David Tennant stars as Richard II in Royal Shakespeare Company production coming to BAM (photo by Keith Pattison)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
March 24 – May 1, $30-$200
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
In a letter to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, in 1800, Admiral Horatio Nelson wrote, “My greatest happiness is to serve my gracious King and Country, and I am envious only of glory; for if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive.” BAM references that famous quote in its glorious program “King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings,” and it would be a sin not to covet it. In honor of the quadricentennial of the passing of William Shakespeare, who died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, BAM has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Ohio State University to present the Henriad, four Shakespeare plays in repertory at the BAM Harvey over the course of thirty-nine days, concentrating on Kings Henry IV and V. All four works are directed by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, with sets by Stephen Brimson Lewis, lighting by Tim Mitchell, music by Paul English, sound by Martin Slavin, movement by Michael Ashcroft, and fights by Terry King. David Tennant (Doctor Who, Broadchurch, Jessica Jones), who played the title character in Doran’s 2008 staging of Hamlet with Patrick Stewart as his father, has the lead role in Richard II, with Julian Glover as John of Gaunt, Leigh Quinn as the queen, Oliver Ford Davies as the duke of York, Sarah Parks as the duchess of York, and Jasper Britton as John of Gaunt’s son, later to become Henry IV. Britton continues his role in Henry IV, Part I, and Henry IV, Part II, with Alex Hassell as Prince Hal, Martin Bassindale as Peto and Prince John, Antony Sher (Doran’s longtime partner) as Sir John Falstaff, Parks as Mistress Quickly, and Sam Marks as Ned Poins. And Hassell then takes the throne in Henry V, with Jim Hooper as the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Thorp as King Charles VI of France, Jane Lapotaire as Queen Isobel, Quinn as lady-in-waiting Alice, and Marks as the French constable.
HENRY IV, PART I is one of four RSC plays running at BAM through May 1 (photo by Keith Pattison)
“The Henriad plays are a contemplation of power and leadership — how they are acquired, maintained, and lost,” BAM publicist Christian Barclay writes in a program essay. “A host of historical and fictional characters — both high- and lowborn — revolve around the monarchs in shifting alliances. . . . The Henriad is a study of the difficult personal and ethical choices that accompany political life.” In conjunction with the plays, the Mark Morris Dance Center is hosting the master class “Embodying Shakespeare” on April 5 with Owen Horsley, Hassell, and Quinn ($25, 2:00), Doran will be in conversation with Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro on April 7 at BAMcafé ($20, 6:00), Neil Kutner, Ryan Gastelum, and Ben Tyreman will participate in the seminar “Behind the Scenes: King and Country” at BAM Fisher on April 20 ($35, 5:00), astronomer Summer Ash will lead guided tours of the sky with telescopes in “A Look at the Stars: Shakespeare and the Cosmos” April 15-17 on the BAM Fisher rooftop terrace (free, 8:30 or 9:30), and the exhibition “King and Country: Treasures from the Folger,” consisting of rare paper artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, will be on view at the Harvey during the run of the performances. Tickets for the shows and the special events are going quickly, so act now if you want to catch any or all of what should be a glorious Shakespeare spectacle to covet.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out. 
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is screening at various days and times through April 3 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the new site-specific interactive-exchange exhibition 
