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John Adams Captures the Music of Shakespeare
Perhaps the riskiest enterprise that an English-talking composer can undertake is to make an opera out of Shakespeare. Though the repertory has many Shakespeare variations, only one particular variation by a indigenous speaker has located a secure position on worldwide levels: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from 1960. The dangers of Bardic opera are evident. The performs deliver their own indelible new music in the reader’s head, and recitations by celebrated actors linger in the memory. A safer technique is to appropriate Shakespeare’s drama and psychology though substituting a far more fashionable textual content. Verdi and Arrigo Boito did as significantly in “Otello” and “Falstaff” so did Thomas Adès…
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Theater artist Madeline Sayet wrestles with Shakespeare and Native American identity
Mohegan theater artist Madeline Sayet’s solo show “In which We Belong” takes a skeptical look at of Shakespeare. In 2019, it premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, they’re going to destroy me. I’m likely to get thrown off stage,’” Sayet said. But Sayet, who’s based mostly in Phoenix, where she’s a scientific assistant professor in Arizona State University’s English office, uncovered receptive audiences with her tale of shifting to the Uk in 2015 to pursue a doctorate in Shakespeare. Grappling with the legacy of colonialism that carries on to reverberate and her inquiries of identification as a Indigenous person, “Where We Belong” launched a…
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Arts news: Where there is a Will (Shakespeare), there is a way | Arts & Entertainment
Madison Taylor and Ryan Omar Stack (with Brik Berkes center), make for an unhappy forced pair in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’ Jennifer Koskinen Shakespeare has written some of the greatest female characters in the English language, but when it comes to being woke in 2022, the Bard is, at best … a restless sleeper. With everything from classic novels and TV shows to Broadway musicals now being reconsidered through a more enlightened (less patriarchal) lens, Shakespeare would seem to be a major candidate for culture canceling. And yet, 400 years later … he endures. In Colorado, Shakespeare is on stage everywhere from Boulder, home of the…