The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC: TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE
We can't help but be a little too excited about this. As you've probably heard, London's world-renowned Royal Shakespeare Company is coming to New York City this summer, performing five plays–As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Julius Caesar (NOT Antony and Cleopatra, as originally scheduled), and The Winter's Tale–during an historic six-week residency at the Park Avenue Armory. The stage will be a wonderfully intimate, three-sided, three-tiered affair, a full-scale replica of the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, built there, shipped here, and reassembled in the Armory's massive, uncolumned Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The Royal Shakespeare Company's 44 actors, 23 musicians, and 30 "other" artists are, quite simply, among the best in the world at putting on the Bard. And though tickets aren't cheap–think Broadway prices, then add 50%–there are seats to all of the plays still available.
There is so much to love about having the Royal Shakespeare Company in NYC. The plays themselves, of course, represent a terrific mix of perennial crowd-pleasers (we're bringing out teenage daughters to Romeo and Juliet, both because they've recently read it in school AND, mostly, because it's just a flat out awesome play), and works more rarely performed. The Park Avenue Armory theater looks like it'll be amazing, all vertical and cozy and Elizabethian, as if someone were going to hurl rotten fruit, or shout out bawdy puns, or run on stage and give Rosalind a kiss. And the cast will all be performing multiple parts, in multiple plays, so you can see, for example, veteran Greg Hicks portraying a pair of crazy Kings, both the eponymous Lear, as well as Leontes in The Winter's Tale; and Forbes Masson as the jaded Jacques in As You Like It, then the sagacious Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet.
Yes, there is no shortage of summer Shakespeare in New York City these days, from the great celebrity-spectacles of the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park to, our favorite of the many, less-lined-up-for freebies, the Lower East Side's slightly uncomfortable but always entertaining Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, courtesy of the Drilling Company. But having the Royal Shakespeare Company here for a six-week run offers an extraordinary opportunity, which we fully intend upon seizing. See you in the balcony!
Royal Shakespeare Company at the Armory Details
The Royal Shakespeare Company will be performing in the Park Avenue Armory (between 66th and 67th Streets) from July 6 through August 14. For a full schedule of all five plays–including two "Marathon Weeekends" in August–plus ticket-buying information and TRAILERS (!), please see Lincoln Center Festival's Royal Shakespeare Company webpage.
Posted in NYC Events | Tagged Park avenue armory NYC • Royal shakespeare company NYC • The royal shakespeare company
