Playing with our expectations ... Belarus Free Theatre's production of King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe, which was performed in Belarusian. Photograph: Simon Kane A gaunt and arthritic king totters on stage, his head a thatch of matted white hair – then, grinning, he springs up like a jack-in-the-box and whisks off the wig. This is, we gather, one of Lear's dangerous little jokes: one of many in a production that teases constantly at our expectations. Instead of treating the play as it's so often done in Britain, as Shakespeare's attempt at a PhD in epistemology, Vladimir Shcherban and a young, energetic Belarus Free Theatre company offer instead a Lear returned vividly to its roots: as a comic folktale that shatters into tragedy. World Shakespeare festival ... Continue reading →

Michael Riedel The musical everyone’s buzzing about is headed to Broadway.“Matilda,” a London import based on Roald Dahl’s great children’s book, will open next spring at a Shubert Theatre to be announced.“Matilda,” which is being produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, has the potential to be a blockbuster.London critics raved. Many of Broadway’s top producers — the Nederlanders, Barry Weissler (“Chicago”), Stuart Thompson (“The Book of Mormon”) Tom Viertel (“The Producers”) — chased it and chased it.In the end, it wound up with the Dodgers, the producers of “Jersey Boys” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The director is Matthew Warchus, who staged such crackerjack productions as “God of Carnage,” “Art” and “The Norman Conquests.”(He also did “Ghost the Musical,” but we’ll let that pass.)“Matilda” is doing ... Continue reading →

Clowning around … As You Like It at the Globe. Photograph: John Haynes If all the theatre in Georgia comes anywhere close to the standard of the Marjanishvili company, then the job of theatre critic there must be the most covetable in the land. At the end of its irresistible As You Like It, they got a standing ovation (at least from those not on their feet already). Its conception of Arden is of a small, makeshift stage – theatre within theatre. Throughout, you see the cast offstage: their camaraderie, chess games, squabbles, vanities. It's charming but also fitting, because As You Like It is partly about escape as a means to self-knowledge. World Shakespeare festival Various venues Starts 23 April 2012 Until 8 September ... Continue reading →

Towards the end of Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, Matt Keeslar's manic depressive character Josh Neff stands on a Manhattan street corner and delivers an impassioned monologue on the importance of a form of music that, at the time of the movie's early 80s setting, seemed to be fading into history."Disco will never be over," he begins. "It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years – maybe many years – it'll be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or, worse, completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester ... Continue reading →