Theatre

This three-part series offers an excellent primer in the history of drama as well as in-depth guidance on the industry’s technical side. From ancient Greek masks and amphitheaters to 21st-century know-how in casting, rehearsal, costumes, sets, and lighting, each video will go the distance in supporting, instructing, and inspiring a new generation of theater professionals.

erformed at Shakespeare’s Globe, London’s faithful reconstruction of the open-air playhouse designed in 1599, Romeo and Juliet is arguably the best-loved of all love stories in Western literature. The play’s masterful combination of lyricism, suspense, and dramatic changes of mood is dramatized by an energetic cast that stars Adetomiwa Edun—called “a Romeo to die for” by The Independent (London)—and, in her stage debut as Juliet, Ellie Kendrick

As You Like It runs the glorious gamut of pastoral romance: disguises and love notes, poetry and brilliant conversation, gentle satire and full-on slapstick, and passion throughout it all! This staging—performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, London’s faithful reconstruction of the open-air playhouse designed in 1599—spotlights Naomi Frederick, Jack Laskey, Laura Rogers, Jamie Parker, and Dominic Rowan in the roles of Rosalind, Orlando, Celia, Oliver, and the irrepressible Touchstone. “This is an As You Like It bursting with youth and vigour,” says The Independent (London), a “boisterous, rambunctious new production.”

Although most actors dream of celebrity, many find satisfaction in modest film and television roles, commercials, and regional theater. This program shows students that side of the profession, interviewing several accomplished performers who—although they are far from being household names—have found steady work on the stage and in Hollywood. Kevin Conway (Invincible, Gettysburg), Melissa Leo (21 Grams), Peter Maloney (Summer of Sam), Jacqueline Knapp (Dominick and Eugene), Jim DeMarse (The Sopranos), Kristin Griffith (Interiors), William Wise (In the Bedroom), and others share their practical yet inspiring views on auditioning, insecurity, disillusionment, aging, and the viability of acting as a career option today.

The “magic” of theater is the result of rigorous planning, hard work, and the finely honed skills of artisans and designers. This program takes viewers inside the technical process of mounting a stage play. Focusing on a theater company’s major production departments—set, prop, costume, makeup, lighting, and sound—the video shows how the knowledge and labor of theater technicians comes to life. Information about model fabrication, painting techniques, flats and bracing, scene changes, hand props, furniture, statues and masks, period suits and dresses, light rigging, and mic placement makes this the ultimate hands-on authority for theater courses and workshops.

Although staging a play requires extensive preparation, its ultimate success depends upon the energy of the performers and their ability to engage a live audience. This program focuses on what makes that interaction successful, featuring segments on character interpretation, timing, underplaying, movement, positioning, dialects and accents, portraying pain and drunkenness, and other principles and elements of acting. Sections covering mime performance—one of the oldest forms of acting—and stage management are also included. The result is one of the most thorough and user-friendly guides to stage acting and directing now available to students.

Over the course of a single year at the RSC, 150 actors play 500 different roles, each requiring authentic period costuming and makeup. In this remarkable program, master costumers and makeup artists demonstrate their crafts as expressed in productions of The Tempest, Measure for Measure, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. How does cleverly designed clothing help make Pompey more arrogant and Isabella look both chaste and alluring? How is Caliban’s speckled hide created, and how does Hieronimo seem to actually bite off his tongue? With subtlety and finesse, this powerhouse team works miracles of stage magic.

It can take more than 100 specialists working 8,000 hours to create the set for a single stage production. How is it done? In this extraordinary program, the dynamic process of set design for RSC productions of Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and Measure for Measure is described by the people who make it all happen. From creating a full-size tree for Benedick to climb that can be removed quickly between acts to fabricating a giant conch shell for Caliban to inhabit, no creative or engineering challenge is beyond the abilities of this talented team of prop makers and set builders.

Hamlet changes in meaning from generation to generation, from decade to decade, and from actor to actor. In these programs, Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, talks with some of the greatest actors of the 20th century about their interpretations of Hamlet—John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vittorio Gassman, Richard Burton, Mandy Patinkin, Nicol Williamson, Ben Kingsley, Jean Louis Barrault, Maximilian Schell, and the great Russian actor Innocenti Smoktunovsky. The Great Hamlets is invaluable to students of the play and to all actors, not just those studying to play the noble Dane.

Understanding Greek tragedy, not through post-Ibsenist, post-modernist, post-Method eyes but in terms of what the ancient playwright may have intended, requires going beyond the text to the staging. For the staging defines the relationship between chorus and actors, between actors and audience, and between playwright and play. Using the theatre at Epidauros as an example—it was built a century after the heyday of Greek classical theatre but is well preserved—this program identifies the physical parts of the acting space and, with specific reference to the Oresteia, shows how the plays would have been staged in Aeschylus’ time.