CHICAGO—After 37 years as artistic director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Barbara Gaines has directed all of Shakespeare’s 28 plays. She is now retiring, but her last production is not one of the Bard’s tragedies or histories, but a laugh-out-loud farce. In her good-bye production, Gaines is revisiting “The Comedy of Errors,” which she directed…

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the initial publication of William Shakespeare’s collected plays, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an independent charity devoted to studying and promoting the Bard’s life and work has announced a special exhibition to honor the occasion: “The Great Variety of Readers: Celebrating 400 Years of Shakespeare’s First Folio.” An…

CHICAGO—It follows Shakespeare’s plot line, but the revival of “Measure for Measure” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater unfolds in a different time and place, and features a lot more color, choreography, and music than Shakespeare could ever have imagined. This modern take still has the same theme as the play’s original performance in 1604, which focused…

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is supposed to take place as a dream on a summer night in a wooded forest, so it’s befitting that Midsomer Flight is presenting the comedy in a park setting during mid-summer. What could be more appropriate than watching the laugh-filled fantasy of love gone awry among the verdant trees,…

CEDAR CITY, Utah—We’re often repulsed by the laughter of those we believe to be mad. In the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s performance of “King Lear,” which eschews gimmicky revisions in favor of a more traditional approach, Lear’s laughter reveals his humanity, even if we don’t understand why he laughs. “The great challenge of this role is…

Summer is not only a season that people love, but it is also a season where people fall in love. Warm temperatures encourage warm temperaments, and summer love is a thrill that most have some happy memory of, memories that are often like dreams. What person does not look back on the laughing, lovesick capers…

Commentary The Woke always surprise me by their high boredom threshold, for one would have thought that nothing could be more boring than always to look at the world through the narrow distorting lens of race, gender, etc., and always come to the same conclusion about it. However, one has to give it to the…