"The Winter's Tale" Links: |
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Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre Artistic Director Bruce Rogers (Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Merchant of Venice) leads the cast in this year’s The Winter’s Tale.
Third time FST director Graham Watts (Julius Caesar, Love’s Labor’s Lost) handpicked a combination of visiting and local performers to fill the more than 50 roles needed to bring The Winter’s Tale to life.
Over the past 12 summers Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre has hosted more than 100 different visiting artists. Many of those artists return each year. Fairbanks community members make up significant parts of the sprawling casts it takes to bring a Shakespeare production to the outdoor venues where FST performs. Professional and amateur actors work together and learn from each other as they face the elements while delivering the passion of Western Literature’s greatest playwright.
Below is a list of the people who are in the show, and the roles they will be performing. This is only a hint of the spectacle that awaits Fairbanks this summer.
The title of the show The Winter’s Tale means just that. The first half of the play is set in a Fairbanks-like winter. This environment will be brought to life complete with snow, ice skating, and dog mushing.
The second half moves forward in time to an Alaskan summer 16 years later. When young love brings together two friends torn apart by suspicion and betrayal.
This show has a surprise for the audience. If you are coming with a friend and know the ending - but they don’t – don’t tell! It’s the only ending of its kind in Shakespeare. FST is proud to present William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale this June at the Alaska Dog Musher’s Field.
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THE WINTER'S TALE cast (Fairbanks) |
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As I sit writing this and thinking of the beautiful Alaskan Summer, snow is falling and England’s green fields are covered in a blanket of white. An appropriate backdrop for me to share some thoughts with you about “The Winter’s Tale”. In the past for FST I have directed the early comedy “Love’s Labor’s Lost”, last year the tragedy “Julius Caesar” written when Shakespeare was in his middle age, and this year it will be the tragic-comedy “Winter’s Tale” written at the end of Shakespeare’s life and almost the last thing he ever wrote.
As you can imagine, after a long career in the theatre and 35 other plays under his belt, Shakespeare was at the top of his form when he wrote the play. The first half, set in winter, is as bleak and unforgiving a study of morbid jealousy as Shakespeare ever wrote. Forget “Othello”. Leontes’ jealousy sweeps all before it in shocking and brutal scenes that take your breath away. Leontes (played by Bruce Rogers) believes his wife Hermione is having an affair with his childhood friend Polixenes (Tom Robenolt). The consequences of that belief spell death and disaster and culminate in an unpleasant encounter with a bear!
Out of the despair comes hope and the story moves forward sixteen years to a beautiful summer and the prospect of reconciliation. The second half is a riotous comedy with some of the best comic scenes and characters that have EVER been written. Indeed much of what Shakespeare writes formed the basis of the comedy we recognise today. Delight at the antics of the rogue Autolycus (played by Jake Waid) as he seeks to dupe some slow witted country folk.
I won’t spoil the ending for you but it’s one of the most surprising, uplifting and stunningly visual moments in theatre history. It is not so much an ending as a benediction leaving everyone who witnesses it renewed, cleansed, and filled with hope for a brighter future.
We are performing earlier in Fairbanks this year and hope to take advantage of the sunny weather before going out on tour to share the enormous talent we find here in Fairbanks with the rest of the State. So tell your friends, grab a picnic, and join us under the midnight sun to see what the poet Coleridge called “the most beautiful play that Shakespeare ever wrote”.
And remember. It’s not “A Winter’s Tale”. It’s “THE Winter’s Tale”! There’s been nothing to surpass it before or since.
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