And I absolutely do not trust Kenneth Branagh with it; he wouldn't know a delicate touch if it lightly brushed by him. He's very good at many things and airiness is not one of them.
I saw his version when it came out and my recollection is that it was a sort of ephemerally charming 1930's jukebox musical with a Shakespearean frame that I would almost certainly have enjoyed more had it actually been made in 1938. Regret inform it is the only version I have ever seen. I keep meaning to listen to this version because the cast is stupid good, but have not yet done so and in any case it does not solve your problem of wanting to see it well staged. The ASP seems to have done it exactly once early in their existence. In the meantime they just finished their third Macbeth.
(Dang: in 2023 they did an enthusiastically queer As You Like It with a non-binary actor playing Rosalind. At Tufts. I feel like I didn't even know that was happening. I think I was already ill.)
Richard II is the other Shakespeare with which table-reading made me fall in love, and I hope and trust someone has already written the thesis on what it says about the divine right of kings which I babbled at everyone about after we read it. But I haven't the strength to go through JSTOR. Sigh.
The good news is that I have seen its angle on the divine right of kings touched on even in reviews, meaning the body of scholarship that established it must exist. I remember liking the 1978 Jacobi version, although oddly what I remember most is the fragile music of his voice, very little of anything the production did visually. It is also the only version I have seen beyond the scenes included in the ASP's The Coveted Crown in 2010.
Anyway, if you ever run into a good Love's Labours Lost, please do let me know ASAP.
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I saw his version when it came out and my recollection is that it was a sort of ephemerally charming 1930's jukebox musical with a Shakespearean frame that I would almost certainly have enjoyed more had it actually been made in 1938. Regret inform it is the only version I have ever seen. I keep meaning to listen to this version because the cast is stupid good, but have not yet done so and in any case it does not solve your problem of wanting to see it well staged. The ASP seems to have done it exactly once early in their existence. In the meantime they just finished their third Macbeth.
(Dang: in 2023 they did an enthusiastically queer As You Like It with a non-binary actor playing Rosalind. At Tufts. I feel like I didn't even know that was happening. I think I was already ill.)
Richard II is the other Shakespeare with which table-reading made me fall in love, and I hope and trust someone has already written the thesis on what it says about the divine right of kings which I babbled at everyone about after we read it. But I haven't the strength to go through JSTOR. Sigh.
The good news is that I have seen its angle on the divine right of kings touched on even in reviews, meaning the body of scholarship that established it must exist. I remember liking the 1978 Jacobi version, although oddly what I remember most is the fragile music of his voice, very little of anything the production did visually. It is also the only version I have seen beyond the scenes included in the ASP's The Coveted Crown in 2010.
Anyway, if you ever run into a good Love's Labours Lost, please do let me know ASAP.
Love, I will.