CSC's Shakespeare at Fenway Park

At Fenway, a magical night of Shakespeare

By Terry Byrne

 | Globe Correspondent   September 20, 2014

Brian Snyder/REUTERS

Actors Paul Melendy, left,  and Larry Coen were at a rehearsal at Fenway before Friday’s show.

An all-star lineup took the field — um, make that the stage — at Fenway Park Friday night for an enchanting evening of Shakespeare.

The event, which celebrated the start of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 20th anniversary, brought together an impressive collection of actors — from Seth Gilliam (“The Walking Dead”) and Zuzanna Szadkowski (“Gossip Girl”) to Mike O’Malley (“Glee”) and Maryann Plunkett (“House of Cards”) — for a selection of “greatest hits” from 10 of William Shakespeare’s plays. Artistic director Steven Maler welcomed the crowd of 4,500 and took to opportunity to announce that “King Lear” will be this summer’s production of free Shakespeare on the Boston Common.

After an introduction by Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner, complete with several of Shakespeare’s references to baseball (“Fair is foul and foul is fair”), a motley crew of Rude Mechanicals from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” bounded on stage — a 20-by-40-foot over the Red Sox dugout — to hand out roles in that comedy’s play-within-a-play. The audience seated in the stands above first base not only had a perfect view of the performance, but also a rare peek at Fenway’s beauty without the glare of field lights.

Once the Mechanicals adjourned to study their texts, Christian Coulson (“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”) arrived to offer Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, followed by his “nunnery” scene with Ophelia. Coulson’s intense focus was quite impressive; he never broke character, even when a fire alarm went off in the stands nearby.

The chilly evening was warmed by the smart, passionate performances of Bianca Amato and James Waterston from “Much Ado About Nothing”; the fraught scene between friends Kersti Bryan and Szadkowski from “Othello”; the innocent enthusiasm of Jenna Augen and Rupak Ginn in “Romeo and Juliet”; the playful repartee of Marianna Bassham and Kerry O’Malley in “Twelfth Night”; the fierce passion of Gilliam and cunning of Waterston in “Othello”; the giddy mix of triumph and terror in Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders in “Macbeth”; and the tantalizing battle of wills between Augen and Peter Cambor in “The Taming of the Shrew.” 

Interspersed among scenes were songs inspired by Shakespeare, sung by the extraordinary O’Malley, Max von Essen (who melted the crowd with “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story”), Jason Butler Harner, who accompanied the Mill Town Rounders and delivered a soliloquy from “Richard II,” and Neal McDonough, who performed a sonnet, first lovingly to his wife via cellphone, and then with the darker strains of the heavies he often plays in film.

The evening closed with the entire cast gathered on stage for a hilarious performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “Midsummer’s” play-wihtin-the-play. Local favorites Rick Park, Will LeBow, Paul Melendy, and Larry Coen joined Cambor and Mike O’Malley for a joyous ending to a truly magical evening of theater.

Bollywood Keeps Copying Ideas From Shakespeare

Bollywood hearts Shakespeare... but sadly not everyone can pull off a Haider

Oct 3, 2014 10:24 IST

by Nandan Kini

Shakespeare comes back to Bollywood this week, and it’s his old hand, Vishal Bhardwaj, who brings him back in style in with Haider, a grim adaptation of Hamlet.

Having already made his mark with Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello), Vishal clearly has a nose for the Bard’s works.

However, Bollywood’s obsession with Shakespeare runs deeper than Bhardwaj’s trilogy.
This is not surprising since the Bard may just have been the pioneer of Bollywood’s favourite masala stories, penning girl-meets-boy-and-then-dies love stories on one hand, and maa-kasam-badla-loonga revenge dramas like Hamlet on the other. (Papa-kasam-badla-loonga story, in Hamlet's case, of course.)
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 than one can imagine have sought inspiration from his works, intentionally or otherwise. We all applaud the good ones, but it's clear that most of the adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were made, wittingly or unwittingly, with the unstated goal of making old Willie turn in his grave.

Sadly, not all Bollywood tributes to the bard are quite Haider: Facebook

Given Bollywood’s fixation on romance, Romeo and Juliet has been a perennial favourite for filmmakers. Everything from Ek Duje Ke Liye to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, to Ram… Wait, Goliyon Ki Rasleela – Ramleela, were apparently inspired from the tragedy. But while some of those films might have hit the mark, quite a few clearly lost the plot altogether.

The most recent example was last year’s Prateik-Amyra Dastur (who??) starrer, Issaq. Director Manish Tiwary has some good work to his name (Dil, Dosti, Etc.), but with Issaq, he seems to have decided to go in a more experimental direction by casting two pieces of cardboard as Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, together, Prateik and Amyra had the combined expressive range of a wooden spoon, and audiences might just have been better off staring at their home cutlery than watching this travesty.
By the numbers, Hindi cinema’s penchant for Shakespeare's comedies is way greater. While Bhardwaj’s mentor Gulzar famously adapted A Comedy of Errors for the silver screen with Angoor, starring Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Verma as a pair of identical twins with a whole lot of confused identities, David Dhawan’s Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan was also a twisted but unintentional take on pretty much the same story.

Nowhere close to Angoor, Dhawan's Shakespearean turn was presented as Amitabh Bachchan’s comeback vehicle, but instead saw Bachchan hamming it up, playing virtual second lead to Govinda, and basically rehashed his dead-on-arrival ‘80s' act with some very crass jokes.

Thankfully, better sense prevailed, and the Big B followed Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan up with roles closer to his actual age. He did take one more stab at Shakespeare, with the desi English language film, The Last Lear. This time, he managed to drive the stake right through Willie’s soul in this painfully contrived adaptation of King Lear. Not exactly Bollywood, but I digress.

If you look down upon Amitabh Bachchan for succumbing to Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan, know that even Bollywood’s biggest production houses couldn’t resist taking a shot at Shakespeare.
Take Yash Raj, for example, which, in 2009, released a bomb called Dil Bole Hadippa, starring the current Mrs Chopra aka Rani Mukherjee and Shahid Kapoor.

Director Anurag Singh probably thought he was plagiarising from an equally terrible Hollywood comedy called She’s The Man when he made his film about Rani dressing up as a sardar, beard and all, to get onto a cricket team.

Perhaps not a sports team, but the earliest version of this cross-dressing confusion was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the Countess Olivia dresses up as a young man Cesario to enter Duke Orsino’s service. That, however, was the end of similarities. Dil Bole Hadippa featured no Shakespearean flourishes and went down without effort at the box office. Perhaps it was the fact that Rani as a sardar looked more butch than Shahid... but then, who knows?

Speaking of butch women and effeminate looking heroes, Rajshri’s 2010 release, Isi Life Mein featured a similar pairing, with two doe-eyed unknowns Akshay Oberoi and Sandeepa Dhar in starring roles.

The film started off as a ham-handed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and even featured the play as a plot device before veering into more familiar, sanskaari, Barjatya territory and sparing the Bard’s soul some terrible torture.

Not every filmmaker is that understanding: filmmaker Sharat Katariya adapted the magical A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a film called 10ml Love back in 2012, and one imagines he must have been hopped up on 30ml of something while making it.

The film was your typical low-budget, arty Bollywood fare, starring regulars like Purab Kohli and Rajat Kapoor. The twist, though, was that the actors were probably not informed that the film was meant to be a comedy, and ended up sleepwalking through it all, turning this dream into an insufferable dozefest instead.

Given his track record with Shakespeare, one can be sure that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider will not disappoint this week. Until then, however, could we please hide those copies of Love’s Labour’s Lost, lest David Dhawan or Sajid Khan find them?

Nandan Kini is a documentary film researcher and journalist based in Mumbai. Also the national president of the Association of the Sartorially Challenged, he tweets at @bombilfry and has booked his face at Facebook.com/nandan.kini.