David West Read on & Juliet
Hit musical & Juliet combines Romeo and Juliet with the songs of pop hitmaker Max Martin. Its writer, Schitt’s Creek writer and executive producer David West Read, tells us about how the idea came to him while he was concussed.
Shakespeare in Latinx Communities, with José Cruz González and David Lozano
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 176 Theater artists José Cruz González and David Lozano join us in this episode. Their conversation “On Making Shakespeare Relevant to Latinx Communities” appears in the new book Shakespeare and Latinidad. González and Lozano talk with Barbara…
Simon Godwin on Romeo & Juliet
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 165 The National Theatre’s new production of Romeo & Juliet was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production’s director, was tasked with turning it into a…
Tana Wojczuk on Charlotte Cushman's Radical Life
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 152 Charlotte Cushman was one of the most famous American theater artists of the mid-19th century. And while she was known for her Lady Macbeth and Oliver Twist’s Nancy, she was acclaimed for her performances as Romeo…
Simon Mayo: "Mad Blood Stirring"
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 115 In a novel just released in the US, author and longtime BBC radio host Simon Mayo tells an amazing—but true—story: that England’s first all-black production of Romeo and Juliet was staged by Black American prisoners of…
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…
Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 80 Without a doubt, American composer Leonard Bernstein’s most significant contribution to the world of Shakespeare was West Side Story, the 1957 smash Broadway hit adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written and created by Jerome Robbins, Arthur…
Juliet's Answer
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 66 Starting in the 1930s, people began sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy. The letters were all addressed to Juliet and for years, no one knew what to do with them. …
Shakespeare and YA Novels: Ryan North and Molly Booth
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 62 While print sales of adult fiction are down in the last decade, the juvenile market – which includes YA – has actually gone up 40 percent. In this episode, two YA authors talk about their writing,…
Shakespeare and Girlhood
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 60 How does Shakespeare portray girls and girlhood in his plays, and what do those portrayals tell us about life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England? Our guest for this Shakespeare Unlimited episode, Deanne Williams of York University…
Charlotte Cushman: When Romeo Was a Woman
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 13 Actress Charlotte Cushman was a 19th-century theatrical icon, so famous and beloved that, like Madonna or Beyoncé today, newspapers called her by just her first name: she was “Our Charlotte.” But her fame was not for conventionally Victorian feminine…
Romeo and Juliet through the Ages
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 12 Though the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet is a perennial favorite, the world around the play has changed in the four centuries since it was first performed. Shifting attitudes about taboo love and marriage,…