In the 2016/2017 season, I somehow ended up directing two productions of Much Ado About Nothing. The first was with high school students at the American Shakespeare Center’s high school theater camp. The second was with Pigeon Creek Shakespeare, a touring professional company in Michigan. As I’m preparing to go back to Michigan to remount it at […]
Seeing people’s #threefictionalcharacters posts this week (which has been super fun, by the way), I’ve been thinking of other ways to sum up a person in just a few items. Here’s one: What are your top five creations? Ground rules: Listing your children is cheating. It should be stuff you’re proud of and that helped […]
Last spring, while on tour at King University in Tennessee, with Pigeon Creek Shakespeare, Katherine snapped (and subsequently facebooked) a sign in their greenroom that said, “Pursue your goals. Pick up your cues. Tell the story.” I joked that I need that on my tombstone, so I can direct from beyond. When he was directing […]
Recently, a friend was in an accident. It was one of those situations where a split second was the difference between serious injury or death, and a painful, but remediable, injury. Luckily, the timing went the latter direction. She’s injured, but she’ll be back to normal at more or less the moment she gets used […]
If you’ve been reading over here for any length of time, you know that, although I live in Virginia, I have a creative home in Grand Haven, MI, home of The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. I’ve done three plays with them in the past several years, and have made short trips for other occasions, like […]
Remember that time I said I was done with Duchess-obsessed posts? Lies, lies, all lies! I meant it at the time, but then Scott Lange sent me the production photos and they are SO GOOD and I love them. Sarah Stark took them during a performance at the Dogstory Theater in Grand Rapids. I’ve added text to […]
I haven’t written as much as I would have expected about my theater work on this blog. In part, this is because it’s hard to find the right time to write about it. During the process, I have so much to say, and no one I can say it too–so many things, I fear, would […]
Duchess of Malfi intrigues and delights Review published in Encore Michigan, by Marin Heinritz, 1/26/2016 Playwright John Webster, Shakespeare’s contemporary, is known for his twisted, macabre sensibility as well as his gorgeous use of language. T.S. Eliot described him as a poet “much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin.” Webster’s masterpiece, The […]
In rehearsal the other night, Sean Kelley, who had been Romeo in my 2012 Romeo and Juliet at Pigeon Creek Shakespeare, pulled out his phone and started showing me pictures of my play that I had never seen before. Pigeon Creek remounted my production in 2014 to perform at The Rose, a reproduction Elizabethan theater at […]
By James A. Kroll NEW YORK CITY – Last night (Aug. 13) I had the opportunity to see the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company’s New York City Debut, a production of “Julius Caesar” performed with an all-female cast. It was staged at the Kraine Theatre in the East Village, once renowned as the home of the […]