Richard Monette, the longest-serving artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, died Tuesday night of a pulmonary embolus in hospital in London, Ontario. He was 64 years old. Monette’s tenure at the festival lasted for 14 seasons, from 1994 to 2007. His first season as artistic director of the festival produced a dramatic turnaround in the festival’s economic fortunes, turning an accumulated deficit into an $800,000 surplus. That success continued throughout his tenure, which was marked by record levels of attendance.
Stage and screen actor Colm Feore will return to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2009 to play the roles of Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac on the Festival stage. His motion pictures include The Chronicles of Riddick, Chicago, Face/Off, The Red Violin and Titus. Mr. Feore will next be seen in the upcoming season of the American TV series 24, playing the president’s husband.. He also co-stars next month in Clint Eastwood’s Changling, opposite Angelina Jolie.
September 9, 2008
“The Prince of Wales met a group of budding young actors today as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first Youth Ensemble took to the stage.The group, which consists of 21 members aged between 13 and 18, performed extracts from their version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stratford-Upon-Avon.” Source : The Coventry Telegraph
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Planners for the London 2012 Olympics are launching a four-year program designed to showcase the UK’s arts and culture to the rest of the world in the run up to the games.
The Cultural Olympiad will include a World Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2012, to be hosted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The festival will celebrate Shakespeare as an international figure and the British as an international people centering on exchange and collaboration.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is asking raise £1m in public donations to help rebuild its main theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The theatre closed for redevelopment in 2007 and the RSC has already received more than £100m towards the work. Now the company is seeking a further £10m and is hoping £1m will come from public donations.
Ralph Cohen and Jim Warren, the founders of the American Shakespeare Center, have been named recipients of the 2008 Governor’s Awards for the Arts by Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia. The ASC is a theatre company that performs Shakespeare’s plays using original staging practices in the world’s only recreation of the Blackfriars Playhouse, the indoor London theatre owned by Shakespeare’s acting company.
There’s little consensus among London’s theatre critics over Theatre of Memory’ s new production of Romeo and Juliet at Middle Temple Hall. In fact, nearly every review has a different take on the acting, directing and production design. The play is being staged as part of the 2008 Temple Festival. Middle Temple Hall was built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and was the site of the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night in February 1602
The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival has appointed a new artistic director following a four-month search. Michael Carleton will begin his job in October and has been acting and directing for 24 years.
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is starting its own record label, Globe Editions, designed to offer a fresh approach to early music and spoken word recordings. The first album, Elizabethan Street Songs, will be released next month. Featuring historically researched tunes performed on sackbut, archlute, hurdy-gurdy and other period instruments, Elizabethan Street Songs is a musical interpretation on the not so genteel world of the Elizabethan street musician and singer.
Julie Taymor, the critically acclaimed film and theatre director, is currently working on a film adaptation of The Tempest in which the gender of Prospero has been switched so that the exiled Duke of Milan is now Prospera, the exiled duchess. But, as it turns out, Taymor isn’t the only person to think of the gender-bending twist. Academy Award-winning actor Olympia Dukakis is currently playing the role of Prospera in a stage adaptation of The Tempest entitled The Other Side of the Island. And Prospera isn’t the only character in this new adaptation to receive a theatrical sex change.
