Other Shakespeareans known to be on board the project are Anthony Hopkins, who plays Thor’s father and king of the gods, Odin, Colm Feore of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival *and Julie Taymor’s Titus). English actor Tom Hiddleston, a RADA grad who won an Olivier award for his Leonatus in a stage production of Cymbeline, will play the villain, bad-boy Trickster god Loki–can’t wait for that!

Thor is due out in 2010. The cast also includes Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard and Rene Russo. Thor will be played by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth, who played James T. Kirk’s father in the recent J.J. Abrams Star Trek.

For your reading pleasure, here are some links:

• the IMDb page on Thor
• Associated Press report on Branagh at the recent Comic Con in San Diego.
• How Did Kenneth Branagh Get Thor Job?
• Roundtable interview with Branagh about Thor

Here’s a vidclip of an interview with Branagh (pronouced “Branner”—who knew?) from Comic Con:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s another Branagh interview at Comic Con, this one discussing how Thor fits into the Marvel universe of Iron Man and Captain America:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And why did that young scamp Ireland do it? Many historians, including his new biographer, Doug Stewart, author of The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare , think it was to impress his father, Samuel Ireland.

Listen to the audio (or read the transcript) of the NPR feature here.

In a Massachussetts program called “Shakespeare in the Courts” that has been running some ten years, juvenile offenders are given the option of participating in a live Shakespeare production as an alternative to sentencing to a correctional institution. According to Louise Kennedy of the Boston Globe,

[Kevin Coleman, the program's education director] noted that when the teenagers arrive on the first day, they’re angry, impatient, and in shock that they really have to study Shakespeare — or go back to court for resentencing. “Oh my God, they’d rather go to jail,’’ he said. “They find this really bizarre, that they have to do it. ‘This is so unfair.’ ‘I’m not going to do this.’ ‘You can’t make me.’ That lasts into the second week.’’

Slowly, it changes. “When they come in, their language is hopeless, and it’s blaming and posturing,’’ Coleman said. “Now they seem to have more flexibility, more resilience. They’re becoming much less judgmental, more hopeful, taking more delight in each other.’’

Click here for Kennedy’s complete article on the program posted on boston.com.

And along similar lines, check out Shakespeare Behind Bars, an award-winning documentary on a similar program operating among hardened offenders in a Kentucky penitentiary.

Read on.

The novel in question is The Final Act of Mr William Shakespeare, by Robert Winder, and, also as in Equivocation, the author makes so bold as to write a new “Shakespeare” play, as it were, as part of the story. In the case of Equivocation, the play was a “True History of the Gunpowder Treason”, and we only see a few small portions of it, all concocted from bits and pieces out of other Shakespeare play, mainly Macbeth — which in Cain’s fictional world is the play Shag ends up writing instead as a sort of “equivocating” (read: Safe, barely) slam at Tudor-Stuart religio-politics. But Winder, in a case of jaw-dropping chutzpah, apparently does Cain one better and writes a whole damn new “Shakespeare” play. It’s called The Tragicall History of Henry VII, it’s (by the sounds of it) unequivocally critical of the Tudor he had given the hero treatment in Richard III, and it runs to one hundred pages, a fourth of Winder’s novel.

Wow.

(BTW, the London Times reviewer calls it “hugely enteraining” to boot. Here’s their article.

And here’s a link to the Amazon page; the book won’t be available via Amazon until Feb. 4, 2010, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

A bit of "director-driven, concept" Shakespeare that worked pretty well.

That is the question posed by NYC-based theatre critic David Cote in a blog article published by the Guardian UK entitled, “Most Stagings of Shakespeare Don’t Go Far Enough”.

Quoth Cote, after taking Wall Street Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout to task for “grousing” about concept staging in a Big Thing interview:

I also wince at conceptual Shakespeare, but for another reason: most directorial concepts are far too timid. Shakespeare was a moderate, nonsectarian humanist? Nonsense. Why not assume that if the Bard were alive, he’d be a bug-eyed anarchist or an eco-terrorist (he did love nature imagery, after all). Shakespeare, that notorious mixer-up of comedy and tragedy, certainly wouldn’t be churning out well-behaved divertissements for conservative critics.

And we’re lying if we say we know how his plays should be staged, or that we find every single syllable equally pellucid and penetrating. It’s 2010, and Shakespeare’s language is a glorious, perplexing welter of ageless, soul-stirring verse, antique jokes, irrelevant cultural prejudices, blazingly vital characters and obsolescent verbiage. Translation (metaphorically speaking) and innovation are key to preserving these overdone classics.

My own take: I’ve seen great traditional Shakespeare and horrible traditional Shakespeare; I’ve seen luminous “director-driven, high-concept” Shakespeare, and goofy versions thereof. Bad traditional Shakespeare is usually dull as ditchwater, bad concept-driven Shakespeare is usually unintentionally funny, so choose your poison. Ultimately, the end-product has more to do with the clarity of vision and quality of talent involved. David Cote, I think, though making excellent points, used as his launching pad one or two uncontextualized lines from Teachout’s interview that, after watching it, came across as Straw Man argumentation. In the end I think I’d have to agree with Teachout that “It’s all about what works.” In the end, too, I think Cote pretty much says the same thing, so perhaps there is less distance between the two viewpoints than initially strikes the reader.

BTW, Teachout’s interview is worth watching on a number of scores, including his views on the revolution underway in art criticism/journalism because of the digital revolution. Go here for that.

Go here for David Cote’s article.

According to Father Andrew Headon, vice-rector of the college and organiser of the exhibition, the names can be deciphered as “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford”.

A third entry in 1587, “Shfordus Cestriensis”, may stand for “Sh[akespeare from Strat]ford [in the diocese] of Chester”, he said.

The entries fall within the playwright’s “missing years” between 1585, when he left Stratford abruptly, and 1592, when he began his career as playwright in London.

One might ask why a pilgrim in Rome might not just sign his name, “Wm. Shakespeare” or whatever, but, alas, it must be remembered that William Cecil and Elizabeth’s “spymaster” Francis Walsingham had agents all over Catholic Europe keeping their eyes out for Englishmen gone abroad to receive Catholic educations or be trained as priests, so the pilgrim’s discretion should not be wondered at.

And this, of course, is a constant problem with trying to uncover irrefutable info on the subject of Shakespeare’s religious background and orientation.

So not a Smoking Gun, perhaps, but another piece in the “convergence of probabilities”. I wonder, has anyone thought to search the Vatican Archives?

Read the entire Times article here.

Here’s their initial write-up:

In 2005 the BUFVC, through its association with the Open University, was the recipient of a three-year Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, to create An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio.

The aim has been to deliver an authoritative online database of Shakespeare-related content in film, television, radio and video recordings, international in scope and dating from 1899 to the present day. It offers current and continuously updated distribution information and also identifies the location of copies in archive collections.

For more information on when the database will come fully online, or to search the test database, go here.

Every avid theatregoer knows the pain, sooner or later, of having bought tickets to some performance specifically because of a certain actor, only to discover, upon arrival, that the actor has gotten sick or been injured, and the role is to be played by the Understudy. I’ve never (personally) had that happen with a Hamlet yet, though I confess to having seen a Hamlet or two where I wish it had happened; but imagine, if you will, that the theatre is the RSC, and the sidelined Hamlet in question is the highly anticipated David Tennant.

Not that this wouldn’t still make it on my “Put money in my purse!” most-devoutly-to-be-wished theatre list, if only to see Patrick Stewart’s Claudius—check out my review of Stewart’s take on the role in the BBC version from the ’80s.

Be that as it may, here’s David Jay’s take on the disappointing circumstance.

(P.S. If you, like me, haven’t ever seen David Tennant on stage, but you think he looks familiar, he was the wonderfully creepy Barty Crouch, Jr., in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and an erstwhile Dr. Who.)

In the summer of 2008, eleven of the most prestigious and accomplished regional theatres in the country were invited to nominate multiple actors for consideration to be named LUNT-FONTANNE FELLOWS. All of the actors who were nominated for this honor: have 20-plus years of experience as professional actors; are widely considered among the top actors in their community; and are widely respected by audiences, directors, and fellow actors for their talent, dedication to craft, attention to detail, and passionate pursuit of excellence – the qualities for which Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so revered.

Well, the “best of the best” have now been selected, and we here at bardolatry are hardly surprised that two of our favorite actors are among those chosen: Dan Donohue from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Lee Ernst from the Milwaukee Rep and the American Players Theatre back in our old Wisconsin stomping grounds.

You’ve been hearing us natter on about Dan Donohue on this site all summer, and fully concur with Bill Rauch’s assessment (in his nominating letter) that DD is “a genius”. Alas, we haven’t been able to take in any of Lee Ernst’s performances in over a decade, since our move from Wisconsin to Oregon; but besides his wonderful Shakespeare work at the APT, Lee Ernst is unforgettable to Clan Murphy for his performance in what still stands, after all these years, as our single favorite regional theatre production: the Joe Hanreddy-directed world premiere of a joint (and bi-lingual) American/Japanese production of Silence, Steven Dietz’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s fictional masterpiece about Jesuit missionaries in 16th century Japan. (The show, at the Milwaukee Rep in the mid-nineties, also starred Marco Barricelli, another OSF favorite.)

I found a couple of old articles about the Silence production here and here.

Congratulations, Lee and Dan! Clan Murphy would love to be flies on the wall during some of those master classes with Lynn Redgrave!