Event

The Tempest

THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare, directed by Sheldon Patinkin. Original score by Kingsley Day. Shakespeare's final play opens our season. Magic and music, romance and revelry. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." January 31-March 16.

The Tempest is thought by scholars to be the final play Shakespeare wrote alone, and it is the only one that seems to some to be set in the New World, being based in part on first-person accounts of a famous 1609 shipwreck at Bermuda. It is generally considered that the character Prospero is a stand-in of sorts for Shakespeare himself and that Prospero's renunciation of his life as a magician constitutes the playwright's farewell to the theatre.
It has more music in it than any other Shakespeare play, having been written not for the open-air Globe Theatre but for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, where Shakespeare's company produced in the winters toward the end of his career. City Lit's production will feature a new score composed for the play by Kingsley Day.