Productions
After tryouts at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in the summer of 1971 and twenty previews, the Broadway production, directed by Mel Shapiro and choreographed by Jean Erdman, opened on December 1, 1971 at the St. James Theatre, where it ran for 614 performances and won two Tony Awards including Best Musical over such shows as Grease and Follies. The cast included Raul Julia, Clifton Davis, Jonelle Allen and Diana Davila in the leads; Stockard Channing and Jeff Goldblum were in the chorus.
A West End production was mounted at the Phoenix Theatre beginning on April 26, 1973 and ran for 237 performances. Shapiro directed and Erdman choreographed. The cast included Veronica Clifford, Derek Griffiths, Benny Lee, Michael Staniforth and Samuel E. Wright.
The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival revived the piece in 1996, directed by Robert Duke and starring Philip Hernandez and Dana M. Reeve.
The musical was revived by the Public Theater in their Shakespeare in the Park series for a limited run in 2005 at the Delacorte Theater. Kathleen Marshall directed and choreographed, and the cast featured Norm Lewis (Valentine), Oscar Isaac (Proteus), Rosario Dawson (Julia), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Silvia), Paolo Montalban (Eglamour), Mel Johnson Jr. (Duke of Milan) and John Cariani (Speed). Critic Ben Brantley compared the "festive production" to "a fruity sangría", praising the cast but concluding that the work has not held up well. He wrote that the play's "wayward" characters were "not without parallels among the lotus-eating youth of the post-Woodstock years – a comparison that Messrs. Shapiro, Guare and MacDermot made canny use of. They also scaled down Shakespeare's passages of poetic pain for an approach that emphasized an easygoing, multicultural exuberance over wistful poetry and nonsense over sensibility.... MacDermot's songs... lack the variety of his score for Hair.... And the lyricism Mr. Guare is known for as a playwright is rarely in evidence in his clunky work here as a lyricist.
Read more about this topic: Two Gentlemen Of Verona (musical)
Famous quotes containing the word productions:
“It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Most new things are not good, and die an early death; but those which push themselves forward and by slow degrees force themselves on the attention of mankind are the unconscious productions of human wisdom, and must have honest consideration, and must not be made the subject of unreasoning prejudice.”
—Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902)