SPEAKING OF SHAKESPEARE ENGAGEMENTS
Like other institutions, we're now using digital formats for engagements
that would normally be presented in traditional gatherings. Our next event,
at 12 noon Eastern time on Wednesday, February 24, will focus on Dame
Judi Dench, who received our Gielgud
Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts at Broadway’s Barrymore
Theatre in a May
1999 gala that featured such luminaries
as Zoe Caldwell, David Hare, Hal Holbrook, and Christopher Plummer. To register for this
program, click here.
In 1976 a young Judi Dench had shared the limelight with another rising star in a celebrated Trevor Nunn production of Macbeth
at The Other Place, an intimate RSC setting in Stratford-upon-Avon. So we're delighted that Sir Ian
McKellen, our inaugural Gielgud laureate,
will be joining us for a conversation in early March. A link to that NAC@Home attraction will be provided shortly.
Our most recent dialogue featured Sir
Richard Eyre, who oversaw Britain's National Theatre
during a decade that featured such triumphs as a touring Richard III, with
Sir Ian McKellen in the title role, and the global premiere of Angels
in America. Dame Judi influenced Sir Richard's decision to become
a director, and he took part in the 1999 Gielgud ceremony that
paid tribute to her. He has also enriched our lives with a number
of cinematic gems, among them Iris and Notes on a Scandal, both of which starred
Dame Judi, and a recent King Lear with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the title role.
Click here
for a riveting hour with one of the most visionary artists of our era.
Another memorable conversation, recorded September 13 in association with
Santa Fe's Lensic Performing Arts Center, was a chat with Jim
Dale, a celebrated performer
who garnered an Oscar nomination as lyricist for the theme song in "Georgy
Girl," who won a Tony Award for his title role in "Barnum," and who holds
multiple Grammy Awards for his evocative recordings of "Harry Potter." Click
here
to enjoy the charming anecdotes he shared with Lensic executive director
Joel Aalberts and Guild president John Andrews about his brilliant career
as a singer, composer, actor, director, raconteur, and narrator.
One of our most resonant programs, recorded in late June by the National
Arts Club in Manhattan but held for realease until August 19, was a wide-ranging
exchange
with Harvard's Stephen
Greenblatt. It commenced with a discussion of the prescient op-ed that
Professor Greenblatt published in the New
York Times a few weeks before America's 2016 presidential election.
It then focused on Tyrant, his 2018 volume about Shakespeare's
insights into how corrupt authoritarians seize and maintain power. From
there it proceeded to a broader consideration of the classical education
a budding playwright received in grammar school, and the ways in which it
equipped him to produce the resonant masterpieces that led a fellow dramatist,
Ben Jonson, to eulogize him in the 1623 First Folio as an artist who was
"not of an age, but for all time." For a vivid illustration of how Professor
Greenblatt's books and articles are influencing today's political discourse,
see a recent Times column by Maureen
Dowd.
On June 23 we arranged a special afternoon session with F.
Murray Abraham, a YouTube conversation that permitted the Guild to introduce
a charismatic actor who grew up in the Southwest to his many admirers at
Santa Fe's Lensic Performing Arts Center. A few weeks later, on August 12,
we enjoyed a delightful National Arts Club conversation with actor John
Douglas Thompson, who'd recently portrayed the Duke of York in the New
York Public Theater's WNYC
audio presentation of Richard
II. Now available on the NAC@Home
channel, this dialogue had been promoted by both Broadway
World and Thought
Gallery, and it drew to a close with pertinent questions from well-informed
viewers around the country.
Many of those participants had joined us May 26 for a dialogue with Columbia's
James Shapiro. That
discussion had also been hosted by the NAC, and it allowed us to explore
Shakespeare in a Divided America, a timely volume that the New
York Times has recently identified as one of The
Ten Best Books of 2020.
As we recall the days before Covid-19 changed our lives, many of us are
now feeling nostalgic about evenings such as the one that occurred on February
26 at The Players (16 Gramercy Park South in Manhattan) with two of
America's most distinguished
visual artists, illustrators James
McMullan and Edward
Sorel. This exchange, which took place in the club's atmospheric Hampden-Booth
Library, was recorded by Ed's son, Leo
Sorel, and thanks to him and his colleague James
Salzano we're pleased to make it available here
for viewing.
Because of the Trumpidemic that followed
that special occasion, we've postponed several SOS offerings. Yet
to be rescheduled, either as programs with in-situ audiences or
as online offerings, are conversations with
Ron Rosenbaum (a prolific
journalist whose publications include The
Shakespeare Wars), with Shana
Farr (a gifted cabaret singer), and with Scott
Newstok (an esteemed scholar who draws on "Lessons from a Renaissance
Education" to explain How to Think Like Shakespeare).
Shortly to be announced, meanwhile, is a new series of NAC@Home conversations,
to be presented during the next few months, that will feature recipients
of the Guild's prestigious GIELGUD AWARD, among them director Sir
Richard Eyre (2018) and actors Sir Derek Jacobi (1997), Sir Ian McKellen
(1996), and Sir Patrick Stewart (2008).
During the interim we encourage you to revisit a 2007 C-SPAN2 interview
with E. R. Braithwaite, the author who gave us To
Sir, With Love, a globally-renowned, best-selling 1959 memoir about
racial struggles in post-war London that provided Sidney Poitier with one
of his finest roles in an award-winning film whose theme song, recorded
by Lulu, was Billboard's top single of 1967. For more detail about
Ambassador Braithwaite, who died in 2016, visit OTHER
OFFERINGS.
THE GUILD'S 2019 GIELGUD AWARD CEREMONY IN LONDON
Our most recent Gielgud Award, presented on Monday, October 28,
2019, paid tribute to the extraordinary achievements of Sir
Cameron Mackintosh. Once again our Award
festivities took place in conjunction with the UK
Theatre Awards Luncheon. And once again our Award selection
was featured in publications such as Broadway
World and The
Stage. As it happened, however, this celebration occurred, not
as usual in London's venerable Guildhall on Sunday, October 27, but at the
beautiful Gielgud
Theatre the following afternoon. As you'll see if you peruse our brief
overview about the gathering,
it proved to be a memorable occasion, and one that saluted not only that
year's Award recipient but Clive
Francis, the actor and visual artist whose caricatures are among the
highlights of a beautiful shrine to the Gielgud legacy.
Fifteen years earlier, on April 19, 2004, the Guild had joined the RSC and
RADA in that resonant setting for a remarkable Gielgud
Centenary Gala. Our 2019 gathering vividly recalled that occasion.
But it also commemorated two anniversaries that dated back a quarter of
a century: (a) the establishment of a new
award in Sir John's name, which was announced on April 24, 1994, at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, and (b) the renaming of a
venue
on Shaftesbury Avenue that had been known as the Globe prior to November
2, 1994, when it became the Gielgud Theatre in recognition of Sir John's
exemplary accomplishments, not least among them fifteen major productions
in that prestigious setting.
Bestowing our 2019 trophy was Sir
Richard Eyre, who was busy directing a revival of Mary Poppins
at London's Prince
Edward Theatre. In addition to his many achievements in the profession
for which he is best known, Sir Richard is a distinguished producer, filmmaker,
and author, and it was he who received our 2018
Gielgud Award at last October's UK Theatre Awards luncheon. Sir Richard's riveting television
production of King Lear, with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the title role, had debuted
a few weeks earlier on Amazon Prime Video. Meanwhile his evocative feature
film, The Children Act, co-starring Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci
and featuring Fionn Whitehead in a screenplay by novelist Ian McEwan, was
gripping moviegoers around the globe. And if those credits were not enough,
Sir Richard was also directing Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton,
a "beautifully nuanced solo performance" (Michael Billington of The
Guardian) to open soon on Broadway.
Our 2018 award had been presented by Sir
Ian McKellen, The Guild's inaugural Gielgud laureate, who was
himself appearing in a West End staging of King Lear that had been
shared cinematically with audiences throughout the world. When he'd received
his own trophy, during a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library on May
20, 1996, Sir Ian had graced the occasion not only with praise for Sir John,
but with a from The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, relating the words
that Shakespeare had composed for the script's title character to remarks
that Justice Anthony Kennedy had uttered earlier that day while he was delivering
a pivotal Supreme Court ruling that "no state may 'deem a class of persons
a stranger to its laws.'"
As he bestowed the 2018 Gielgud trophy, Sir Ian recalled how much
Sir John did, not only to exemplify meticulous standards in his own presentations
of Shakespeare and other playwrights, but to encourage and support the efforts
of other performers, among them those who were just beginning their careers.
Sir Ian extolled Richard Eyre for the same qualities, and he emphasized
how much everyone who cherishes the dramatic arts has benefited from his
many contributions to our cultural lives.
For more detail about the Guild's 2018-19 programming, click here.
If you wish to join and receive periodic updates, we invite you to visit
our MEMBERSHIP page for
types of affiliation. There you'll find a link to a page where you can register
for events,
enroll as a Guild member, or provide
a tax-exempt DONATION.
