STAGES & SCREENS

The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s  Anna in the Tropics  is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within.  Anna  was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic,  Cabaret,  at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant. The plays were a resonant follow-up to two of the highlights of my Spring.  Berlin  at the Court Theatre covered the same period ...

No sooner did I publish my last blog post declaring that Shakespeare completists have “perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy” than an even rarer Shakespeare play showed up in my neighborhood: The Two Noble Kinsmen , by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This weekend and next it is being produced in Forest Park, Illinois by the Forest Theatre Company. As I made clear in that prior article, Henry VI is rarest in the full three-part format; it is often edited into two parts when staged. But The Two Noble Kinsmen is another holy grail for fans of the Bard. In fact, an article in the Forest Park Review reported that one self-described “Shakespeare completist” emailed the production’s artistic director, Richard Corley, to say she is flying in from England just to see this small, free outdoor production because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before,” Corley t...