in the acting. A Shakespeare play makes three demands upon the actor, which only isolated actors in these productions have been able to fulfill: to grasp and convey larger-than-life emotions in a way that is realistic and convincing; to render both the meaning and the poetry of the lines; to look and move as if one is the character portrayed, and not an actor masquerading as that character. Except for an occasional genius-like George C. Scott, whose Richard III and Shylock remain the Festival's high points of acting-actors must be trained to play Shakespeare. Mr. Papp has asked for foundation assistance for such training during the winter, and surely no cause in the performing arts is more deserving or more urgent. Until such training of American actors is undertaken by a professional of the caliber of Michel St. Denis, who heads the actors workshop for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre of Stratford-upon-Avon, American produc-

The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1963

Journal Article The New York Shakespeare Festival, 1963 Get access Alice Griffin Alice Griffin Hunter College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 14, Issue 4, Autumn 1963, Pages 441–443, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868180 Published: 01 October 1963

The Shakespeare Season in New York 1958-1959

HE I958-i959 Shakespeare season in New York was indebted to visitors from abroad for its quantity and most of its quality. England's Old Vic presented good productions of three plays, Sir John Gielgud gave a brilliant anthology of Shakespearian characters, scenes and passages in Ages of Man and a superb production of Much Ado About Nothing, and Russia's Galina Ulanova contributed an unforgettable heroine in the Bolshoi Ballet version of Romeo and Juliet. Of the home-grown offerings, the New York Shakespeare Festival's Julius Caesar was a special triumph not only as a first-rate production but as a victory over city officials who attempted to block these free-admission outdoor presentations of Shakespeare. The Old Vic opened its New York season December 9 at the Broadway Theatre with a production of Twelfth Night especially well suited to a caste that lacked star names but had an understanding of style, voices for verse, and a sense of the ensemble in their playing. Desmond Heeley's Cavalier period setting for the play-an elegant arch standing at mid-stage, decaying among rosesreflected the strain of melancholy in this play, but director Michael Benthall chose to stress the comedy. Although Viola (Barbara Jefford) lacked the poignancy often brought out in the romantic scenes, her moments of comedy were sheer delight. Malvolio's (Richard Wordsworth) letter-reading scene (II. v) should be and was a high spot. So was the cakes and ale scene (II. iii), each actor creating an individual and richly comic character, yet all acting together in the same style in perfect harmony. John Neville was Aguecheek, Joss Ackland Sir Toby, Dudley Jones Feste and Judy Dench Maria. Hamlet, which opened December i6, offered a Prince of Denmark in the romantic tradition and a virtually uncut (three and one-half hours) performance which as a production was one of the best this reporter has seen of the play. Director Michael Benthall set the action on a flat stage (none of the usual ramps or stairs) against black strip-drapes, creating stunning scenic effects by the grouping of characters in Audrey Cruddas' rich costumes and by the imaginative use of lighting. John Neville's thin, blond, pale, handsome and sensitive Hamlet was in the Gielgud tradition (except that he lacks Gielgud's genius) rather than a virile Stoll-Olivier hero. In a way this intelligent if not inspired Hamlet put the play in perspective; one was aware of the tragedy played out against a background that included the corrupt court, the voluptuous rulers, the decent Polonius family. One general complaint about the last two North American Hamlets (Christopher Plummer and Fritz Weaver) was that they lacked music. Vocally, Mr. Neville gave us a full score.