Chicago Shakespeare Festival
February 6 – March 23, 2014
Directed by: Gary Griffin
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Boasting one show-stopping song after another—like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Let Me Entertain You”—this classic musical is inspired by memoirs of the burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee; and it marks Associate Artistic Director Gary Griffin’s continued exploration of the Sondheim canon. Tony Award® nominee Louise Pitre makes her Chicago Shakespeare debut as Rose, the most infamous of all stage mothers. Pitre’s career highlights include many critically acclaimed performances in the theater, on television and concert stages across North America and Europe. Gypsy, a jewel of the American musical theater, has been described by The New York Times critic Frank Rich as “Broadway’s own brassy, unlikely answer to King Lear.”
Chicago Shakespeare Festival
February 22 – March 22, 2014
Director: David H. Bell
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A magical forest filled with a host of some of Shakespeare’s most comedic characters make A Midsummer Night’s Dream one of his most popular plays. CST’s 75-minute abridged Short Shakespeare! production serves as an ideal introduction to the Bard—for audiences of all ages. When lovers cross with mischievous sprites in an enchanted forest, a series of mishaps occur and nothing is what it seems. Add to the mix a bevy of fumbling actors and chaos breaks loose until dawn breaks and all is once again right with the world. After the performance, the actors remain on stage for a brief question-and-answer session. Then join the audience in the Lobby for one-on-one conversations and photo opportunities.
Chicago Shakespeare Festival
March 13 – May 4, 2014
Directed by Gary Griffin
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Associate Artistic Director Gary Griffin brings you not one, but two musicals, Gypsy and Road Show, that feature the extraordinary talents of Stephen Sondheim—both inspired by real stories of ambitious Americans in pursuit of their dreams. Based on the lives of the boldly enterprising brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, the musical journey of Road Show spans forty years—from the Alaskan Gold Rush to the Florida real estate boom in the 1930s. Traversing the continent in a variety of get-rich-quick schemes, the brothers stick together through experiences that change their lives in unexpected ways.
Chicago Shakespeare Festival
March 30 – April 13, 2014
Adaptor/Director: Emma Rice
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Lauded all around the world for its trademark vitality, the artistic collective from Cornwall, England, Kneehigh makes its long-awaited Chicago debut with the iconic work that first catapulted the company to international fame. Marrying gorgeous music and ingenious staging with cheeky humor and Wagnerian intensity, Kneehigh now reimagines one of the world’s oldest love stories. Cornish King Mark is at war; he rules with his head, not his heart. But he hasn’t counted on falling head over heels for his enemy’s sister, or expected the arrival of the enigmatic Tristan.
Hamlet – Globe to Globe – Shakespeare’s Globe, London – World Tour
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Bruckhurst
A TWO-YEAR TOUR TO EVER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
Learning of his father’s death, Prince Hamlet comes home to find his uncle married to his mother and installed on the Danish throne. At night, the ghost of the old king demands that Hamlet avenge his ‘foul and most unnatural murder’.
Encompassing political intrigue and sexual obsession, philosophical reflection and violent action, tragic depth and wild humour, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ‘poem unlimited’, a colossus in the story of the English language and the fullest expression of his genius.
Be at the start of a completely unprecedented theatrical adventure and help us launch this two-year worldwide tour of our pared-down, small-scale Hamlet, which will visit all 205 nations on earth.
Titus Andronicus
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Lucy Bailey
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Returning to Rome from a war against the Goths, the general Titus Andronicus brings with him the queen Tamora and her three sons as prisoners of war. Titus’ sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son to appease the ghosts of his dead sons, and his decision to refuse to accept the title of emperor, initiates a terrible cycle of mutilation, rape and murder. And all the while, at the centre of the nightmare, there moves the villainous, self-delighting Aaron.
Grotesquely violent and daringly experimental, Titus was the smash hit of Shakespeare’s early career, and is written with a ghoulish energy he was never to repeat elsewhere.
This production revisits Lucy Bailey’s spectacular Globe production of 2006.