Tony Award winning actor Kristin Chenoweth will host an upcoming television documentary that goes behind the scenes of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s recent production of Twelfth Night. Shakespeare on the Hudson follows the actors and creative team through the real-life, off-stage drama of the production from auditions and call backs to the final moments backstage before the performance begins.
Scotland on Sunday reports that the new film version of King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins could be filmed in Scotland instead of Ireland as was first reported. According the article, “The director and producers of the movie, which is due to start filming in the spring, arrive in Scotland tomorrow to examine potential locations. Faye Ward, one of the London-based producers, told Scotland on Sunday: “It’s definitely more than a possibility.”
Academy award-nominated director Julie Taymor says she’s in the final planning stages for a film version of “The Tempest.” Taymor recently told the Australian newspaper The Age that she hopes to start shooting in November if financing is available. Taymor has directed “The Tempest” on stage twice. Her 1986 production was filmed by WNET-TV in New York and shown on American public television. For the new film, however, Taymor has a gender-bending twist in mind.
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles began shooting a comedy television series this week about a Shakespearean theatre company in crisis. Meirelles has also revealed that his next movie will be a loose adaptation of “”Love’s Labour’s Lost.” The 52-year old Sao Paulo is probably best known for directing the films “City of God,” and “The Constant Gardener.” The new Brazilian TV series, “Sound and Fury,” is based on the Canadian program “Slings and Arrows.”
A film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2007 production of “King Lear,” directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellen, is headed for television screens in the United Kingdom, United States and Japan. But this past weekend, American television critics weren’t as interested in McKellen’s interpretation of Lear as they were in the possibility that he [...]
For the past three and half months, the South African television network SABC1 has been showing Shakespeare in Mzansi, a series of reworked versions of Shakespeare’s tragedies adapted into a South African context. Shakespeare in Mzansi consists of five mini-series: “Entabeni,” “Izingane Zobaba,” “Jolile ka Kheza,” “Ugugu no Andile,” and “Death of a Queen.” Each [...]
Shakespearean tragedies are usually bloody affairs on stage but Shakespearean theatre has reputation for refinement and respectability. That wasn’t always the case. In his 2007 book “The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America,” author Nigel Cliff describes how a feud between the English actor William Charles Macready and the first great American [...]
The Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C. made an unusual casting choice for its current production of “Antony and Cleopatra.” Director Michael Kahn decided to use three 20-inch ball pythons to play the role of the asp that Cleopatra uses to commit suicide in the play’s final scene. The slithery, but non-poisonous, Shakespearean actors were [...]
More casting information is emerging about a planned movie version of “King Lear.” The project was first revealed in May during the Cannes Film Festival in France. As previously announced, Anthony Hopkins will play the title role. Keira Knightley will play Cordelia and Gwyneth Paltrow will portray Regan. This week it was also announced that [...]
“CBC’s adaptation of Othello, The Tragedy of the Moor, is handsome, intelligent and — inevitably — limited. Some of the limitations are literal; a lot of the Shakespearean text is gone, including nearly all the long speeches,” writes Robert Cushman of “The National Post.” As Cushman explains, the cuts effectively change the nature of the [...]
