There’s a whole lot of Hamlet goin’ on! The Woodward Shakespeare Festival has the Melancholy Dane onstage, while the Good Company Second Space pokes fun at him with I Hate Hamlet. The WSF’s second and final play of the season will be another riff on something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-Denmark, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Shakespeare is really busy these days, 400 years after his death.
Another summer of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival begins June 16 in Fresno so we took some time to chat with their executive producer for the past 5 years, Greg Taber, about the 2016 season.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Revised) at the Woodward Shakespeare Festival is…
Wait a minute! Didn’t you review that show two weeks ago?
Yes, I did, but that was with a different cast.
Can you imagine seeing all of William Shakespeare’s 37 plays in one night…in less than two hours? The Woodward Shakespeare Festival makes a fine go of it with its final production of the festival’s 11th season, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Revised), which was developed by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield in 1987. The Revised part updated some of the jokes to bring the humor into the 21st century.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona isn’t the biggest and flashiest Shakespeare play, but it’s probably one of his first. The training wheels were still on, and he was learning to use some of the plot devices he would master in later plays. It’s a simple story, one you might see on a TV sitcom, and the Woodward Shakespeare Festival has given a bright, peppy, 50s look wrapped up in early rock-and-roll tunes that hearkens back to reruns of Happy Days.
Kayla Weber’s set on The Festival Stage in Woodward Park looks like the metaphorical attic of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival, littered with bits and pieces of past productions: toppled columns from Julius Caesar, plywood trees, chunks of Macbeth, ironwork from A Streetcar Named Desire. The black set is embellished with rows of gold-stenciled designs, and a red band of paint next to the stage floor looks like dried blood that has seeped from behind the scenery. This is the world of the Greg Taber and Broderic Beard directed production of Richard III the WSF is presenting through July 11.
For eleven years, this group has managed to bring free theatre to the public. They’ve battled weather, the park, and the ultimate artistic challenge - Shakespeare. Through three separate performance spaces, they have put on 24 main-stage productions, and are about to open three more.
Due to a crazy summer, it has been awhile since we've had a local actor or director profile, so this time we have someone who does pretty much everything--Greg Taber is both an actor and director, along with being a major force behind the Woodward Shakespeare Festival, and running his own theatre company.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last major plays, and one of my favorites (I have some vague childhood memories of the 1960 TV version with Maurice Evans, Richard Burton, Lee Remick, Roddy McDowall, and Tom Poston—my first introduction to the works of William Shakespeare). This is the final production of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival’s tenth season.
Introducing one of the most fascinating Shakespeare characters you’ve probably never heard of–Christopher Sly. He’s a scoundrel, a drunk and dominates the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, but he doesn’t appear in most productions (You won’t find him in the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor film version or the musical Kiss Me, Kate, which is built on the play). Well, the Woodward Shakespeare Festival production isn’t like most productions. Christopher Sly is back!
