STAGES & SCREENS

A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times , shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential....

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19 th  Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson's short-lived 1937 show  Mr. Gladstone , which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?  The fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli's positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the  London Review of Books  in 2013, almost 40 years after the last  Dis...

The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in...

This year the legendary film director Federico Fellini is getting his first box office test since his movies 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita plummeted in the famous 2022 Sight and Sound ranking of the best 250 films of all time, probably thanks to a reckoning on the treatment of women provoked by the “#MeToo” movement. A new 35mm print of 8 ½ is running all this week at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre as part of a mini-retrospective called “Five by Fellini,” on the heels of a prolonged and much-extended run for the movie at New York City’s Film Forum this Spring. The Music Box’s five Fellini films include both 8 ½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960), as well as La Strada (1954), City of Women (1980) and Amarcord (1983), all five of which depict aspects of Fellini’s relationship to women. He once said that throughout his life he viewed women “from the vantage point of a pre-puberty or slightly post-puberty boy” ( The New York Times , Nov. 12, 1979). That perspective is at the heart of the films’ r...