The Westport Country Playhouse has finally announced what’s filling the June slot on its 2014 season: Sing for Your Shakespeare, a new revue of songs from stage musicals and other performance pieces based on Shakespeare plays.
Westport artistic director Mark Lamos, who’ll be directing the show, helmed Sing for Your Shakespeare’s world premiere last June at New York’s 92nd Street Y. There, Lamos not only co-wrote the script (with Deborah Grace Winer) and directed, but hosted the concert-style performance.
Mark Lamos is one of the great Shakespeare directors of our time, yet the theater he runs has done only a handful of Shakespeare plays in its 83-year history. Most recent was Lamos’ very musical production of Twelfth Night in 2011. (That’s an image of actor/cabaret singer Darius DeHaas as Feste from that show, above.) Under Lamos’ predecessor, Tazewell Thompson, the WCP presented Being Alive, a 2007 revue devised by Billy Porter (now known as the Kinky Boots star) joining Sondheim songs with Shakespearean poetry.
The New York version of Sing for Your Shakespeare featured a five-person cast presenting, among other things, suites of songs from West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate, the “Hamlet” number from Red, Hot & Blue, stuff from The Boys from Syracuse, plus some jazz interpolations of the band by Duke Ellington, John Dankworth, Frank Loesser and others.
Gosh, can they make room for Billie Joe Armstrong’s “Regretfully Yours,” from These Paper Bullets!, currently playing at Yale Rep?