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From Shakespeare to Patankin
The summer in theater

Summer stages

Come summer, it’s " Westward-ho " (as they say in Twelfth Night) for seekers of serious theater. And the major theater companies operating in the shadow of Tanglewood have announced their 2003 schedules, promising everything from Shakespeare to Mandy Patinkin — one of few people not thought to be the " real " Shakespeare.

The Tony-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival kicks off its mainstage season with the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera (June 25 through July 6). Former artistic director Peter Hunt directs the production, which features Jesse L. Martin of television’s Law and Order, Broadway legend Betty Buckley, and Melissa Errico. John Guare’s 1977 Landscape of the Body, helmed by Rent director Michael Greif, follows (July 9 through 20). Huntington Theatre Company resident director Darko Tresnjak stages Dylan Thomas’s lyrical portrait of a Welsh village, Under Milk Wood (July 23 through August 3), and Gregory Boyd directs Tom Stoppard’s 1974 Travesties (August 6 through 17). The season concludes with English playwright Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with master larynx and Chicago Hope star Patinkin in the title role (August 20 through 24). Gerald Freedman directs.

On the WTF’s smaller Nikos Stage, the season begins with the world premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Big Bill, which is about tennis great William Tilden (July 2 through 13). Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin directs Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s Mother of Invention, a " hilariously absurd look at the comedy inherent in family tragedy " (July 16 through 27), and Scott Ellis helms Pulitzer winner Frank D. Gilroy’s The Lake (July 30 through August 10), which is about " the rise and decline of a lake community from its inception in 1927 until after the war. " It’s old-home week for the final Nikos offering, The Chekhov Cycle (August 12 through 16), which offers readings of all four of Chekhov’s major plays, plus an exchange of letters between the Russian playwright and his actress wife, Olga Knipper, over the course of five nights. The marathon features Williamstown stalwarts including Olympia Dukakis, Blythe Danner, Austin Pendleton, and Louis Zorich.

In Lenox, Shakespeare & Company gets started early, opening its 2003 season in the Spring Lawn Theatre with artistic director Tina Packer’s production of David Egan’s new play The Fly-Bottle (in repertory May 16 through August 24), which is about a 1946 fight between renowned philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Spring Lawn season continues with man-of-the-summer Chekhov nudging Edith Wharton from her usual spot as Normi Noël directs The Chekhov One-Acts, a program that includes The Celebration, Swan Song, The Harmfulness of Tobacco, and The Brute, in translations by Eric Bentley and Theodore Hoffman (in rep June 20 through August 31). And Tod Randolph, so wonderful in the 1999 S&C staging of A Room of One’s Own, returns to the role of Virginia Woolf (no word on the nose) in Vita and Virginia (in rep July 12 through August 31). Daniela Varon directs the piece, which was adapted from correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West by the English actress Eileen Atkins. S&C stays in business longer than the region’s other theaters, and the fall will bring to Spring Lawn Peter Shaffer’s play Lettice and Lovage (November 7 through December 21), with a rare appearance on stage by artistic director Packer, who plays the role created by Maggie Smith, that of fanatical English country-house tour guide Lettice Douffet.

In the Founders’ Theatre, Daniela Varon directs the Bard’s Much Ado About Nothing (in rep May 30 through August 31), with Allyn Burrows as Benedick and Boston-based Paula Langton as Beatrice. The troupe’s popular production of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) returns for a third outing (in rep July 5 through August 31). And Packer directs the mother lode, King Lear (in rep July 18 through August 30), with Jonathan Epstein undertaking the title role. Come fall, the Founders’ Theatre looks harshly forward to winter in the Berkshires with a revival of S&C’s production of Dennis Krausnick’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (September 5 through November 2). Eleanor Holdridge directs.

S&C continues its planning and fundraising for the erection of an accurate model of London’s Rose Theatre, where Shakespeare trod the boards. Meanwhile, on its Rose Footprint Theatre, Andrew Borthwick-Leslie directs the Summer Performance Institute in the Bard’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (July 31 through August 31). The Rose Footprint will be tented this year (protection not just from the rain but from the sun); the sides will remain open, however, so you’ll still get that outdoor feeling. Also, as part of its new Bankside Festival project, an attempt to re-create the theatergoing experience of Elizabethan times, S&C will be offering outdoor " Preludes, " as company artists explore " the Punch and Judy Show, the Burlesque, Ballads, Madrigals, Morris dances, and perhaps even a gentle Satyricon. " No mention of bear baiting, we’re glad to report.

In Stockbridge, the venerable Berkshire Theatre Festival gets its 75th mainstage season off to a start with Joseph Stein’s Tony-winning adaptation of Carl Reiner’s autobiographical Enter Laughing (June 17 through July 5), the Depression-set story of a young man whose thespian dreams conflict with his parents’ desire that he be a druggist. Scott Schwartz directs. Next up is the American premiere of Canadian novelist and playwright Timothy Findley’s The Stillborn Lover (July 8 through 26). Emmy winner Richard Chamberlain returns to the BTF to play a career diplomat who is suspected of murdering a young male prostitute in Moscow in the Martin Rabbett–directed production. Anders Cato directs Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning valentine Talley’s Folly (July 29 through August 9), and Eric Hill takes the reins of the more adult-oriented John Caird/Trevor Nunn adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (August 12 through 29).

The BTF’s smaller stage, the Unicorn Theatre, opens with American Primitive (John and Abigail) (May 23 through June 7), " the words of John and Abigail Adams, put into a sequence for the theater, with addenda in rhyme by William Gibson, " the 89-year-old author of The Miracle Worker and Golda’s Balcony. Gary English directs. That’s followed by Norman Allen’s Nijinsky’s Last Dance (June 11 through July 12). Joe Calarco directs Jeremy Davidson as the ballet icon and sometime madman. The Who’s Tommy gets a Unicorn revival (July 16 through August 2), and the theater also takes on John Weidman & Stephen Sondheim’s 1991 musical Assassins (August 6 through 29), which unites in song all the folks who have tried to kill the president.

The youngest member of the club, Barrington Stage Company, kicks off its ninth season at the Consolati Performing Arts Center in Sheffield with the show that made Barbra Streisand a star, the 1964 Jule Styne musical Funny Girl (June 25 through July 19). Artistic director and musical specialist Julianne Boyd is at the helm. The second show is Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero (July 23 through August 2), to be directed by Rob Ruggiero. The season concludes with the world premiere of The Game (August 7 through August 23), a musical with book and lyrics by Amy Powers and David Topchik and music by Megan Cavallari that’s based on Pierre-Ambrose-François Choderlos de Laclos’s nasty 1782 epistolary classic Les liaisons dangereuses. Boyd directs that one, too.

BSC’s Stage II opens its season with another world premiere, Mark St. Germain’s Ears on a Beatle (July 9 through 23). The comedy, by the author of Camping with Henry and Tom, spans the 1970s as it explores the relationship between two FBI agents assigned to spy on John Lennon in New York. Stage II will also present Neil LaBute’s exploration of love and art, The Shape of Things (July 30 through August 10); Andrew Volkoff directs.

ART stages

The American Repertory Theatre this week unveiled what will be its second season under artistic director Robert Woodruff, and it’s a more international affair than the Big Apple Circus. The 2003-2004 season will kick off in September with Russian director Kama Ginkas’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Yalta-set short story about an illicit love affair, Lady with a Lapdog. Ginkas, who’s renowned in Moscow for his lyrical interpretations of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, will be working stateside for the first time.

Next up, in December, is Charles L. Mee’s Snow in June, to be directed by the Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng and augmented by live music commissioned from California composer Paul Dresher. Mee, whose Brecht-inspired Full Circle was directed by Woodruff for the ART, is best known for his postmodern, collage-like responses to classics. Snow in June is based on a 13th-century Chinese tale in which a young girl returns to earth as a ghost to take revenge on the society that permitted her murder.

Choreographer Martha Clarke, whose signature dance-theater pieces include The Garden of Earthly Delights (which ART hosted in 1985), will direct Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream beginning in January; that will be followed, in March, by Harold Pinter’s 1958 comedy of menace The Birthday Party, in a staging by New York-based Joanne Akalaitis, whose last ART outing, a post-nuclear Endgame set in an abandoned subway station, got the company in hot water with Samuel Beckett. One hopes Pinter is less fussy.

May brings a collaboration between the ART and the Minneapolis-based Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, which is known for its physical, Jacques Lecoq–inspired brand of theater. Dominique Serrand, one of Jeune Lune’s founding artists, will direct actors from both theaters in Molière’s The Miser. Finally, also in May, the home team will step up to the plate when Woodruff, whose ART productions have included Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities as well as this season’s Highway Ulysses, directs Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. For more information, call (617) 547-8300 or visit www.amrep.org.

More cancellations

Yet another American tour has fallen victim to the war on Iraq. Hespèrion XXI, the renowned Spanish early-music ensemble led by Jordi Savall, has decided not continue with its North American tour. The group were scheduled to perform this Friday, April 4, at the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, as part of the Boston Early Music Festival Concert Series. They hope to reschedule these concerts next season.

 

Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003

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