Why the RSC’s upcoming productions are going to be this summer’s must-see events
Maybe, like me, you were thinking that there’s so much Shakespeare around in the summer—and much of it free (the Public Theater’s productions of Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well opened in Central Park this week)—that you don’t need to shell out the $100+ bucks to see the Royal Shakespeare Company productions that are part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. Well now, after having attended the sneak preview hosted by the RSC yesterday, I think we may be wrong. It looks as though this is going to be one of those events that any true theater lover will be sorry to have missed.
As you probably know, the RSC, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, is going to do five plays—As You Like It, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale—that will be performed in repertory over six weeks, starting July 6.
The company’s artistic director Michael Boyd described each of the productions and they all sounded fantastic although the Julius Caesar, directed by Lucy Bailey, which, Boyd said, “was not for the squeamish” sounds as though it might be the most outrageous fun.
But what will make these productions truly special is that they’re all going to be performed in an exact replica of the RSC’s home theater in Stratford-upon-Avon. The temporary theater, called the Scarlet & Gray Stage in homage to the school colors of Ohio State University, which has an educational partnership with the RSC, was built in Britain, deconstructed, and packed into 46 40-foot containers that have been shipped across the Atlantic.
Twenty carpenters, welders and electricians from the RSC have been working for the past two weeks to put all of it back together again in the cavernous Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street and Park. They stopped for about half an hour on Thursday morning for Boyd and others to lead groups of journalists and bloggers—including me—around the facilities.
About 30 of the containers are being used as the foundation on which the theater auditorium sits. They also double as tech rooms and storage spaces. The auditorium above has a thrust stage and 975 seats that wrap around it.
Geoff Locker, the company’s technical director who lead my group, explained that no seat is more than 50 ft. way from the stage. The idea is to create a really intimate experience with Shakespeare and the folks who are the world specialists in presenting his work.
