Latest news with #TheComedyofErrors
San Francisco Chronicle
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Is ‘The Comedy of Errors' salvageable?
For all the people out there who think they're not Shakespeare fans, one of the biggest culprits is reading aloud a play's scene-setting monologue in high school English class. In real life, if someone went on and on in monotone, spouting all that convenient exposition, you'd probably get turned off, too. If only all those 10th-graders could see how director Devin Brain does it in 'The Comedy of Errors.' In the show, which I saw Tuesday, April 22, at American Conservatory Theater, as Aegeon (Diana Coates) embarks on his sob story, four other actors sit cross-legged in front, facing us, and Jared Gooding's lighting design shifts to suggest the glow of a TV set late at night. It's story time, the giddy hour your parents let you watch maybe once a week. Lindsay Jones' sound design conjures a staticky orchestra, like what you might hear during an old-school movie montage. The music plays 'Anchors Aweigh!' for sailing on the high seas, 'dun dun dun!' for danger ahead and a thunderclap for a decisive, life-changing moment. And it's all borne along by Coates' mad scientist voice, with the tone of a put-upon father whose tale of woe is always looking for the slightest provocation, that it might unfurl once more. A curtain-raiser is just as inspired, with cast members unsheathing actual slapsticks. They terrorize each other with them, naturally, but then the clapping noise switches on the world of the play, with twinkling lights and the 'bing!' of a cleaning product commercial. One only wishes Brain had taken on worthier material. The show, which New York's Acting Company is presenting in repertory with the fabulous 'Two Trains Running,' might be more aptly titled 'The Contrivance of Errors.' In devising a way that two sets of twins, separated at birth, might find themselves in the same place and get mistaken for one another over and over again, Shakespeare isn't funny so much as exasperating. You picture him in a garret, quill in hand, going, 'Tee hee hee! But I'm not going to let everything straighten out yet! These shenanigans have only been going on for an hour,' while his wife rolls her eyes, pats his head and says, 'Sure, hon, whatever makes you happy.' Christina Anderson's modern translation of the text supplies a few felicitous anachronisms. 'Come on, man, these jokes are not cool,' one twin says to what he thinks is his own servant. Then later: 'Hey now, sir, has your goofy humor altered?' But mostly, 'Errors' isn't about the poetry or the plot, whose questions of who bought a necklace from whom and who carried money to whom you'd do well to gloss over. It works only as a platform for outrageous physical comedy, and here Brain and the cast succeed only intermittently. At one point, actors James Ricardo Milord and J'Laney Allen are so delirious with confusion, so desperate to understand each other, that they embrace, but in the way drowning swimmers might cling to each other at sea. In another, Deanna Supplee as wife Adriana is so insistent to get to the man she thinks is her husband that she chucks his servant over a counter. (The set reuses the 1969 diner from 'Two Trains.') But a few chuckles does not a 'Comedy' make. The show demands toe-to-crown animation and precision; it needs the expressive powers of the entire body zapped to life and pointed in sync. An effective 'Comedy' would be understandable almost without words, like a silent movie. That's telling on its own, though. If a play's narrative and words aren't central, why mount it?
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggests
It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his 'second best bed', although still a valued item. Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a fragment of a 17th-century letter that appears to cast dramatic new light on their relationship, overturning the idea that the couple never lived together in London. Matthew Steggle, a professor of early modern English literature at the University of Bristol, said the text seemed to put the Shakespeares at a previously unknown address in Trinity Lane – now Little Trinity Lane in the City. It also has them jointly involved with money that Shakespeare was holding in trust for an orphan named John Butts. Addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakspaire', the letter mentions the death of a Mr Butts and a son, John, who is left 'fatherles', as well as a Mrs Butts, who had asked 'Mr Shakspaire' to look after money for his children until they came of age. It suggests the playwright had resisted attempts to pay money that the young Butts was owed. Steggle said: 'The letter writer thinks that 'Mrs Shakspaire' has independent access to money. They hope that Mrs Shakspaire might 'paye your husbands debte'. 'They do not ask Mrs Shakspaire to intercede with her husband, but actually to do the paying herself, like Adriana in The Comedy of Errors, who undertakes to pay a debt on her husband's behalf, even though she was previously unaware of it: 'Knowing how the debt grows, I will pay it.'' Steggle added: 'For about the last 200 years, the prevailing view has been that Anne Shakespeare stayed in Stratford all her life and perhaps never even went to London.' This document, which refers to the couple who 'dwelt in trinitie lane', suggests that she did spend significant time with her husband in the capital. The fragment was preserved by accident in the binding of a book in Hereford Cathedral's library. Although it was discovered in 1978, it has remained largely unknown because 'no one could identify the names or places involved', Steggle said. Crucial evidence includes the 1608 book in which the fragment was preserved, Johannes Piscator's analyses of biblical texts. It was published by Richard Field, a native of Stratford, who was Shakespeare's neighbour and his first printer. Steggle said that it would be a 'strange coincidence' for a piece of paper naming a Shakspaire to be bound, early in its history, next to 400 leaves of paper printed by Field, 'given Field's extensive known links to the Shakespeares'. John Butts seems to have been serving an apprenticeship because the letter mentions 'when he hath served his time'. Scouring records from the period 1580 to 1650, Steggle found a John Butts, who was an apprentice, fatherless and in the care of his mother. He also unearthed a 1607 reference to a John Butts in the records of Bridewell, an institution whose tasks included the disciplining of unruly apprentices. A document told of 'his disobedience to his Mother' and that he was 'sett to worke'. Steggle found John Butts in later records, placing him in Norton Folgate, outside the city walls, and living on Holywell Street (Shoreditch High Street today), home to several of Shakespeare's fellow actors and associates. It was an area in which Shakespeare worked in the 1590s, first at the Theatre in Shoreditch, the principal base for the Lord Chamberlain's Men throughout those years, and then at its near neighbour, the Curtain theatre. Shakespeare's lifelong business partners, the Burbages, were involved in innkeeping and victualling nearby. Steggle said: 'The adult John Butts, living on the same street as them, working in the hospitality industry in which they were invested … would very much be on the Burbages' radar. So Shakespeare can be linked to Butts through various Norton Folgate contacts.' If the writing on the back of the letter – in another hand – was written by Anne, the words would be 'the nearest thing to her voice ever known', he noted. The research is being published in Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, on 23 April, the anniversary of his birth. Steggle writes: 'For Shakespeare biographers who favour the narrative of the 'disastrous marriage' – in fact, for all Shakespeare biographers – the Hereford document should be a horrible, difficult problem.'
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
University of New Mexico road closures, parking restrictions ahead of weekend events
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) — There will be a slew of parking restrictions and road closures, along with some traffic congestion, at the University of New Mexico this weekend as multiple events carry on around campus. These events include two triathlons and various shows. UNM to begin construction on new university police headquarters You can find an idea of when and where roads will be impacted below. Lobo Kids Triathlon on UNM main campus6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Southwest Film Center presents Queer at Student Union Building6 p.m. to 8 p.m. August Wilson's Two Trains Running at Popejoy Hall7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Traffic congestion is expected around Redondo Drive at the Johnson Field & Cornell parking structure. Lobo Adults Triathlon on UNM main campus6 a.m. to 10 a.m. The Comedy of Errors at Popejoy Hall3 p.m. to 5 p.m. All campus entrances will be closed during the triathlon. They will reopen at 10:30 a.m. Access to the Lomas parking structure will stay available to UNM and UNMH permit holders from the Girard and Campus intersections – westbound on Campus Blvd. There will be a one-way exit from the Lomas parking structure westbound on Campus to Lomas. UNM also expects traffic congestion along Redondo Drive around Johnson Field & Cornell parking structure for event parking. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love's Labour's Lost (More or Less) review – lads on tour in Ibiza swear off sex
Standards have declined. When Shakespeare set his characters a challenge in his early comedy, he measured it out in years. In a bid to lead a life of contemplative study, the king of Navarre persuades his friends to join him in a three-year regime of abstemiousness, requiring them to renounce women and cut back on food and sleep. Now, by contrast, playwrights Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane have revisited the material but cut the pledge down. Their young men have to last a whole three days. For a show opening at the start of Lent, that seems pretty feeble, although, to be fair, the context has also changed. Berowne (Thomas Cotran), Long-Dumain (Linford Johnson) and Ferdy (Timothy Adam Lucas) agree to avoid the company of women not just anywhere, but in Ibiza, the throbbing heart of 1990s hedonism. For every other party of lads flying out of Manchester airport, meeting women is the point. Returning to the blueprint of 2023's The Comedy of Errors (More or Less), a jokey rehash of Shakespeare with a pop-song setting, the writers have reunited with director Paul Robinson to put Love's Labour's Lost in the decade of Blur, the Spice Girls and Pete Tong at Manumission. This one is even less reverent than the last, not only substituting almost the entire script for modern-day urban poetry, but also beefing up the women's roles to make them equal partners with the men. Alice Imelda, Annie Kirkman, Alyce Liburd and Jo Patmore rise gutsily to the occasion. They are now on a mixed-up stag-and-hen weekend (with additional hired-assassin subplot), while a lovelorn Armado (David Kirkbride) is the Sun Park holiday resort's resident pill supplier. So far so flippant, but is it irreverent enough? A truly modern comedy on this subject, apart from being an hour shorter, would have made more of the island's temptations. To be puritanical in Ibiza would take some doing. Resisting would be funny. But by clinging on to Shakespeare's plot, Godber and Lane minimise the men's dilemma. The comic stakes are too low. Still, the audience delights in the old songs, dance routines and outrageous Cher costumes, not to mention the energetic silliness of it all. At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 22 March, then at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 27 March-19 April.
