Poster for Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of those plays that is incredibly famous, but also quite easy to hate: because so many of us are forced to read it in school, because so many people think of this story of teenage angst and suicide as the ultimate love story, even …
Continue reading William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—29 June 2025
Program for The Crucible Arthur Miller’s classic anti-McCarthyite play The Crucible is widely regarded as one of the most important plays of the twentieth century, taking a stand against the injustice that comes with authoritarian injustice and religious fanaticism. But it’s also a deeply problematic play. And the choice by Shakespeare’s Globe to put it …
Sweeney Todd Playbill On the one hand, I’m not a big fan of musicals as a genre, but on the other, I very much like the story of Sweeney Todd. Penn State Theatre’s production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Zack Steele, was generally a strong performance, though the night …
Continue reading Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street—20 Nov. 2024
Me with the Richard III poster at the Globe As part of a Literary London study abroad course on crime and justice in British literature, I assigned William Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was a marvelous bit of serendipity that Shakespeare’s Globe was putting on that very show while we visited London. Even before the Globe …
Continue reading William Shakespeare’s Richard III—8 June 2024
The big draw of the Rochester Broadway Theatre League’s production of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, by Aaron Sorkin, was undoubtedly Richard Thomas in the role of Atticus Finch. Thomas, famous as John-Boy in The Waltons, was certainly a big factor in my mother’s excitement to see the production—and considering that many of the …
Continue reading Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, by Aaron Sorkin—14 June 2023
Theater of War Productions is one of the most exciting companies in the performance of ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays because they tie each performance to a particular social issue and use the performances as a jumping off point for discussions of the issue. Their recent version of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis was performed …
There are few subjects more fit for the stage than Oscar Wilde. He was a larger than life personality, who fundamentally changed the way many think about art, about society, and about sexuality. And of course he was best known in his lifetime as a playwright, so the stage is doubly appropriate. Moises Kaufman’s Gross …
Continue reading Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, by Moises Kaufman-2 May 2021
Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson adapts the Sophocles play in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and its specific history in Ferguson, MO following the murder of Michael Brown by police in 2014. Organized and run by members of the Ferguson community working with professional actors and singers from New York and …
Continue reading Antigone in Ferguson, by Theater of War Productions–9 Aug. 2020
Aeschylus’ The Persians is one of the oldest and most interesting plays in Western history, being unique among surviving ancient Athenian plays in being set entirely outside the Greek speaking world, and in unique among tragedies in being about current events rather than a mythological subject. The play premiered in 472 BCE, just eight years …
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, perhaps surprisingly for people who don’t know the play, not really about Caesar, it’s about Brutus and his struggle with the decision to be drawn into the conspiracy to murder the increasingly imperial Caesar in the hopes of restoring a free Roman Republic. And then once the murder is committed, he …
Continue reading Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare–2 Nov. 2019
Phillip Zapkin 