The Coming Summer Cabaret of Shakespeare Arises with Roses

The Yale Summer Cabaret is a distinct entity from the school-year Yale Cabaret. In the fall and spring semesters the shows change weekly, and so do the directors and casts. There are some 20 such shows in that manner, each given six performances. Only the artistic director and managing director are constant for the whole season. In the summer, there are longer runs of fewer shows, usually with much more of an ensemble feel.

Fun couple Bruce Tulgan and Debbie Applegate (he the founder of RainmakerThinking, she the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Henry Ward Beecher) are diehard board members of the Yale Summer Cabaret, and held a bash at their house Sunday, April 12, to officially announce the SumCab’s 2011 season. The slate had already been posted on a few websites and talked about in the halls of the Yale School of Drama, but details emerged.

Under the slogan “Love, Blood and Fools,” the Summer Cabaret has been renamed The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, with three productions (or seven, depending on how you count—read, on Macduff!) running in repertory.

That’s several big changes in how the SumCab usually does things—there’ve been overall tones (Tea Alagic’s pomo Germanic summer of 2005 springs to mind), but nothing as consistent as a single playwright for the whole season. There’ve been plenty of dedicated ensembles which, like traditional summer-stock companies, handle all the roles in all the shows, but the Cabaret has not (at least in the 20+ seasons I’ve been covering it) gone the repertory route of overlapping the runs of the separate shows and alternating performances of them throughout the season.

The nitty gritty: The season requires three directors and ten actors. Devin Brain, who co-ran the school-term Cabaret in 2009-10 (and whose directing thesis project was Anouilh’s Eurydice), is artistic director, and Tara Kayton (who was Managing Director of the just-ended Yale Cabaret 2010-11 season) serves as producer. Each of the ten actors will appear in at least two of the three shows. The Tempest, to be directed by Jack Tamburri, will have a cast of six, but only a couple of very minor roles have been cut, and Tamburri told me that the design will not be sparse. I don’t really know anything about As You Like It yet. Rose Mark’d Queen is an original adaptation of Henry V, Henry VI (all three parts) and Richard III, focusing on the recurring character of Queen Margaret. Rose Mark’d Queen is to be directed by Brain himself; the adaptation is largely done, but he intends to refine it in rehearsal with constant input from the cast. In that same interactive spirit, all the shows are augmented by an “Immersion Series” of workshops to help the audience get a grasp, held before every performance and covering such issues as stage design, the intricacies of Shakespearean text and speech, and the history behind the playwright’s history plays.

Other theaters have attempted various combinations of Shakespeare’s history plays relating to the War of the Roses. One of the many distinctions of this project is how it hopes to find a throughline through the five Roses plays and also, by running that Condensed Cream of Henry alongside a romance and a  comedy but the same hallowed Stratfordian, gives a full-blown dip into the well-rounded Shakespeare world.