Casey Wilder Mott and Fran Kranz on their LA Midsummer
Shakespeare Unlimited Episode 123 Director Casey Wilder Mott’s 2017 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets Shakespeare’s story in modern Los Angeles, where aspiring filmmakers, eccentric artists, studio execs, and surfers bounce off one another in a riot of…
The Gender Politics of Kiss Me, Kate
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 122 A new production of Kiss Me, Kate is on Broadway now. It features Cole Porter’s memorable music and Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase as Lilli Vanessi and Fred Graham, a bickering divorced couple thrown together when…
Glenda Jackson
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 121 The great Glenda Jackson is back on the stage. In 1992, the Emmy and two-time Academy Award winner was elected to Parliament. She spent the next 23 years in Britain’s House of Commons. Since returning to…
Harriet Walter
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 118 In 2012, London’s Donmar Warehouse opened an all-female production of Julius Caesar, starring Dame Harriet Walter as Brutus and directed by Tony Award-nominated director Phyllida Lloyd. The production was set in a women’s prison, and it was…
Olivia Hussey: The Girl on the Balcony
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 113 Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in Romeo and Juliet. When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the young actor playing Romeo, to global stardom. For…
Steven Berkoff: Shakespeare's Heroes and Villains
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 104 Since the 1990s, playwright and actor Steven Berkoff has been traveling the world performing a one-actor show called Shakespeare’s Villains. Berkoff promotes the show’s examination of Iago, Shylock, Richard III, the Macbeths, and others as “A Master…
Antioch Shakespeare Festival: John Lithgow, Robin Lithgow, and Tony Dallas
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 99 Over the course of three summers in the 1950s, Arthur Lithgow and a troupe of actors he’d gathered performed every single one of Shakespeare plays, in rep, at the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, also known as Shakespeare…
Paterson Joseph: Julius Caesar and Me
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 98 In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, Julius Caesar, set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, recently wrote a book about the experience called Julius Caesar…
Antony Sher
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 94 Sir Antony Sher, one the greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries, died in December, 2021, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. He was 72. In 2018, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Sir Antony and, to…
Derek Jacobi: Acting Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 92 Actor Derek Jacobi talks about his remarkable career, including the advice he received from Richard Burton, a disappointing rejection by the Royal Shakespeare Company, sharing the stage with Laurence Olivier, performing King Lear in 2010, his…
Derek Jacobi: Playing Hamlet
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 91 Renowned actor Derek Jacobi talks about the Shakespearean role for which he is best known, Hamlet. Beginning at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1957, Jacobi has acted this role on stage nearly 400 times, and as you…
Shakespeare and War: Stephan Wolfert
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 81 In his one-man show Cry Havoc! actor Stephan Wolfert, a US Army veteran, draws together lines in Shakespeare’s plays spoken by soldiers and former soldiers—including Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. He puts those words to the…