On The Arts Fuse: I Review Bridge Repertory Theater's "Julius Caesar"

On The Arts Fuse, I reviewed Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston's production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. While I admire the visual style and the sonic rawness of this interpretation, I feel much of the story and political subtext is buried in the breakneck pacing.

Julius Caesar has long been the best known of Shakespeare’s Roman plays: its plot and the historical events that inspired it are common knowledge, and Marc Antony’s funeral oration has long been used as an object lesson in the rhetorical use of irony and sarcasm. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus are beginning to generate some more productions and interest, but for the time being, Caesar still reigns.

The Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston is currently offering a stripped-down, modern dress production that clocks in at about 100 minutes without an intermission. Director Olivia D’Ambrosio is due some praise for helming a visually distinctive minimalist presentation, but her breakneck ‘fast and furious” pacing ends up leaving the Bard’s poetry and the subtleties of the realpolitik narrative in the dust.

I was entertained by the roughly twenty-minute set of improv by Fine Line Comedy that followed in which they lampooned the play and production.

Read the full review on The Arts Fuse!