SPEAKING OF SHAKESPEARE ENGAGEMENTS
Like other institutions, we're now using digital formats for engagements
that would once have been presented in traditional gatherings. Our most
recent program, at 5 p.m. Mountain Time on Sunday, April 11, was a benefit
for SANTA FE CLASSIC
THEATER, which will be presenting As You Like It this summer
at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. Click
here for details.
Our next event, at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, April 20, will focus
a spotlight on globally-renowned playwright DAVID
HARE. Sir David took part in our 1999 Gielgud Award presentation
to Dame Judi Dench at the Barrymore
Theatre in New York, and he himself received our 2017 Gielgud trophy at London's historic Guildhall. To
register for what promises to be a particularly memorable conversation,
click
here.
That event will be followed at 6 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, April 25,
with a special Shakespeare's Birthday gathering with F.
MURRAY ABRAHAM, which will serve as a benefit for
THE PLAYERS, a historic institution on Gramercy Park South in Manhattan
that was founded by Edwin Booth. Details will follow shortly.
Among our recent programs, in an online series that has attracted thousands
of viewers from around the globe, was a delightful conversation with
SIR IAN MCKELLEN. He had received the Guild's inaugural Gielgud
Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts during a festive 1996
ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington, with Brian Bedford, James Roose Evans, Edward
Gero, Robert MacNeil, Kelly McGillis, and Lynn Redgrave among the presenters.
And he rejoined us Wednesday, March 3, for a delightful NAC@Home
conversation that focused primarily on his dozens of Shakespearean roles.
To watch it,
click here.
Another scintillating engagement, on Wednesday, February 24, featured one
of Sir Ian's most cherished theatrical colleagues, DAME
JUDI DENCH, who received our 1999 Gielgud
trophy at Broadway’s Barrymore
Theatre during a gala that featured such luminaries
as Keith Baxter, Zoe Caldwell, Rebecca Eaton, David Hare, Hal Holbrook,
Robert MacNeil, Ronald Pickup, Toby Stephens, and Christopher Plummer. To
enjoy this charming visit to Dame Judi's home south of London, click
here.
In late December we saluted 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. A young Judi Dench 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 our most visionary dramatic artists.
On September 13 the Guild joined Santa Fe's Lensic Performing Arts Center,
for a lively dialogue with JIM
DALE, a celebrated and remarkably versatile 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.
And click
here to watch a resonant conversation with Harvard's STEPHEN
GREENBLATT that was recorded in late June but held for realease until
August 19. It was a wide-ranging exchange that 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 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 an afternoon session with F.
MURRAY ABRAHAM, a gathering that permitted the Guild to introduce an
actor who grew up in the Southwest to his admirers at Santa Fe's Lensic
Performing Arts Center. To watch this conversation, click
here. A few weeks later, on August 12, we enjoyed a delightful National
Arts Club exchange with actor JOHN
DOUGLAS THOMPSON. He had recently portrayed the Duke of York in the New
York Public Theater's WNYC
audio presentation of Richard
II, and that was one of the topics we addressed with him. To watch
this engaging dialogue, which was promoted by both Broadway
World and Thought
Gallery and elicited questions from viewers around the nation, click
here.
Many of the admirers who joined us for that event had also participated
in a May 26 dialogue with JAMES
SHAPIRO of Columbia University.
Click here to watch an NAC discussion that explored 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 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 stately Hampden-Booth
Library, was recorded by Ed's son, Leo
Sorel, and thanks to him and his colleague James
Salzano, we hope to make it available soon on YouTube.
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).
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.
