The Hamlet Gamble.

Theatre  The last Hamlet I reviewed was from Shakespeare's Globe in April 2020, which I was fortunate enough to see via YouTube during lockdown.  Their latest production, from the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse was due to be streamed this month, but they cancelled sighting the cost.  Now the professional reviews are out, I should be pleased.  It sounds horrendous:
"I can just about understand why Holmes introduces a speech from Romeo and Juliet, but not why he replaces the gravediggers’ dialogue with a rambling contemporary improv routine and a singalong of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler, all performed by the show’s composer/musician Ed Gaughan. This is the most misguided interpretation of the scene since I saw it done in the mid-90s as a rap that ended with the words “now I’m gonna neck Ophelia”."
Here's the key problem with this - it's for people who already know the play. I'm still curious to see it, because any variation from norm is always interesting especially if there's a particular intellectual underpinning. Lord knows, after seeing the play forty-one times in different versions, it's the variations on the main theme which keep it interesting.  It sounds brilliantly awful.

But I shiver to think about the people for whom this could be their first introduction to the play and Shakespeare in general.  Will any of this make any sense?  Isn't adding in lines from Romeo and Juliet simply confusing?  Not to mention my usual annoyance that you wouldn't do this sort of thing to other artforms, so why must Shakespeare's writing continually endure this desecration?  [via]

Annotations:
An Editor's Burial: Journals and Journalism from The New Yorker and Other Magazines.

Books  An Editor's Burial: Journals and Journalism from The New Yorker and Other Magazines is a companion volume to director Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch which presents the voices, stories and people who influenced the fictionalised journalists and their tales as they appear in the film.  Each chapter has the density and intensity of reading a whole book, which is why its taken me nearly a week to reach the halfway point.

But throughout I wondered, did I need to buy this?  Given that they're mostly articles from The New Yorker, could I not simply have looked at the website instead?  Comparing the contents page to the available texts and the answer is both yes and no.  While there are plenty of New Yorker articles and many are free to read, many of the chapters about working at the magazine are excerpted from books and other articles are behind a paywall.

My finds are below for your edification.  If you have the money, I'd certainly recommend the book, especially if you're a fan of the film.  The chapter on Paris alone is worth the money, especially consider the current price for the full volume.  If the title's in bold, it's a link to the complete article free to read on The New Yorker website.  If it's in italics, it's a link to the complete article behind the paywall on The New Yorker website.  If it's underlined, it's a link to the source book on Amazon.


The Pilot Light
A conversation between Wes Anderson and Susan Morrison.

James Thurber

Brendan Gill

Luc Sante

Joseph Mitchell

Lillian Ross

Ved Mehta

S. M. Behrman

Calvin Tomkins

Mavis Gallant

Janet Flanner

James Baldwin

A.J. Liebling