Staging Shakespeare

We talk to scholar Fiona Ritchie, whose new book, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, details their rise to fame.

This month, Shakespeare theaters across the country are getting ready for the holidays with stories of Scrooge-i-ness defeated. Even Malvolio learns a lesson!

Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos write about stage adaptations of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” that engage with Día de los Muertos traditions, reframing Shakespeare’s meditations on life and death according to Indigenous and Latinx worldviews.

Sir Ian McKellen tells us about some of his most famous roles: playing Macbeth opposite Dame Judi Dench, King Richard III with a screenplay he co-wrote, and Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings films.

King John (2022): Jessika D. Williams in “King John,” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenny Graham. The fall harvest is ready, and this year, we’ve got a bumper crop of Shakespeare plays! If you’re in the mood for…

Sir Ian McKellen played Hamlet in his thirties, and again in his eighties. He gives us his take on the Melancholy Dane.

Adams talks with host Barbara Bogaev about how he turned a five-act play into a two-act opera—which scenes got the hook, new lines written in the style of the Bard, and what Shakespeare may have thought of the play’s characters.

Find out what’s onstage at a Shakespeare theater near you in September.

“Nowhere does Shakespeare attend more to theatrical enterprise and potential than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” writes Michele Osherow, Folger Theatre’s resident dramaturg. “It makes the play irresistible to those who practice theatre and to those who crave its incomparable…

Austin Tichenor explores small-cast Shakespeare and the artistic possibilities of a few performers playing multiple roles.

Lolita Chakrabarti shares historical context about pioneering 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge, the subject of her play Red Velvet, including a notable detail about his funeral in Poland which she learned after she’d written the play.