You can now purchase tickets for The Magic Circle Theater Company’s first Fringe production, Solo Tales of Terror: Lovecraft & Stoker. Chris Morse performs his chilling adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and Josh Hitchens performs his terrifying Stoker’s Dracula. We are bringing Halloween to the Philly Fringe!
Tickets are $20 and you can purchase them here!
Only 6 chances to see two Solo Tales of Terror:
Thursday, September 8 - 10pm
Saturday, September 10 - 7pm
Sunday, September 11 - 1pm
Thursday, September 15 - 10pm
Friday, September 16 - 10pm
Saturday, September 17 - 4pm
I am pleased to announce that The Magic Circle Theater Company will be mounting its very first Philly Fringe show in collaboration with local actor and playwright Chris Morse: Solo Tales of Terror!
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter, Adapted and Performed by Chris Morse
Stoker’s Dracula, Adapted and Performed by Josh Hitchens, Directed by Ken Jordan
Two classics of Gothic horror are brought to the stage in a pair of chilling one-man adaptations by Chris Morse and Josh Hitchens. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter and Stoker’s Dracula will bring you to the mountains of madness and over the edge. For mature audiences only.
September 8 - 17, 2011 at the Second Stage at the Adrienne, part of the Philly Fringe Festival.
Praise for Stoker’s Dracula: “You may have seen one of the hundreds of adaptations of the book, but you have never seen any quite like this … Intensely frightening.” - Brian Stone, WHYY Newsworks.
After nearly a year of work, the script for Magic Circle’s Kings is nearly finished. Now the director (Ken Jordan) will take a look at it and we’ll see what changes grow from that. It’s been a very interesting writing experience for me, and I’m very excited and happy with the shape the play has taken. It really feels like a play of its own now, not just an editing of the three mammoth Henry VI plays and the equally mammoth Richard III. It is Kings.
I was feeling very discouraged with the project for a while. Having gone through all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, all I could see was the hours and hours of text that had been eliminated. But when I can back to Kings again last week and read it fresh, I saw that it worked. And I think it works extremely well. There are many dead spots in the Henry trilogy and Richard III is very long, and transforming four plays into one two-act evening was a tall task. Working closely with director Ken Jordan, together we distilled Shakespeare’s epic history of the Wars of the Roses into a fast-paced narrative of an intense and bloody struggle for power. Shakespeare’s plays are Shakespeare’s plays, but Kings is its own animal. Watching it will be a different experience from watching a traditional production of Henry VI or Richard III. We’re giving you the whole bloody saga in one bite.
In Kings, I feel that the journeys of the characters are much clearer. In the original texts, amazing characters such as King Henry, Margaret, and even Richard can be dwarfed by the sheer volume of characters and storylines surrounding them. Kings brings these people and this story to center stage, with an intimacy that can’t be escaped.
I love how many echoes there are in the play, how things that happen in the first half are repeated in the second half. That’s Shakespeare’s art, not mine. But I think Kings makes it clearer than it would be otherwise, because the story has been distilled to its heart. In the beginning, when York talks to the audience about how he’s going to catch the crown and compares his brain to a “laboring spider,” it’s not hard to see where Richard III gets his personality from. Like father, like son.
I’m very excited to work on this show. I’m excited to play Richard. I feel like I understand him so much better now than I did before. We’re hopefully going to do a workshop/reading of Kings sometime this summer. Stay tuned to this blog and our website http://www.magiccircletheater.com for updates.
There are no Gods in Shakespeare. There are only Kings. - Jan Kott.
Sounds like a very intriguing production of a very difficult Shakespeare play. I’m going to try and get up to New York to see it. I think it would be very inspiring. Above is a link to the New York Times rave review.
I also want to see Classic Stage Company’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Maggie Gyllenhaal as Masha and Peter Sarsgaard as Vershinin. The Williamstown Theatre Festival book on acting Chekhov totally unlocked those plays for me, and this Three Sisters is directed by Austin Pendleton, one of the actor/directors I so admired in that book. Lots of great classical theatre to see in New York this winter!
Blog’s been quiet over the last few months! Announcements to come soon.
In the meantime, here is a really interesting article in the New York Times by Ben Brantley. It’s about what I think every company who does classical theatre reaches for.
I just finished watching Rupert Goold’s film of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. As mentioned in the last post, I saw this production on Broadway and was eagerly awaiting the film version. Now I’ve seen a lot of great film Macbeths, including the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench version, the RSC film with Antony Sher, and Roman Polanski’s. This film is the best Macbeth that you will ever see. In fact, scenes that I didn’t find very effective onstage (Lady Macbeth’s mad scene and and the long scene between Malcolm and Macduff) were very powerful in the movie. Patrick Stewart’s performance is definitive. You can see every thought that passes through his mind. Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth charted her fall into insanity with such clarity that when Macbeth is told that she has died, it’s no surprise to him or the audience. You see that there was no other end to her story. The Weird Sisters, here played as Nurses who have gone over to the dark side, are truly frightening. There is no weak link in this cast, the directing is thrillingly original, and the production design is stunning. It easily could have been shown in movie theaters. This Macbeth is set during the Cold War of the 1950’s, and doesn’t shy away from the shocking violence of a dictatorship. Characters are brutally executed, and the murder of Lady Macduff and her children is greatly disturbing, even though you see almost nothing happen. And to top it all off, Rupert Goold has the film end with the camera panning from location to location throughout the castle (the dining room, the kitchen, the Weird Sisters’ morgue) and then closes with a shot of Macbeth and his Lady in the elevator, hand in hand. So we end with the idea that Macbeth’s castle isn’t just drenched in blood. It’s haunted.
In 2008, as I was preparing to direct Macbeth for Magic Circle, I made a trip to Broadway to see British director Rupert Goold’s production starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. I came out of the theater three hours later stunned. That production remains one of the best productions of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and it was a huge influence for me when I directed the play. It’s one of the few times where I have really been afraid while watching live theater (another was the world premiere of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman at the National Theatre). At the performance I attended, there were moments that made about half the audience scream.
Director Rupert Goold set Macbeth in a subterranean kitchen/morgue with an elevator that at one point gushed blood (he also directed a production of The Tempest with Patrick Stewart set in an Arctic wasteland). As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll see a better Macbeth than Patrick Stewart. His mastery of the text was brutally clear, and there was something so sad about seeing a Macbeth as old as Stewart. That he’s had a wonderful life and throws it all away. I loved how he wasn’t afraid to let Macbeth be really funny at times. Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth was terrifying, sexy and insane on a grand scale. And Goold had the Weird Sisters be homicidal nurses who made corpses in body bags wriggle to life as they rapped out the “Double, double toil and trouble” spell. So scary. And so cool.
Long story short, Rupert Goold has made a film of the production starring the original cast, and it will be airing on PBS on October 6th. I can’t think of a better Halloween treat than this. I’m so happy that I’ll be able to watch this amazing production again and again.
Watch a preview here.
Watch an interview with Patrick Stewart here.
Read the New York Times review here.
Last night, while I was searching through images of Richard III, I came across these beautiful paintings of Shakespeare’s characters by John Link. Here are a few of my favorites:
Hamlet and Old Hamlet
Feste
Imogen
Malvolio
Ophelia
Sir Andrew Aguecheek
King Lear
Viola and Sebastian
And of course, Richard III
You can see all of the paintings here.
If you love classical theatre, or theatre at all, go see the Philadelphia Artist’s Collective’s magnificent production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. It is unforgettable, and the best piece of theatre that I have ever seen. I really mean that. I just saw it tonight for the second time, and I would happily go again. Tickets are only $15. The show closes on October 9th, you can see performance dates and buy tickets at http://philartistscollective.weebly.com/performances.html
You can read a rave review from the Philly Inquirer here.
And another in the Broad Street Review here.
And still another in Philadelphia CityPaper here.
“Why should she live to fill the world with words?” - Richard
I used a website called WordItOut to create this image. I entered the entire text of Henry VI and Richard III, and this image takes the words that occur most often. Very interesting and fun. Because of what the most significant word in the play is, Ken and I are thinking of calling it Kings.
Last night I was rereading one of my favorite books, Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott. In his chapter on the History plays I found this quote:
“There are no Gods in Shakespeare. There are only Kings.”
Hmm.
