A&E Season Preview 2023 – 2024: Mardi Gras Shakespeare
Hamlet as a beatnik. The Tempest as a David Bowie tribute. A manufacturing of Henry V set in Vietnam. Romeo and Juliet as lovers on reverse sides of the Civil Struggle. Twelfth Evening imagined on a desert island, with all of the gamers wearing Bermuda shorts.
Theatrical firms who carry out Shakespeare are all the time arising with methods to modernize the Bard, generally efficiently – Romeo as a Yank and Juliet as a insurgent sounds promising – and generally not a lot.
Then there’s Orlando Shakes’ The Comedy of Errors, slated for a Sept. 6-Oct. 1 run. Orlando Shakes inventive director Jim Helsinger has had its setting and timeframe in his again pocket for the reason that concept got here to him a bit of over 20 years in the past: New Orleans, throughout Mardi Gras.
“Shakespeare’s play takes place in a port metropolis like New Orleans, with quite a lot of commerce occurring, retailers coming and going, cultures clashing,” Helsinger explains. Add the background radiation of raucous music and masked revelers that populate Mardi Gras and it matches in properly with a play that entails mistaken id, and various it.
The storyline options not only one however two units of twins, with every set separated at beginning, then winding up years later as confused and complicated adults who flip up concurrently within the city, inflicting havoc among the many residents who run into the twins with out ever fairly determining learn how to know one set from one other. Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they are saying in New Orleans.
orlandoshakes.org
