Arizona Republic article about Kiri Te Kanawa.

Arizona Republic review of Andrea Chénier.

Arizona Republic preview of Andrea Chénier.

The Arizona Daily Star review of Andrea Chénier.

Arizona Republic interview with Aida Director Bernard Uzan.

Arizona Republic review of Aida.

Get Out! article on Aida.

The Arizona Daily Star review of Die Fledermaus.

Tucson Citizen review of Die Fledermaus.

Tucson Citizen review of the Samuel Ramey Great Singers Series Recital.

The Arizona Daily Star review of the Samuel Ramey Great Singers Series Recital.

Arizona Republic review of the Samuel Ramey Great Singers Series Recital.

Tucson Citizen review of Lucia di Lammermoor.

The Rep review of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Arizona Republic review of The '98 Opera Ball.

Arizona Republic review of Tosca.

Arizona Republic review of Otello.

The Arizona Daily Star review of Roméo et Juliette.

Arizona Republic Shakespeare's fans take artistic license.

Tucson Citizen review of La Traviata.

Phoenix New Times article about Ariadne auf Naxos, featuring an interview with Caroline Whisnant.

Arizona Republic review of Ariadne auf Naxos.

Arizona Republic preview of Ariadne auf Naxos.

Tucson Citizen review of Ariadne auf Naxos.

Tucson Citizen review of The Magic Flute.

Arizona Daily Star review of Lakmé.

Tucson Citizen review of Lakmé.

Arizona Republic review of Lakmé.

By Kenneth LaFave
The Arizona Republic

It's the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. In the garden of the Capulets' home, Romeo approaches Juliet's window and is assisted by his trusty page, Stephano. Stephano sets the ladder for Romeo, who then ... Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait just a bardic minute!

Stephano? Since when is a character named Stephano in Romeo and Juliet?

Since 1867, when Charles Gounod's opera premiered in Paris. Stephano was introduced as an excuse for dramatic action interpolated into the libretto. (Gounod wanted the Capulets to see Stephano fleeing, engendering a search for Romeo.) Also, the opening of the play in the streets of Verona was cut for the sake of time. And to enable the title couple to sing a dying duet, Romeo isn't dead when Juliet awakes in the tomb. He's merely on the way out - and eager to vocalize.

Is this Romeo and Juliet or not?

It's Romeo et Juliette, a French opera that's closer to the source than many other Shakespearean adaptations. Arizona Opera this week will open its 1997-98 season with it, fitting neatly under the umbrella of the UK/AZ festival. But don't go expecting the play, says stage director James Lucas. Plays are flexible in a way operas cannot be.

"You have to remember when you deal with a play - the words are free and you can say them any way you choose, with love or sarcasm, quickly or slowly," Lucas says. "Once the music is set, then it's set. The tempo, the meaning - what you're supposed to feel is in the music."

Opera isn't the only way Shakespeare is seized, changed, loved, used. Four' hundred years after the dramas were first produced, one entire strain of Western culture could be called "Variations on Shakespeare." Say what you will about Dead White European Males being out of fashion, the popularity of Dead White European Shakespeare is at high tide.

Consider the cinema. The past two years have seen the release of two major films based on Richard III; Trevor Nun's Twelfth Night, an absurd if earnest Romeo and Juliet; a controversial but impossible to ignore Othello; and actor-director Kenneth Branagh's compleat, unexpurgated, star-studded Hamlet.

Here in the Valley, the Bard is at flood stage due largely to UK/AZ, which, in addition to the aforementioned Romeo et Juliette, has brought or will bring under its umbrella an authentically English Othello, a Zulu Macbeth, a truncated "essential" Henry V and A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mendelssohn's music.

Even without UK/AZ, the Bard is omnipresent. Last season, Arizona Theatre Company produced an As You Like It, and Ballet Arizona did a Romeo and Juliet. Arizona Opera will end its current season with Verdi's Otello.

Shakespeare is hot. If he were alive, his royalties would rival those of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber.

On the way to his ubiquity, Shakespeare has undergone vast alterations. Here are some informal categories of Shakespearean sea changes.

Shakespeare sung

Operas on Shakespeare are many. Berlioz did a take on Much Ado About Nothing and called it Beatrice et Benedict. Before Gounod, Bellini did The Capulets and the Montagues. Both Rossinni and Verdi musicalized Othello, with Verdi also having a go at Macbeth and at the character of Falstaff as gleaned from The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Prince Harry plays. In this century Benjamin Britten composed a take on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The list could go on at length.

Shakespeare danced

Classical ballet and modern dance have produced exactly one undisputed masterpiece each from Shakespeare: the 1940 ballet Romeo and Juliet, to music by Prokofiev with original choreography by Lev Lavrovsly, and The Moor's Pavane (1949), a distilled abstraction from Othello by modern choreographer Jose Limon. There have also been major dance works on Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare reduced

Trimming the Bard to contemporary expectations has its admirers and detractors. But it's a popular pastime. Playwright Tom Stoppard set the standard with Dogg's Troupe Ten- Minute Hamlet, dispensing in a trice with four hours' worth of plot and thought. It was also Stoppard who did an indefinable dance on Hamlet in the form of Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, wherein the tale is not only shortened but also upended and told from the vantage of two minor, doomed characters.

The Essential Henry V, playing through Oct.26 at the Herberger Theater Center, is a 90-minute condensation of the four-hour original and is one way of cutting Shakespeare down to size. The version of Hamlet that recently played New York and featured marionettes in place of actors is another.

Shakespeare updated or otherwise reassigned

West Side Story is the champion of updated Shakespeare. Juliet's balcony becomes a fire escape, the Capulets morph into the Sharks and the Montagues into the Jets. Little else makes the translation. It's not so much that the original was used as a template, as an excuse to do a very slightly related piece. What the heck, it worked.

On the other hand, the 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet sticks to the exact language of the original while placing the characters in completely contemporary context. This requires a streeeetch that is hilarious from the get-go, when a television news reader utters the famous opening words, "In fair Verona, where we lay our scene." This Verona isn't in Italy, see, it's in California. (There's a Venice, Calif., isn't there?)

By retaining Shakespeare's exact words but dislocating the story, the director was forced into strange corners. An early example: Benvolio, shouting "put up thy sword!" to the Capulets, brandishes a handgun. To explain this seeming anachronism, the line is preceded by a shot of Benvolio's handgun. It's a 9mm made by the fictitious manufacturer, Sword. "Put up thy Sword!" Stretch, stretch, snap.

Changing time seems less propitious for Shakespeare than changing culture. Japanese film maker Akiro Kurosawa's Ran is a Nipponese King Lear, set in medieval Japan, with sons in place of daughters and a fool who sings haiku-length bits of wisdom instead of extended English lyrics. The debt to the original is paid while the translation retains its own clear identity.

Shakespeare via modem

A casual Internet search for Shakespeare-related materials recently turned up 61,619 sites, including the complete works, scholarly links, film promos and sites proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford and even that Shakespeare was really Shakespeare.

Shakespeare now

Neal Lester, professor of English at Arizona State University, specializes in African-American studies. But he has found among his undergraduates that Shakespeare can seem inaccessible to teenagers, regardless of ethnic background.

"They feel somehow disconnected to it," Lester says. "It reminds me of my own experience of Shakespeare. I could intellectually understand what was going on, but it wasn't something I could luxuriate in."

Lester, who's writing a book called Come Into the Light: African-American Revisions of "Traditional Texts," says hip-hop and rap adaptations of Shakespeare that have recently proved popular with African-Americans in California may be a way for younger non-African Americans to cozy up to the likes of Macbeth and Lear.

Picture it: Timon of Athens on the hip-hop charts.

More Info
About ...