“Ms. Taichman’s direction is so assured and the staging so savvy that everything comes together.”
– NEW YORK TIMES
Winter’s Tale
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Rebecca Taichman
Co-Production of
The Shakespeare Theatre Company
Washington, DC
McCarter Theater
Princeton, NY
DESIGNERS:
SETS: Christine Jones
COSTUMES: David Zinn
LIGHTS: Christopher Akerlind
SOUND: Matt Tierney
COMPOSER: Nico Muhly
“The spotlight must be shone on director Rebecca Taichman”
– TALKIN’ BROADWAY
“Rebecca Taichman’s ravishing production of “The Winter’s Tale” at the McCarter Theater Center…I had seen only one production before, James Lapine’s at the Public Theater in 1989, but the McCarter’s, produced in association with the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, is the one I will remember….Ms. Taichman’s direction is so assured and the staging so savvy that everything comes together…It all guides the audience through the story: Christopher Akerlind’s lighting, with towering shadows and powerful stark-and-sudden changes; Nico Muhly’s haunting music; and Matt Tierney’s booming but subtle sound design that suggests distance and internality. Magical is not a word to throw around lightly, but the climactic scene starring the exquisite statue of Hermione comes awfully close.”
– THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The magnitude of forgiveness documented in director Rebecca Taichman’s taut, visually arresting and tenderly wrought new production for Shakespeare Theatre Company is itself a kind of magic. And darned if, in inspirational sync with her designers and cast — particularly, Mark Harelik as Leontes — she doesn’t compel us all to a wistfully moving consideration of the acts of this foolish king….. Taichman’s previous assignments for the company have included, most significantly, a “Taming of the Shrew” that placed fuming Kate in a body-conscious contemporary culture of the kind that could drive any smart woman to violence. Her “Winter’s Tale,” a co-production with Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center, is as complexly emotionally textured as her “Shrew” was topically savvy. The proof is in the feelings stirred by that marvelous reunion scene, rendered onstage at the Lansburgh as a miracle of expressly theatrical proportions…. Paulina’s dark arts are a mirage. It’s the theater’s spell that conducts the enchantment….
Taichman’s vision for the piece is fresh and intimate. Nine actors — all commendable — play all of the roles, and some of the doubling in parts offers clever commentary.
… In blazing her own trail through Shakespeare’s tale, Taichman returns us to the consolingly familiar terrain of the playwright’s massive heart.
– WASHINGTON POST
” The Winter’s Tale, currently playing at Shakespeare Theatre in a transcendent co-production with the MacArthur Theatre Center by Rebecca Taichman, is an example of how rich a Shakespeare play can be when it isn’t hampered by theme or construct. Taichman’s actors are in modern dress, on sets that feel like heightened versions of reality (sometimes chemically so), and the resulting action crystallizes both the timelessness and the richness of the material..The cast… are universally adept at shifting from tragedy to comedy in a heartbeat, and it’s done so efficiently in this production that it’s hard not to marvel at the unexpected grace of it all, even as it mirrors the mercurial nature of life itself..”
-WASHINGTONIAN
Model of the set for A WINTER’S TALE
“William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” thought to be a late work, invites theater-goers of the romantic persuasion to make “a wild dedication of (them)selves/ To undiscovered waters, undreamed shores.” And that’s where director Rebecca Taichman takes us in McCarter Theatre’s stunning production of this play. Run, do not walk, to see this show, running through April 21… A co-production with The Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., this strikingly inventive “Winter’s Tale” is an fine example of how a post-modernist sensibility can breathe new life into a sprawling, bustling, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink Elizabethan entertainment by tightening, paring, focusing, and streamlining. Five acts are compressed into two, with nothing essential lost; the tragic aspects deepen, the comic aspects explode, the romantic aspects soar.
– SUN NEWS
– TALKIN BROADWAY
“So who knew that Bohemia was a playground for huge rainbow-hued butterflies?… But I’m rushing the plot a bit as things start off a lot less colorfully and, indeed, more dourly in the neutral palate palace in Sicilia where begins director Rebecca Taichman’s visionary staging of William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”.. .Taichman intrigues and entertains us with a production that starts off like a modern-dress concert-staging with some of the actors attending admirably and without affectation to the text’s rushes of exquisite lyricism while those not involved sit in chairs in the back of designer Christine Jones’ starkly handsome unit setting that serves in Sicilia as a spacious uncluttered palace room and as a meadow in Bohemia.”
– U.S. 1
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