Phoenix-area folks looking for some counterprogramming to the Super Bowl and/or the Olympics might consider Southwest Shakespeare Festival's The Merry Wives of Windsor...
...this afternoon at Mesa Arts Center; it plays there through February 22. Your Humble Narrator has the honor to share the stage, in the small role of Falstaff's drunken sidekick Bardolph, with a very talented cast. Directed by Keath Hall--of last year's Klingon Hamlet--the production places the farce in an Arizona trailer park in the 1990s, a setting to which it quite readily adapts.
Also on the subject of Shakespeare: In case you missed it, check out the great Ian McKellen on Stephen Colbert's show last week, performing a magnificent speech apparently by Shakespeare from the play Sir Thomas More, unproduced in Shakespeare's time and first performed by McKellen in the mid-1960s. It's More, then "shrieve" (sheriff), shaming an anti-immigrant mob in London, and it's as witheringly appropriate to our time as it ever was.
Back in 1995, I got to interview a pre-Gandalf McKellen (by phone) for Phoenix New Times in connection with Richard Loncraine's pre-WWII-era Richard III movie, in which he played the title role. I asked him about Sir Thomas More and his status as the only living actor to create a new Shakespearean lead. There was a long pause on the line, and then he said, "Can you have seen it?"
No, Sir Ian, I'm just a nerd.
But to hear this beautiful piece of writing blisteringly performed by this absolute freaking master, on national television no less, is a privilege.
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