Extreme Makeover for Home of the Royal Shakespeare Company

November 24, 2010, 2:09 pm

By ERIK PIEPENBURG

3:49 p.m. | Updated

The Royal Shakespeare Company opened its revamped home in Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday. Highlights include a renovated 1,040-seat thrust-stage theater that will bring audiences closer to the actors, a 118-foot viewing tower that overlooks the countryside, a riverside walk and rooftop restaurant.

The project took about three and a half years to complete for the equivalent of about $179 million, according to the company. The theater complex is open to the public, but performances on the new stage won’t begin until April. (A Hollywood-style trailer for the fall season is here.)

Early reviews of the remodeling are positive to mixed:

Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian: “It’s not what you’d call flash architecturally, but it does the job; the important thing is that many of the old problems of the theater are solved.”

Jay Merrick, The Independent: “The Royal Shakespeare Theater’s transformation by Rab Bennetts has turned a famously stolid architectural mongrel into a re-branded 21st-century visitor experience that is, by turns, engrossing, neutral and strange.”

Ellis Woodman, The Telegraph: “This is a project of dizzying intricacy – the product of highly taxing technical and conservation constraints – and not everything about it succeeds; but [the artistic director Michael] Boyd’s vision of the future of theater shines through it vividly.”

New Yorkers won’t have to travel to Britain to see the Royal Shakespeare in action, however. In February the company announced a lineup of five plays — including “Romeo and Juliet” and “Antony and Cleopatra” — that it will perform during a six-week residency on a site-specific stage to be built inside the Park Avenue Armory as part of next summer’s Lincoln Center Festival.

This video, provided courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, provides a tour of the theater under construction and excerpts from recent productions:

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A Step That Is New: James Franco Work Studies 'Three's Company'

November 1, 2010, 1:30 pm

By DAVE ITZKOFF

From our standpoint the closest thing approaching a dramatic moment on “Three’s Company” was the tension of whether audiences would accept Jenilee Harrison as a replacement for Suzanne Somers. But James Franco, as is his wont, sees more in that retro two-girls-and-a-guy comedy than just double entendres and the loveless marriage of the Ropers, and has made it the subject of a new work to be presented at the New Frontier program of the Sundance Film Festival in January.

On Monday the Sundance Institute announced the artists and works that will be featured in its 2011 New Frontier lineup, which is intended “for festival audiences to explore the latest in cinematic innovation and transmedia storytelling,” according to a news release. On the bill is “Three’s Company: The Drama,” by Mr. Franco, the multitasking star of “Howl” and “127 Hours,” which is described as “a multi-media examination of the classic 70s sitcom.” The description provided by festival organizers continues: “Television has undoubtedly shaped our world: our increased exposure to dramatic entertainment, the shapes of our houses, the shape of the time in our day. In this piece James Franco hopes to pull television from the box and view it from ‘a slightly oblique perspective.’”

Other artists who will have works presented in the New Frontier lineup, from Jan. 20 to Jan. 30 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, include Mark Boulos of Paper Tiger Television; Bill T. Jones and OpenEnded Group; and Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk, the creators of “The Johnny Cash Project” and “The Wilderness Downtown.”

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