San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
The Old Globe’s Barry Edelstein wraps up his ‘Sonnets!’ series
Performers on Tuesday’s show include Blair Underwood, Kate Burton, Bill Irwin and Jennifer Paredes
Seven months and nine episodes later, Old Globe Artistic Director Barry Edelstein will wrap up his online series “Thinking Shakespeare Live: Sonnets!” on Tuesday with an all-star tribute to the Bard’s famous 14-line poems.
At 6:30 p.m., the 30minute finale will be broadcast on the Old Globe’s website and social media channels, featuring sonnet readings by actors who have all appeared onstage or directed at the Globe in past years.
They include Blair Underwood (“Othello”), Bill Irwin (“In-zoom”), Kate Burton (“The Tempest”), Ruben Santiago-hudson (director of “August Wilson’s Jitney”), Jennifer Paredes (“American Mariachi”), Michael Genet (“Hamlet”), Monique Gaffney (“Much Ado About Nothing”), Herbert Siguenza (“The Rainmaker”) and many more.
After the Globe’s pandemic-related shutdown in the spring, Edelstein launched the 10-episode sonnets series on March 31. It is part of the company’s catalog of free online offerings that have collectively attracted more than 425,000 views since the pandemic began.
Edelstein said he’s been gratified by the broad reach of the sonnets shows.
“I’ve received emails from New Zealand, Jerusalem and all over the U.S. A guy in Louisiana yesterday emailed me to ask for book recommendations and a University in Ohio asked me to do a virtual session,” he said.
The sonnets program is an outgrowth of Edelstein’s long-running “Thinking Shakespeare Live” educational lecture program, which was inspired by his book for actors, directors and Shakespeare fans titled “Thinking Shakespeare.”
In the lectures, Edelstein dissects Shakespeare’s Elizabethan text to help people understand the author, the times he lived in, the plays or sonnets, the characters’ motivations and situations, and the meaning and context of their words.
For the pandemic, Edelstein said he decided to focus on the sonnets — a collection of 154 14-line poems that Shakespeare published in 1609 — because they’re short and can be easily tackled in the brief episodes, which range in length from 30 to 45 minutes. Over nine episodes, he worked his way through 30 of the sonnets and decided that was a good place to stop because he’d accomplished what he set out to
do.
“A good actor needs to learn when it’s time to exit. I’ve said what I had to say, given people a little break from the relentless gloom, and given them a little dose of beautiful language,” he said.
For the finale, Edelstein reached out to 14 theatrical actors around the country, and all of them agreed to participate in the filmed presentation. They take turns reading the 30 sonnets covered in the series. Other performers featured in Tuesday’s film are Opal Alladin (“Hamlet”), Michelle Beck (“The Wanderers”), Angel Desai (“The Winter’s Tale”), Lizan Mitchell (“The Tempest”), Aaron Clifton Moten (“Romeo and Juliet”) and Keith Randolph Smith (“August Wilson’s Jitney”).
“The Globe’s talent pool, when it comes to Shakespeare, is so incredibly deep,” Edelstein said. “Among them are hundreds and hundreds of Shakespeare credits from all over the world.”
Although he has wrapped up the sonnets program, Edelstein said he plans to launch another online “Thinking Shakespeare” series early next year about the First Folio, the collection of Shakespeare’s 36 plays, which was published by his friends in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. Edelstein said the series will explain how the texts got from Shakespeare’s quill pen to the way we know them today.
Edelstein said the past seven months have included some dark days for the Globe, but he’s optimistic that when the pandemic ends, theaters will reopen to large and appreciative crowds, just as they did after every plague-related closure during Shakespeare’s life.
“I believe when we turn the lights back on, there will be a remarkable outpouring and people will come back out again,” he said. “Shakespeare shows me that that’s the truth.”