Death and the King's Horseman, OSF 2009
February 21, 2009 by Debra Murphy
Filed under Derrick Lee Weeden, G. Valmont Thomas, It Ain't Shakespeare, Kevin Kenerly, OSF, Rex Smith, U. Jonathan Toppo
[N.B. Bardolatry owes its opportunity to comment early on this marvelous production to director Chuck Smith, who generously offered the parishioners of Our Lady of the Mountain Catholic Church the opportunity to see the dress rehearsal on February 11. Ah, the bennies of living in beautiful Ashland, Oregon! The good news for the Oregon [...]
Sleuth on DVD!
March 14, 2008 by John Murphy
Filed under It Ain't Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh’s remake (complete overhaul, more like) of the 1974 classic Sleuth was released on Tuesday. It stars Michael Caine and Jude Law as competitors for the love of a woman who are trying to one-up each other in a dangerous battle of wits. The script is by Harold Pinter, who writes about masculine vanity [...]
Roger Rees reading The Cardinal
January 17, 2008 by Debra Murphy
Filed under "Put money in my purse!", It Ain't Shakespeare
In the “put money in my purse!” category—money for the hotel room/plane ticket to NYC, since the event tickets are only $20—the divine Roger Rees is among the cast doing a Red Bull Theater “Revelation Reading” of Elizabethan playwright James Shirley’s The Cardinal.
Roger Rees, if the name isn’t quite a household word, was last seen [...]
Sleuth (2007)
November 23, 2007 by John Murphy
Filed under Directors, It Ain't Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
starring Michael Caine and Jude Law
War of Wits
Sleuth kicks something vicious. Those familiar with the deliciously over-the-top 1972 version, which pitted legendary Laurence Olivier against a lean-and-hungry Michael Caine, may rightly wonder, why bother? They already got this one right. The play by Anthony Shaffer was a clever bit of gamesmanship—a sort [...]
A Double Life (1947) starring Ronald Colman, directed by George Cukor
August 23, 2007 by John Murphy
Filed under Bardfilm, It Ain't Shakespeare, Othello, Othello Spinoffs (film), Spinoffs
Directed by George Cukor
Starring Ronald Colman and Shelley Winters
Reviewed by John Murphy
Method in his Madness
Ronald Colman won an Oscar in 1948 for his riveting performance in George Cukor’s A Double Life, a noir-ish psychological thriller that cleverly anticipated the Method movement in acting in the early 1950s. Colman plays Anthony John, a famous Broadway actor [...]
August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean
July 30, 2007 by Rachel
Filed under Bard Northwest, Derrick Lee Weeden, G. Valmont Thomas, Greta Oglesby, It Ain't Shakespeare, Kevin Kenerly, OSF, U. Jonathan Toppo
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production, 2007
reviewed by Rachel Murphy
(Editor’s note: We know it ain’t Shakespeare, but we all thought this was too good a production not to comment on. So we’re adding a new category: “It ain’t Shakespeare, but…”)
Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2007 Season Gem is the first of a ten-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle” [...]
The Sopranos and the Bard
June 16, 2007 by John Murphy
Filed under Bard at Large, It Ain't Shakespeare, Motley Bard
Who knew? According to a London Times online article written by Ben Macintyre, HBO’s long-running-and-just ended mob series, The Sopranos, is “every inch a Shakespearean drama.”
Quoth he:
At the climax of a great Shakespearean drama, the once-great king surveys the ruins of his greatness. Betrayed by family and friends, most of his captains dead [...]
