World-renowned playwright and Tony Award nominee Ken Ludwig (Crazy for You, Lend Me a Tenor) will be hosting an interactive discussion on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, followed by a book-signing of his new book How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Saturday, June 8 at 12pm.

The event is free and open to the public; reservations are recommended and can be made by visiting www.folger.edu/theatre or by calling the Box Office at 202.544.7077. The talk is presented in association with Folger Theatre's production of Twelfth Night, playing through June 9. A 2:00pm matinee performance will follow the event.

How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (Crown Publishers: on sale June 11, 2013) details an enormously fun method to help children memorize passages from Shakespeare's plays while learning a world of information about the Bard's life and works.

You don't need to be a Shakespeare scholar to reap the benefits of great literature for your children. Ludwig found that a foundational understanding of Shakespeare is a leg up for any child, giving them a head start in reading comprehension, public speaking, literary history, and overall academic confidence. In How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, Ludwig provides the tools to instill children with a lifelong love and understanding of Shakespeare's works, without overwhelming them. His method combines read-aloud, repetition, and rhyming techniques together with vivid descriptions of the plays and characters to introduce kids to Shakespeare's world.

Ken Ludwig is an internationally acclaimed playwright who has had numerous hits on Broadway, in London's West End, and throughout the world. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards, received three Tony Award nominations, and won two Helen Hayes Awards and the Edgar Award. His work has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been performed in more than thirty countries in over twenty languages. Some of his Broadway and West End shows include Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You, Moon Over Buffalo, Twentieth Century, and adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. He studied music at Harvard with Leonard Bernstein and theater history at Haverford College and Cambridge University in England. .

Folger Shakespeare Library is a renowned center for scholarship, learning, culture, and the arts. Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection and a primary repository for research material from the early modern period (1500-1750), Folger Shakespeare Library is an internationally recognized research library offering advanced scholarly programs in the humanities; a national leader in how Shakespeare is taught in grades K-12; and an award-winning producer of cultural and arts programs-theater, music, poetry, exhibits, lectures, and family programs. A gift to the American people from industrialist Henry Clay Folger, Folger Shakespeare Library-located one block east of the U.S. Capitol - opened in 1932 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Learn more at www.folger.edu.

Ken Ludwig Twelfth Night Pre-Show Talk and Book Party is set for Saturday, June 8 at 12:00pm at the Folger Theatre, 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC. Admission is Free; Advance reservations are recommended. Reserve your seat at www.folger/theatre.edu or call 202.544.7077. Metro: Capitol South (blue/orange lines) or Union Station (red line). Parking: Limited street parking in Capitol Hill neighborhood.

FOUR STARS

It is with great pleasure that I write this review. Catholic University’s production of Ken Ludwig‘s Shakespeare in Hollywood is professional, outrageously funny, and brimming with voracious talent. Wittingly directed by Jay D. Brock, it’s full of hysterical physical comedy, a hefty helping of Shakespeare sonnets, and countless charming innuendos. The pace is perfect, keeping right up with the action demanded by the script, which is well-rounded with fully developed characters, a meaty plot, and exciting climaxes. The Shakespearean text in Ludwig’s play is authentic and pertinent to the action as it is experienced and brought to life by the talented cast of actors. All the key elements of theatre meld together to heighten anticipation and prep us for a wild ride complete with mysterious sound by Gregg Martin, clever lighting by Catherine Girardi, intricate set pieces with numerous changes by Dr. Thomas Donahue, and triumphant colorful period costumes by Celestine Ranney Howes.

The story begins in 1934, at Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood, where a film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being produced. Oberon (Graham Pilato) and Puck (Morgan Sendek) are transported from their world and magically appear on set. They are cast by the Austrian director Max Reinhardt (Robert Pike) as the stars of the film, playing none other than themselves. Oberon has become quite smitten with the actress Olivia Darnell (Marian Donahue) and believes she feels the same way. Chaos and hilarity ensue when their attempt to cast a love spell on Olivia goes awry.

Fantastic energy, an active presence, and strength in objectives abound onstage as every cast member brings life to each character. The versatile ensemble includes Max Applewhite, Kira Burri, Lauren Snyder, and Paul Luckenbaugh (also comedically plays Sam Warner and Tarzan). The men of the WB studio include Joe E. Brown (Philip da Costa), Jack Warner (Bobby Gallagher), Dick Powell (Brendan McMahon), Will Hays (Anthony Papastrat), Daryl (Seth Rosenke), and Cagney (Robert Schumacher).

Rosenke’s Daryl is comfortable onstage, with a natural presence and great comedic timing and physicality that reached to the back row of the house and earned many laughs. Papastrat plays a stern Hays, which makes it even better when he’s caught off guard and has a ridiculously funny encounter with himself in a mirror. McMahon’s Powell is kind and earnest, a true gentleman. Gallagher’s Warner is anxious and also very cool at the same time, a great mix for a complicated character in love with the rambunctious Lydia. Philip da Costa’s Brown is smart, quick, and very funny in his interactions and he is dressed in drag for the film. Schumacher’s Cagney is down-to-earth, witty, and relatable as a result. Pike’s Reinhardt has great drive as he directs and creates passionate moments of connection to the text.

The women in this play are wickedly smart. Reporter Louella Parsons is played with sophistication and sass by Briana Manente, who takes a journey throughout the play and convincingly ends up in an unexpected state. Ditzy bombshell Lydia is expertly played by Jess Schladebeck complete with an accent, dry humor, brilliant punchline delivery, and truly wanting what she’s going for.

Marian Donahue is a joy to watch. Her many scenes brighten the stage with her professional, graceful stage presence and natural demeanor. Her strong motivations show that she has clearly done her background work. She completely won me over in the first scene with her vulnerability and presence.

Donahue and Pilato are a sparkling romantic duo. Pilato is strong and cavalier with so much vigor and authenticity in his delivery. Beautiful gentle moments between the two of them are tender as they recite sonnets with honesty and intrigue. Pilato is her Prince Charming, sweeping her off her feet. He is a fabulous Oberon, with an endearing quirkiness at times the script calls for, and yet remains dashing and steadfast with his plans and incredibly relatable as a result. I was beyond impressed.

Pilato and Sendek are a fantastic scheming pair as Oberon and Puck, casting spells as mysterious magical music plays and the lights dim and flicker. There is never a dull moment when these two are onstage, as their pace is incredible. Their amazing connection, playful banter, and execution of massive chunks of text are all exciting and transport me to another world. Sendek is an outstanding Puck. Her impressive acrobatic skills make her light and quick on her feet as she tumbles around the space. She’s absolutely adorable, cunning, and vibrantly full of life.

Catholic University’s Shakespeare in Hollywood is an outrageously funny production that is sure to have you in a great mood by the end of the evening. The audience broke out in spontaneous applause after many of the scenes and howled with laughter. It’s absolutely worth your time to see these talented actors in a hearty, insanely well-written and executed play.

The Beaux' Stratagem at A Noise Within from A Noise Within on Vimeo.

Review: Restoration comedy 'The Beaux' Strategem' defies categories

By Philip Brandes
LA Times

How often do you get to see a classic bawdy Restoration comedy by George Farquhar, a long-lost Thornton Wilder meditation on marriage and other human foibles, and a brand-new Ken Ludwig farce — all for the price of a single ticket? Granted, they happen to be the same play, but A Noise Within’s West Coast premiere of “The Beaux’ Strategem” is a great deal nonetheless.

This hybrid creation began its theatrical life in Farquhar’s 1707 sharp-edged satire about two rakish fortune-hunters on a road trip to replenish their squandered incomes by preying on provincial heiresses. After Wilder’s partially completed 1939 adaptation was posthumously discovered among his unpublished manuscripts, his estate enlisted Ludwig (of “Lend Me a Tenor” fame) to finish the project.

In only the second production since the present version’s completion in 2005, each co-author’s influence and historical perspectives are apparent. Overlaid on Farquhar’s Restoration-era lampooning of social hypocrisy, frank depiction of sexuality and empowering roles for women (who were at last permitted to perform them upon the stage), Wilder’s humanism spotlights the heart’s dominion over calculated reason and other deeper truths, while Ludwig’s masterful slapstick antics supply the frequent belly laughs.

The result is a show that defies easy categorization — amid the period revival look and feel, the action veers from bawdy one-liners and clowning that could have been lifted from a Judd Apatow romp, to poignantly introspective Wilder-esque monologues directly addressed to the audience. It takes performers adept at both classical technique and freewheeling modern comedy to keep the seams from showing, and this first-rate ensemble delivers under Julia Rodriguez-Elliott’s insightful direction.

The staging overflows with memorably hilarious turns: the two lead scoundrels, Aimwell (Freddy Douglas) and Archer (Blake Ellis), floundering in the moral goo of their unraveling selfish plots when they fall in love with their far wiser targets (Malia Wright and especially Abby Craden, whose adroit comic timing nails the smackdown of her character’s loveless marriage to Robertson Dean’s slovenly drunkard); Deborah Strang’s ditzy overprotective mother who dabbles as a rather scary medical practitioner; and the adaptation’s elegant embodiment of hypocrisy in Time Winters’ Gloss, a God-fearing chaplain who moonlights as a highway robber who puts the fear of God into his victims.

Toss in swashbuckling swordplay and superb production values and you’ve got a lot to enjoy in this postmodern Restoration comedy.

“The Beaux’ Strategem,” A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. Various dates, check website for schedule: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 26. $40-60 (subject to change). (626) 356-3100 or www.anoisewithin.org. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Last month I asked the great John Lithgow to write an introduction to my new book “How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare.” He agreed (wonderful man that he is), and the result arrived in my inbox a few days later.

I knew John was a remarkable actor. I knew he’d won countless awards and played Malvolio in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Twelfth Night,” and that his family background involved the theater. But when I read his introduction everything clicked into place.

It turns out John’s father ran several Shakespeare theaters during John’s youth, and John has been acting in Shakespeare’s plays since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. So let’s see: thorough knowledge of Shakespeare…can quote Shakespeare passages at will…played Mustardseed in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when he was 7 years old…and then John turns into one of the savviest, most versatile actors of the past 50 years. It all added up.

I’m not saying you have to know Shakespeare to become a great actor, but I can say without hesitation that it certainly helps.

Shakespeare is at the core of every serious actor’s training and experience, and the sooner you start the process the better. Of all the hundreds and hundreds of actors I’ve auditioned for my plays over the years, by far the best and most successful have known their Shakespeare very, very well.

The fact is, not only is Shakespeare the greatest playwright of the English language; he has also influenced every single playwright who has come after him. In addition, you can’t pretend to act Shakespeare without knowing how to breathe, listen, interpret, and pace yourself. Mere emoting won’t cut it. And here’s the thing: Shakespeare actually tells you how to say his lines right in the text, as long as you know how to read it properly.

Thus, knowing Shakespeare gives actors two significant advantages: First, it gives them a context for every part they’re acting; second, it gives them the technique they’ll need to be great performers.

I’ve felt strongly about Shakespeare since I first entered the theater, but it wasn’t until I became a father that I figured out how to put my convictions into practice.

When each of my children entered first grade, we sat down together and started memorizing lines from Shakespeare, starting with short accessible passages from the comedies and gradually increasing the length and complexity of the pieces.

What I have tried to do in “How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare” is offer parents and educators the techniques and strategies I developed over the years for my own children. I realized early in this process that Shakespeare is a lot like a foreign language. Many of the words are unfamiliar, even to adults; Shakespeare’s sentence structure sounds odd to our modern ears; and Shakespeare is constantly speaking in complex metaphors that can be difficult to understand.

So what I did for my kids—and what you can do for yours—was teach them how to decipher every difficult word in the passage being studied, and then memorize that passage so their knowledge of Shakespeare became second nature. The goal was fluency in the way a foreign language can become fluent.

In total, the book presents the first 25 passages I taught my kids, ordered in a specific sequence to make learning them as easy as possible. As each passage is discussed, from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to “Hamlet” (with many more plays in between), I talk about the stories, the characters, and the meanings of the works, so ultimately the kids get the kind of knowledge of Shakespeare they’ll need to become great students, great thinkers, great teachers, and yes, great actors.

The moral: All actors should learn how to speak the language of Shakespeare. And if they’re lucky enough to learn it early, they’ll retain it for the rest of their lives.

Interviewed by AACT's Ron Ziegler

RZ: As you know, your plays are widely produced in community theatres around the country and around the world. Do you have any personal background in community theatre?

Ken Ludwig: I do have a background in community theatre. I grew up in the town of York, Pennsylvania; York has a wonderful community theatre called the York Little Theatre. And when my parents moved to York, before I was born, my mother was heavily involved in York Little Theatre and played roles there. In fact, I've just recently found one of her play scripts, signed by her, and I was just thrilled! So it's very much a part of our life. I also remember auditioning for a role. They were doing The Music Man and I was in high school and I probably was 16 or something. But I was determined. I wanted to lay the lead because I had memorized all of Harold Hill's great patter songs (I can still just do them off the top of my head). I really wanted that role. They were very sweet; they let me audition and I did it, but obviously they weren't going to have a 16 year old kid play Harold Hill. I should have played Tommy! And so they let me down easy. So absolutely I love community theatre.

RZ: Besides being a playwright you are also a director, correct?

Ken Ludwig: Yes, I've done directing all my life. I directed shows in college, and then I started directing professionally on and off as I wrote. But I love directing. The only trouble with directing for me at this moment is I still have a son in high school. If you want to direct, you're gone from your hometown for six to eight weeks at a time and that's something I just can't do at this point.

RZ: When you direct your own plays do you ever find yourself wanting to change your script because as a director you've gained a different perspective?

Ken Ludwig: Oh absolutely. I'll direct a piece and then I'll discover I didn't leave enough time for this person to change before an entrance or something. That might be the sort of elemental thing I discover. But the other, more profound circumstance is, if I find that in directing a scene, it ultimately doesn't pay off or work in the way that I want it to. And then it would be a matter of me turning to the playwright and saying "Hey, you know, write better!”

RZ: Or asking the playwright if you could make changes?

Ken Ludwig: Exactly. One of the times I directed, at the Alley Theatre--directing Leading Ladies for the world premiere production-- I bought this little pink hand puppet and I said, "Now listen, when I'm directing I'm not the playwright. She is the playwright. So don't ask me to change a lot, because I'm the director. Talk to the playwright.” It's so easy for an actor to say, "Gee, that doesn't work Ken, could you change my line?” Playwrights slave away trying to get lines right. As Oscar Wilde said, he spent one morning putting a comment in and then in the afternoon taking it out. You're very careful about every choice you make as a playwright and you don't want to make changes willy-nilly.

RZ: Do the characters and situations in your plays—as farcical as they may be at times—have a basis in real life, specifically in your real life?

Ken Ludwig: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Take a play like Lend Me a Tenor. People said to me, "Hey, Ken, that Max, that's you!” If you don't know the play it's about a young man who wants to be an opera star and believes he has it inside him but no one else sees it. In the course of the play he proves it to the world, proves it to himself and he gains self-confidence. I went to law school because thought I needed something to fall back on. And so I spent time practicing law as sort of my day job, and I wanted to be in the theatre more than anything else, and I always did, ever since I was a kid. And I had always felt that I had this ability inside me. I had this sense of what art really is about and trying to communicate it to people and trying to make people happy and trying to give people courage and trying to make people proud of themselves and having a sense of worth and humanity. And that's what mattered to me and I thought I could convey that. But I had to prove it. In the course of the play Max proves it. Actually, Crazy for You is the same story as it turns out. Some people have said when you're a writer you often end up telling the same story all your life. That's one example.

A more specific example is in Leading Ladies. Well you know the old lady who's dying – you think she's dying – I mean, that's my godmother exactly to a T. She was funny. She had a sense of humor. She was curmudgeonly. There was nothing delicate about her. She was tough as nails but she looked frail as she got older. Meg in that play, I knew a hundred Megs. I've certainly known in my life Leo and Jack. I've known them in my work in London and in New York, they're actors who really think they can make it but just haven't had the chance or haven't had the right break and at the same time they want a real life or a life with children and wives and children. So, really, everybody I write, they very much come from real life.

RZ: I've always thought the dialogue you write for your characters rings true and strikes me as honest.

Ken Ludwig: That's a real complement. That's sort of a deep complement that people not in our business wouldn't understand. That's really what I strive for, and it's so easy as a playwright, or any kind of writer, to fall back on mannerisms or things that you think are cute. When you read pulp novels or bad plays you see it all the time. Finding that sense of honesty in a real simple way is in many ways the trick. It's the skill of being a playwright.

RZ: Your love of theatricality and the theatre itself as source material for your plays is obvious; many of your plays have theatrical settings. They also have a sense of theatre history and of tradition.

Ken Ludwig: Yes, and part of the reason for that is that because I've always loved the theatre so much and wanted to be part of this since I was a kid. I think I've always put it on a pedestal and said, "this is the world I'd like to live in.” And it makes me happy and it gives me courage, and so I tried to use theatre as a metaphor for all of life. And it's been a way for me to write about things I care about.

RZ: What are you working on right now?

Ken Ludwig: Well, first of all, a couple of new plays are opening in this season. An organization that represents high school in America asked me to write a play for high schools in America and I wrote a play called Midsummer Jersey, which is an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream set on the Jersey shore. I've written a children's play for the first time, a new play called T'was the night before Christmas, and that's about how an elf and mouse and a little girl save Christmas when a "fallen elf” (like out of Milton) has turned into a "pirate-like” character. He tries to steal Christmas by stealing the naughty and nice list. It wouldn't be so bad except last year he stole Santa's sleigh and tried to sell it to Wal-Mart, so Santa's on to him. And then I have a play opening at the Cleveland Playhouse. They're just opening a new, big $40 million space; we're going to be the very first people to ever to go into these rehearsal spaces and so they're all excited. That play is called The Game's Afoot. It's a comedy thriller about man named William Gillette who was a great, great matinee idol who wrote the play Sherlock Holmes. He actually played Holmes for 30 years on Broadway on and off, and he would often take his cast in a boat up to his castle up on the Connecticut River for a weekend of fun and games and a very elegant weekend. So I thought wouldn't it be fun if a murder occurred during one of those weekends, and if he tried to solve it and in a sense becomes Sherlock Holmes.

RZ: That sounds like fun.

Ken Ludwig: It was fun to write. It's something like Deathtrap or Sleuth. There hasn't been one of those around for a long time. I thought it would be fun to try to write one.

RZ: I appreciate your talking with me, and I look forward to meeting you in person next summer in New York at our event.

Ken Ludwig: Yeah, me too!

Written for Samuel French's [Breaking Character]

Earlier in this series I discussed my view that in order to write a successful stage comedy in the classic Western tradition, it is advisable to create a strong premise for the basic plot. Without such a premise, I argued, a writer is going to have an uphill battle if she wants to create a comedy of any lasting significance. Arguably, there are a few very fine comedies written over the past fifty years that don’t hang their hats on a distinctive premise – ART by Yasmina Reza comes to mind – but it seems to me that they are few and far between.

In terms of classical comedy, even “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” is rarely enough on its own; but “boy meets girl and then girl meets the boy’s identical twin and thinks that the twin is the boy she already loves” is the kind distinctive premise that has formed the basis of one comedy after another in the Western tradition. See The Comedy of Errors, to say nothing of Twelfth Night, Jean Anouilh’s Ring Around the Moon and Lend Me a Tenor.

And while television series seem to be able to thrive on chatter without much else going on (viz. Friends and Seinfeld in all their glory), stage comedies don’t seem to work very well without pretty muscular stories to carry them forward. It’s not that television series don’t have plots in each episode. It’s more that the plots aren’t taken very seriously – they exist primarily as excuses for the wonderful chatter of the characters we grow to love over weeks and weeks, then years and years.

The plots in stage plays seem to need more muscle – perhaps because we’re with the characters for a much shorter period of time. Stage comedies thrive on big ideas, large characters and life-changing plot twists. Where would Joe Orton’s Loot be without a bank robbery next to a funeral parlor? To say nothing of the comedies of Michael Frayn, Woody Allen and Alan Bennett?

There are several other equally important ingredients to strong stage comedies, and one of the most important of these involves deception and mistaken identity. If you’re trying to write a comedy – or analyze one, or just sit back and enjoy one on a more casual level – consider what I would call the second ingredient in most classic stage comedies of the past 2,500 years:

Deception and mistaken identity.

Certainly there isn’t a single Shakespeare comedy that doesn’t abound in mistaken identity. But also consider the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Here’s a playwright who liked to take issue with traditional theatrical forms, calling them old-fashioned and outdated. He wanted to forge, along with Ibsen, a new theatre of the intellect that didn’t depend on the ““claptrap” of “artificial” playwrights like Scribe and Sardou who, in his opinion, spent too much time plotting for plot’s sake alone. “Bardolatry” for Shaw was a sin partly because Shakespeare’s plots were so unbelievable. But when Shaw first wanted to get noticed, and then when he hit his stride as a playwright, he found himself returning again and again to classic comic devices.

In his writings, Shaw said that he included such “claptrap” in his own comedies merely to satisfy audiences who had come to expect it. But Shaw liked to say things to try and shock his readers; it was his own form of ironic deception. In fact, he knew in his bones that stage comedies work best when there is some form of deception or mistaken identity woven tightly into the plot.

Thus, in The Devil's Disciple, which is set during the American Revolution, Dick Dudgeon, the hero of the play and the local firebrand, impersonates the local minister, Anthony Anderson, so that Anderson won’t be captured and hung by the British. In the course of his heroics, Anderson’s wife Judith falls in love with him for his self-sacrifice. In fact Judith wants him to drop his deception so he can save his own skin, but Dudgeon insists on going to his death to save Anderson’s reputation, Judith’s dignity, and his own integrity. (Shaw unashamedly borrowed this plot from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. However, unlike the Dickens novel, The Devil's Disciple ends with Dudgeon being saved.)

Deception and mistaken identity occur again and again in Shaw, in at least half of his major comedies, including Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Caesar and Cleopatra, and, of course, his most famous play, Pygmalion. In Pygmalion (and My Fair Lady, which is based on Pygmalion), Henry Higgins spends half the play turning Eliza, a flower girl, into a duchess, and he then passes her off as such at an Embassy ball. In the course of Higgins’s experiment, he also changes Eliza’s soul, and it is this unexpected twist that elevates the play from a simple comedy into something more multi-dimensional and profound.

Similarly, in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer virtually every action in the play is based on deception and mistaken identity. It starts when local booby Tony Lumpkin convinces his sister’s suitor, Marlow, that the house he’s visiting is an inn, not a private residence. (Marlow therefore treats his future father-in-law like a servant-innkeeper.) And it continues when the sister-heroine, Kate, convinces Marlow that she’s a servant in the house, then a poor relation. More importantly, as in Pygmalion, the mistakes are used to deepen the meaning the of the piece. When Marlow refuses to mislead Kate into a liaison because he would be taking advantage of a poor relation, we learn everything we need to know about Marlow’s heart and character.

Thus, while deception and mistaken identity can be relied on to raise laughter in the theatre, the best playwrights also use these devices to take their plays a step further: they use them to add texture to relationships between the characters, to enrich and deepen the characters themselves, and to enhance the meaning of the plays so that their themes toll a little more deeply and spread their light a little more widely.

Finally, film comedies, like comic plays, thrive on deception and mistaken identity. We see it in the “screwball comedies” of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, like It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey where heiresses pose as vagabonds and heirs as butlers. And we see it in the romcoms of today. Think of Jennifer Anniston in, say, Just Go With It, where she plays an office manager pretending to be a wife in order to help a friend. Or Something About Mary where almost every man pursuing Cameron Diaz is lying about who he really is – including Tucker who goes so far as to stump around on crutches and use an English accent.

As a playwright, I’ve always been drawn to deception and mistaken identity for story lines. In Twentieth Century for example, which I adapted for Broadway a few years ago from a comedy classic by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a gentle lunatic named Matthew J. Clark pretends to be a rich tycoon who can save the theatre empire of the protagonist, Oscar Jaffe. This deception, hilarious in itself, ultimately reminds us that money – though it drives Jaffe’s business – never rules his soul, which is deeply rooted in the glory of the theatre world.

And in Leading Ladies, which I adapted from the Duke and the King episodes of Huckleberry Finn, Jack and Leo, two down-on-their luck actors, pretend to be the long-lost British heirs of a rich old woman who seems about ready to die in her family home in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Ultimately the two men confess to their deception because they’ve fallen in love with the two women who can change their lives.

The moral of all this for playwrights writing today is to take the time to look back at the greatest practitioners of our profession and not be afraid to emulate them. Shakespeare took the story of The Comedy of Errors lock, stock and barrel from The Menaechmi of Plautus, which was written over 1,600 years before Shakespeare put pen to paper. And he took much of the plot of AS YOU LIKE IT from a novel called Rosalind by Thomas Lodge written about ten years before the play appeared.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and it’s how we, as writers, find our distinctive voices. In trying to imitate the writers we love, our own voices eventually emerge, and these voices are expressed not only in our choice of words, characters and theme, but also in the stories we choose to tell.

A Noise Within (ANW), the acclaimed classical repertory theatre company, concludes its 21st season with the West Coast premiere of GEORGE FARQUHAR’S THE BEAUX’ STRATAGEM, a hilarious period yet contemporary “buddy road trip” filled with eccentric characters adapted by THORNTON WILDER and KEN LUDWIG, opening Saturday, April 6 and closing Sunday, May 26, 2013 (previews begin Saturday, March 30). Set in the early 1700’s in the English countryside, two girl-crazy young adventures are on the road-trip of their lives when, out of the blue, they find themselves hopelessly in love. Co-Producing Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott directs the play, which is the remarkable creation of three playwrights working in three different centuries. Described as “sheer laugh-out-loud fun” (The Free Lance-Star), the play “glides confidently from silly to wry, from the pratfall to the riposte” (The Washington Post) and is “a delightful romp that seamlessly reaches across the centuries to combine the old with the new” (Theater Mania). The run includes a "Pay What You Can” date on Thursday, April 4.

Irish dramatist Farquhar wrote the original script of The Beaux’ Stratagem, with its colorful and bawdy cast of characters skewering the institution of marriage, in 1707. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Thornton Wilder decided to adapt the late-Restoration comedy for Broadway in 1939 shortly after his classic Our Town became a hit on Broadway. He never completed the project, and it languished until 2004 when Tappan Wilder, the playwright's nephew and literary executor, discovered the uncompleted handwritten adaptation among Wilder’s papers and sent a copy to Ken Ludwig, whose playwriting credits include Lend Me a Tenor and Crazy for You, suggesting he complete the adaptation. Ludwig jumped at the chance to “collaborate” with Wilder. With each succeeding playwright’s touch, The Beaux’ Stratagem was streamlined and characters were further developed – and some cut and a few added – making it ever livelier and more fun. States the Baltimore Sun, “Three centuries after Farquhar and almost seven decades after Wilder, this collaborative Stratagem is charming audiences with its comical characters, farcical shenanigans and uplifting moral.”

“I loved the exuberance of the characters, and you get caught up in the story, right away," notes Ludwig, of his decision to adapt the muscular comedy and maintain Farquhar's and Wilder's tone. "With The Beaux’ Stratagem, I had two plays to work with.” Among Ludwig's contributions are the additions of several soliloquies in which some of the characters address the audience directly “in the spirit of Wilder.”

Rodriguez-Elliott says, “After a chance meeting several years ago with Tappan Wilder, he introduced me to the Wilder/Ludwig version, and I was enchanted with the way they adapted George Farquar's wonderful Restoration comedy, breathing new life into it with a modern flair."

The Beaux’ Stratagem cast features Abby Craden (Mrs. Sullen), Deborah Strang (Lady Bountiful), Apollo Dukakis (Boniface), Freddy Douglas (Aimwell), Alison Elliott (Cherry), Alan Blumenfeld (Scrub), Robertson Dean (Sullen), Joel Swetow (Sir Charles Freeman), Luke Peckinpaugh (Hounslow), Time Winters (Gloss/Foigard), Blake Ellis (Archer) and Malia Wright (Dorinda).

A Noise Within, led by Producing Artistic Directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, is the only year-round classical repertory company in Southern California and one of only a handful in the entire country dedicated solely to producing classical dramatic literature in the repertory tradition of rotating productions with a resident company of professional artists. It has been lauded by critics as a “premiere classical theatre company,” and an "outstanding ensemble" whose "vibrantly theatrical" "brilliant productions" are "freshly imagined," "exceptional," "invigorating," "riveting," "brilliantly atmospheric," “inspired,” and “masterfully crafted.” Founded 21 years ago, ANW quickly established itself as one of the region’s key theatre companies, attracting fiercely loyal audiences and consistently high praise from the media for its productions and as a key force in arts education. The company has presented more than 140 plays from the classics of world literature, each season producing works from authors ranging from Shakespeare and Molière to Ibsen, O’Neill and Shaw to Miller and Williams. A Noise Within completed its milestone 2011-12 Season and 20th Anniversary in its permanent new home, a 33,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art venue in Pasadena, in May 2012.

TICKETS & INFO:
(626) 356-3100
www.ANoiseWithin.org

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Backstage.com: How Shakespeare Can Make Your Child a Better Actor




ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis

A delightfully engaging guide to helping children fall in love with the works of William Shakespeare.



William Shakespeare’s plays are among the great bedrocks of Western civilization and contain the finest writing of the past 450 years. From Jane Austen to The Godfather, many of the best novels, plays, poetry, and films in the English language produced since Shakespeare’s death in 1616 are heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s stories, characters, language, and themes. In a sense, his works are a kind of Bible for the modern world, bringing us together intellectually and spiritually. Hamlet, Juliet, Macbeth, Ophelia, and a vast array of other singular Shakespearean characters have become the archetypes of our consciousness. To know some Shakespeare provides a head start in life. In How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, acclaimed playwright Ken Ludwig provides the tools you need to instill an understanding, and a love, of Shakespeare’s works in your children, while enjoying every minute of your time together along the way.

Ken Ludwig developed his methods while teaching his own children, and his approach is friendly and easy to master. It begins with the memorization of short passages from Shakespeare's plays. It then continues with an exploration of Shakespeare’s life and time period, the implications of Shakespeare’s choice of words, and an exposure to cultural references that children will use for years to come. Ludwig delves into each play with an eye to revealing the invaluable lessons behind Shakespeare’s characters and stories. Colorfully incorporating the history of Shakespearean theater and society, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare guides readers on an informed and adventurous journey through the world in which Shakespeare wrote.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Twelfth Night, from Macbeth, to Romeo and Juliet, this book helps children enjoy and appreciate the wisdom of Shakespeare’s plays. And there’s fun to be had along the way. Shakespeare novices and experts, and readers of all ages, will each find something wonderfully irresistible in How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare.

One of the nicest features of the Broadway revival of Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor” back in 2010 was John Lee Beatty’s creamy rococo hotel suite where the operatic characters dashed about.

Nancy Johnston, at left, plays a dowager, Mark Price is the bellhop, Michael Kostroff is the opera company’s manager, and Jill Paice is the ingénue.
The Paper Mill Playhouse’s exuberant staging of “Lend Me a Tenor” in Millburn utilizes Mr. Beatty’s set, which provides five doors that always slam with a satisfying wham. Within those deluxe surroundings, the theater presents a fresh, expertly performed rendition of Mr. Ludwig’s well-known farce.

This 1986 play has long been a perennial among regional and community theaters, and with good reason. Employing some of the traditional elements from hotel-room farces of past centuries — mistaken identities, sexy ladies, naughty banter, looming scandal — the playwright crafted a frisky 1930s-style comedy that demands only stylish performances to be considerable fun.

The director, Don Stephenson, has assembled a smart cast to do exactly that at Paper Mill. Theatergoers who already know the show may even enjoy it more than the newcomers, since they can anticipate some of its antics.

Occupying that hotel suite one night in 1934 is Tito Merelli (John Treacy Egan), a celebrated Italian tenor who is making his long-awaited American debut in “Otello” with the Cleveland Grand Opera Company. Saunders (Michael Kostroff), the company’s pompous general manager, and Max (David Josefsberg), his milquetoast assistant and a would-be singer, quickly have their hands full with Tito, a lover of wine, women and song whose florid charms have the local ladies in a flutter.

A jealous blowup between Tito and Maria (Judy Blazer), his spitfire wife, combined with an unwise excess of Chianti and sedatives, plunges the overly emotional tenor into a coma that Saunders and Max believe is fatal. Soon Max is disguised in Tito’s brocade doublet and swarthy makeup as Otello and rushes off to perform the opera, at which point Tito wakes up. Matters turn increasingly frantic and funny later as look-alikes Tito and Max cope with several smitten females and other confusions.

Mr. Stephenson guides the comedy briskly through its paces while encouraging sterling performances that reflect the animated style displayed by silver-screen worthies. The bespectacled Mr. Josefsberg brings a wistful countenance and an energetic manner to his underdog role as Max. The portly Mr. Kostroff, whose Saunders is an amalgam of several 1930s character actors, complete with a pencil-style mustache and bulging eyeballs, looks thoroughly overbearing or staggered as the plot requires.

A tall, imposing figure as Tito, Mr. Egan portrays the tenor with a ringing voice and a good-natured air. Infusing her ferocious Maria with a pepperoni accent for frequently hissed threats like “I’m gonna keel ’im,” the invaluable Ms. Blazer sulks and stomps through the same role she played in the Paper Mill’s 1991 production and makes it all seem spontaneous.

The other women, beautifully dressed (and sometimes undressed) by Wade Laboissonniere in period fashions, brightly depict their characters. Jill Paice (the ingénue), Nancy Johnston (the dowager) and Donna English (the femme not-so-fatale) all pursue the opera star — or at least the fellow they believe to be Tito. Mark Price dashes in and out as a cheeky bellhop who can’t help singing, despite everyone’s wishes.

In such fine company, you can’t help laughing a lot at “Lend Me a Tenor.”

Somber audiences be warned: Don Stephenson's invigorating new production of Lend Me a Tenor aims to drive ticket-holders to tears--of laughter--and is currently hitting its mark at Paper Mill Playhouse. And, really, how could it not? If two hours of slamming doors, girls in closets, men in tights, prescription pills, and opera gags won't win your smile, nothing will.

Playwright Ken Ludwig's hit play, a nine-time Tony Award nominee during its Broadway debut in 1989 and three-time nominee for its revival in 2010, combines sexual puns, Italian accents, and gaudy characters to create a perfectly crafted farce. The show tells the story of Max (Broadway's The Wedding Singer veteran David Josefsberg), assistant to the General Manager of the Cleveland Grand Opera Company, and his dream of becoming a professional opera singer. When world-famous Italian tenor Tito Merelli (John Treacy Egan, most recently of Broadway's Sister Act) is scheduled to appear as the lead in Cleveland's Otello and is found dead, presumably, just hours before his performance, Max takes on the leading role of Merelli, as Otello. Hilariousness ensues in the form of all the misunderstandings you'd expect.

Michael Kostroff's (HBO's The Wire) extraordinary talent in taking on Saunders, the opera's manic general manager, anchors the entirety of this Tenor. If you look up "levels" in the dictionary, you'll likely see Kostroff's photo there—his broad physicality, so stoic on The Wire, fills the stage, and the actor milks every word of dialogue for laughs that would otherwise go unappreciated. Josefsberg does an admirable job of bringing depth not only to nerdy Max, but nerdy Max as Tito Merelli as well. Although the real Merelli's girth is exceptionally large, the slim Josefsberg so convincingly fills in the space between to two that it's not so big a stretch for audiences to believe the other characters buy him as the Italian tenor. That said, Josefsberg's overly bookish portrayal of Max occasionally ventures from loveable to borderline grating.

The true highlight of the evening comes when Egan's Merelli launches into a full-on duet with Max, giving audiences their first glimpse of the voice that has made Egan a Broadway favorite for years. His pitch-perfect transitions from confusion, to terror, to pain also land some of the night's biggest laughs, especially in his scenes with firey wife Maria, played by Judy Blazer. Everything is funny with accents and Broadway veteran Blazer is no exception, her vivid facial expressions and over-the-top Italian charm-cum-insanity leaving viewers somewhere between gasping for air and peeing their pants.

As a whole, the production finds its success in the skill of its onstage mimics, who make mistaken identity in this implausible opera setting seem not only plausible, but appealing. The aforementioned duet actually charges the air with passion and emotion—not something easily accomplished in a comedy full of drunken antics and sight gags involving wax fruit. John Lee Beatty's alluring set doesn't hurt either, creating the illusion of a flawless, grandiose hotel suite. The only obstacle comes, sadly, from the script's commitment to the single-set hotel suite, which limits innovation in the staging and design.

Lend Me a Tenor is, of course, a formulaic work. It is also a masterpiece, ingeniously alive on both the page and stage. Stephenson, and the cast and crew at Paper Mill, should take pride in having brilliantly revitalized and showcased its many virtues as the ideal vehicle for an ensemble of comedic actors who, with the right set up, know how to hit all the right notes.

When Domingo saw the show, he approached the playwright to say, "In my heart, I’m not Tito. I’m more like Max," Ludwig recalled in a recent interview.

Tito and Max constantly get mixed up throughout Ludwig’s often-revived farce, which opens at the Paper Mill Playhouse on Sunday.

The comedy gets rolling when Tito arrives at a Cleveland opera company unable to perform the title role in "Otello." Max, a lowly opera house gopher who harbors a secret dream of singing — and a gift to match — gets an impromptu voice lesson from Tito, his hero.

Soon, he has to use all he has learned when the impresario Saunders asks him to impersonate Tito onstage. The fans get swept up in the act, and so do Tito’s wife and other admirers, including Max’s girlfriend Maggie.

While Tito may have the star power, it’s Max who epitomizes the heart of the story, Ludwig said.

"It wasn’t until after I wrote it that people said, ‘That’s you’ and I did a double take," Ludwig said. "It was."

"I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and I idolized the theater. … If I had my life to live over again, without a doubt I’d want to be an opera star."

The play provides opera fans with selections of Verdi and Bizet to enjoy. But Ludwig attributes the show’s regular presence in theaters of all sizes to the "innate joyousness" of characters like Max.

"It’s really a story about him and what he feels is inside him that nobody can see," he said.

In the upcoming production, John Treacy Egan of Broadway’s "Sister Act" and "The Producers" plays Tito Merelli. Judith Blazer, seen as Eliza Doolittle in the Paper Mill’s "My Fair Lady," plays Maria, his wife. David Josefsberg, whose Broadway credits include "Les Misérables" and "The Wedding Singer," plays Max.

The cast also includes Jill Paice (seen on Broadway in "The 39 Steps" and "A Little Night Music") as Max’s girlfriend Maggie, Donna English (recently in "The Sound of Music") as the soprano Diana, Nancy Johnston ("Elf") as Julia, the chairman of the opera guild, and Michael Kostroff of HBO’s "The Wire" as the grouchy Saunders. Don Stephenson directs.

Ludwig, who is currently working on a new show steeped in the opera world, has often made the stage the subject of his plays. His works also include "Moon Over Buffalo," "Leading Ladies," "Shakespeare in Hollywood," the musical "Crazy for You," "The Beaux’ Strategem," The Game’s Afoot" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

"Lend Me a Tenor" was last revived on Broadway in 2010 in a production that starred Justin Bartha, Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shalhoub.

"I write plays with a view of humanity that says that if we work hard and we’re honest and we do things with integrity, we can make the world a little better," he said. "I try to push the ball in that direction.

"However infinitesimal that move is, that’s my contribution."

Very few writers alive today have been elevated to the ranks of “sure thing” by their abilities to keep an audience entertained, but Ken Ludwig — whose The Fox On The Fairway will be performed at the Toledo Rep January 18-26 — is the exception that forces the others to keep trying.

Theater is a writer’s medium. More than movies, which are arguably more about the director and the editor than the script (which can eventually fall through several sets of keyboards before filming even begins; the exceptions being those directors wise enough — yes, I'm talking to you Mr. Spielberg —to bring in the best writing the stage has to offer when they hire Broadway brilliance, like Tony “Lincoln” Kushner); and television, which has taken on an almost surreal dimension of “how can we outdo everyone else? How about dwarfs, zombies and meth-dealing high school chemistry teachers!” Well heck folks, how about all three in one show?

Theater remains the sole venue where a writer can prove his or her worth as an artist, social commentator, humorist, dramatist, linguist, philosopher, realist, absurdist, impressionist, docu-dramatist and all the many other words that come to mean . . .”writer”. In these days of “studio” art (what I prefer to call “ghost factories”), where writers as famous and popular as James Patterson don't write three quarters of the books that bear their names, the theatre is the one place where a writer, a single writer, can be lifted to the skies or hurled back to the earth in mere moments. This after what could have been years of toil to find just the right words to make dreams of success a reality.

Very few writers alive today have been elevated to the ranks of “sure thing” by their abilities to keep an audience entertained, but Ken Ludwig — whose The Fox On The Fairway will be performed at the Toledo Rep January 18-26 — is the exception that forces the others to keep trying.

In his first at-bat in 1989, Mr. Ludwig hit a grand slam with his play Lend Me A Tenor. And for the past 24 years, he has written some of the most broadly entertaining and interesting plays since Neil Simon was at his peak. There’s the book for the musical hit Crazy For You, Moon Over Buffalo, Leading Ladies (a monster hit for Toledo Rep a few years ago. And now you can’t swing a cat in any metropolitan area without hitting a theater that's performing LL); also, adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Three Musketeers, and Treasure Island. Not to mention 4 plays he produced in 2012 – two for childrens theater; the big people hit The Game’s Afoot, and the reading of his Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Baskerville.

But in 2010 Ludwig also had another hit along the lines of a homage to the great English farces of the 1930s and 1940s. Probably as close to the Marx Brothers style of comedy as anything else out there. The Fox On The Fairway is Ken Ludwig doing what Ken Ludwig does best — taking the carnival mirror to the country club elite and turning it upside down. Mr. Ludwig is the one playwright out there having fun poking the sacred cows of wealth, propriety and nine irons. . . and getting it right. Mistaken identities, slamming doors, over the top romance . . . yup, sounds a lot like both Leading Ladies and Lend Me A Tenor but set in the stuffy trappings of a private country club.

His characters are quirky and, in their quirkiness, usually hilarious; Ludwig’s situations, which have often been misconstrued as “mechanical”, evoke explosive laughter. Not just here in Toledo, but regional, college and high school theatres across the country can attest, Ken Ludwig is a comedy favorite. And if Director Carol Ann Erford brings to The Fox on The Fairway, what she brought to directing Leading Ladies, then it’s easy to imagine that Fox will be another bonanza for The Rep on these cold winter nights in January. A playwright of high caliber, such as Ken Ludwig, can still find a way to warm us up with a good old fashioned 1930's comedy set in 2013.