Discovering a New Shakespeare Play, at My Age

1/5/2016

Judi Dench and Miranda Raison/ Photo by Johan Persson

One of the joys of being old is the occasional discovery of something lovely, something you never knew existed.

That’s what happened Sunday when we saw the filmed performance of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” -- not in London but in Kew Gardens, Queens.

I am embarrassed to admit I never knew the play, after four years of being around the wonderful Shakespeare Festival at Hofstra College in the late ‘50’s. That was the biggest thing on our little campus, because the president, John Cranford Adams, was a noted Shakespeare scholar, and had made sure we had a Globe Theatre in the new playhouse (soon deservedly named for him).

I can still see friends in costume, wielding swords, wooing, declaiming. (Francis Coppola was backstage, learning his craft.)

However, in five decades of seeking out Shakespeare all over London, I still had to verify that the “The Winter’s Tale” was his, when it popped up Sunday at the deus-ex-machina art-film house in a funky corner in Queens that reminds me of some blessedly static part of London.

Yes, it was Shakespeare. My wife had seen a version at the pit at the Barbican. The plot was for me to discover.

Branagh was excellent as the jealous king who touches off the tragedy but the star was Judi Dench as the wise elder who speaks truth to the king. She is 80; her voice and psychic power could cut and polish a diamond.

The elders in the movie house seemed to love Dench. They spoke English and Russian and other languages of our city; the lady next to me was Jamaican.

No plot giveaways here. I will only say that I remember tearing up near the end of Stoppard’s “Arcadia” a few decades back when the tectonic plates of two separate centuries, two sets of people at a country estate, gracefully overlap.

I wish I could say, “Don’t miss this,” but this was essentially a one-off item that may pop up elsewhere at the rare theaters that provide quality films. (The movies in my town are mostly banal trash.)

To find quality performances, one has to monitor the schedules for the Metropolitan Opera, the National Theatre Live, the Bolshoi Ballet, and now Branagh’s enterprise in the gorgeously renovated Garrick Theatre at Charing Cross. (My London rellies saw a sold-out “The Winter’s Tale” on Christmas Eve and reported that rare British happening, a standing ovation.)

I didn’t stand in the movie house in deepest Queens on Sunday – too busy wiping away a few tears before the house lights came back on.

Kenneth Branagh/ Photo by Johan Persson

Josh Rubin

1/5/2016 02:17:42 pm

Nice story. Shakespeare, well-performed, is always a treat. My family and I also encountered a "new" play of the bard's: As You Like It. I had neither seen it nor read it before, but we just saw the National Theater's production in London and it is quite imaginative and witty, particularly once the set is transformed and we enter the forest of Arden. My parents tell me that they will be seeing it soon through a screening from the National Theater, though I am not sure where. Through the miracle of modern communications, all the world is indeed now a stage.

George Vecsey

1/5/2016 05:14:55 pm

• Hi, Josh: Thanks for the note. The series you mention is National Theatre Live, with outlets all over the world: keeps us sane in the New World.
http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions
“As You Like It” was the first Shakespeare play I ever saw – spring of 1957, Hofstra, in the gym, before they built the playhouse. Two freshmen who started with me, Emmline DeNitto and Ellen Weston, played major roles and were staples of the drama department for four years. I remember the language and the costumes, and I was hooked. See link below:
http://cdm16373.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15281coll19/id/2957/rec/1

Alan Rubin link

1/5/2016 05:02:28 pm

George

Welcome to the wonderful world “Live Performances”!

There is an ever increasing selection of venues that are available in theaters and on other large screens. In addition to those from London, we are fans of HD live from the Met.

We recently saw Jane Eyre and Hamlet (with John Cumberbatch) broadcast from London’s National Theater—two gems.

We had season tickets for the Met when we lived in Manhattan. Although there is nothing like seeing an opera at the met, the live HD big screen performances are truly special. The panorama view at the Met is replaced with intimate close ups that reveal emotions up close. Also, the intermission interviews enables you to become familiar with the singers and the behind the scene activities that support the performance.

It is nice to see some of today’s new technology put to good use and at a reasonable price.

George Vecsey

1/5/2016 05:18:29 pm

Alan, the Rubins have landed.
We saw the Jane Eyre with our friend Adriana, who said she had seen three film versions of it. We all loved it. We skipped this Hamlet because we saw Rory Kinnear a few years ago and he was so good.
Talking about father and son, the guy who began the Met series is Peter Gelb, son of my boss at the NYT, Arthur Gelb, a theatrical person himself. Comme pere, etc.

Alan Rubin link

1/5/2016 09:19:40 pm

George,

Since this blog is about families and performances, I’m taking the liberty to introduce my daughter Jen who is the producer of the newly formed Moth story slam venue in Madison, WI.

Jen had been a regular at various Moth Story Slams for some time, but her winning debut performance at The Moth Story SLAM in Milwaukee three years ago launched her on the path to where she is today.

Hooked on The Moth Podcast, Jen had worked up her courage to participate as a “mid-life challenge.

Jen is a wonderful story teller and a delight to listen to.

The story of how this all came about was recently announced on Madison’s Isthmus’ web site.

http://isthmus.com/arts/the-moth-lands-in-madison/

Thanks,

Alan

Elliott Kolker

1/6/2016 01:39:10 pm

Not knowing anything about what had occurred the previous day, when I turned on the radio and heard,"...he said "I will own it till the day I die and then another York will own it," I thought I had inadvertently tuned to NPR and stumbled onto a reading of Lancaster's Equal Time Rebuttal of the Duke of York's "Soliloquy on an English Crown Found in the Gutter and Placed on My Head" in a recently discovered portion of a previously unknown manuscript by Shakespeare of a play he wrote about the War of the Roses until I realized I was still tuned to KNBR Sports Radio and it was Fitz and Brooks during their regularly scheduled show discussing Jed York's 49er Apologia: "I'm in Charge Here Because Grandaddy was Successful" press conference from the day before. .

George Vecsey

1/7/2016 09:27:02 am

Dear Elliott Kolker: Just what this site has always needed: a poet who can detect Shakespearean overtones in this prosaic sports world. Please feel free to spot glimmers of Iago, Coriolanus, Falstaff, Lear, Prince Hal and some of the strong women of Shakespeare. Go forth.

Josh Rubin

1/7/2016 12:29:36 pm

What a nice parlor game, equating Shakespeare characters with figures from the world of sports. My nomination:

Sepp Blatter = Malvolio from Twelfth Night.

Elliott Kolker

1/8/2016 05:38:03 am

You are onto something, Josh. Your Shakespearean characters and figures from the world of sports mashed-up my actors and characters in movies to cast yourself or others (see below)
would exponentially increase the potential of such a new parlor game.

Back in the day when I worked at the Sand Dollar Restaurant we played a game: If they were casting a movie, who would play you? I've learned oi is a good shorthand for describing someone to someone else who does not know them.

Anyway, it was generally agreed that the owner, Kendrick, who was also Chief of the Stinson Beach VFD, would be played by Humphrey Bogart. But whereas most people thought of Kendrick as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, I considered him more like Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

Anyone who didn't understand was not present when one delivery mistakenly substituted never-ordered strawberry ice cream after another delivered the first flat of seasonal strawberries,
before Kendo returned famished from the Marin County FD Budget Meeting where he more than earned his keep by schmozing the budget while polished in full dress uniform.

Full disclosure: At the time, I was overruled and Billy Crystal was the consensus.I wanted Groucho Marx. In our new mash-up, I would select Groucho as Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff,coaching the Bad News Bears.

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Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Discovering a New Shakespeare Play, at My Age

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