Play Julius Caesar

For modern Shakespeare, directors' adaptations may be kindest cuts of all

Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” begins with a couple of tribunes — Roman politicos — heckling the rabble. That opening thrusts the audience headlong into a debate it doesn’t know anything about.

So here’s how “Julius Caesar” will begin in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production that starts this week with the Scene 2 soothsayer warning that Caesar is in danger (“Beware the Ides”), and with a processional demonstrating that Caesar is a hit with the public. Only then will the tribunes utter the tragedy’s opening lines.

When the show ran for two months in 2008, did director David Muse receive many comments from audiences about his rearrangements?

“They have no idea,” Muse says. “They just think that’s the play.”

In fact, Shakespeare’s plays are seldom seen without directorial shaping that goes beyond staging, beyond what director Aaron Posner calls “where and when Vienna 1848 or whatever,” and into the realm of editing. The result — even in traditional productions, not just radical adaptations — is referred to as a director’s “cut.”

In a Bard-happy town like Washington, the subtle art of cutting Shakespeare is on near-constant display. The craft requires nerve, stage savvy and scholarship. And time.

“Dozens and dozens of hours,” says Muse, a former STC associate artistic director who now runs the Studio Theatre. The job can involve rearranging scenes, prioritizing story lines, combining multiple minor figures into a single character, changing line assignments and wrangling with the magnificent but sometimes elusive language.

“I find it to be a major act of interpretation and authorship,” Muse says. “And it often goes almost completely unnoticed, except by people who are completely familiar with the text.”

Because the plays are long and the language is old, time and narrative sense are two routine starting points. For Cam Magee, a dramaturge who has cut 24 of the 37 plays, a running time of 2 hours has been a typical goal at the Washington Shakespeare Company.

“You’re losing an hour to an hour and a half of material,” says Magee, whose cuts also have been seen at the Folger Theatre.

STC audiences have built up a greater endurance, so longtime artistic director Michael Kahn is comfortable with productions that sometimes run past three hours. But Kahn and Magee groan at the memory of Kenneth Branagh’s plodding four-hour movie “Hamlet.

Angelina Jolie Attached to Play Cleopatra | The Wrap Movies

Now here's a casting match made in movie heaven.

Oscar winner Angelina Jolie is attached to star in the "Cleopatra" movie that Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin has been developing since 2006, according to USA Today .

At a lunch this week in Manhattan to promote Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff's new book, "Cleopatra: A Life," Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch said Rudin envisions Jolie starring as the Queen of the Nile.

Rudin's office then confirmed that the project "is being developed for and with Jolie," who Schiff describes as having "the perfect look" to play the character.

Calls to Rubin's office by TheWrap were not immediately returned.

As for who would play Julius Caesar in the movie, Schiff was stumped, but she did say that Jolie's partner Brad Pitt would be a "no-brainer" to play Marc Antony.

Rudin acquired the rights to Schiff's tome back in 2006 after reading a ten-page proposal.

The closest the "Salt" star has come to playing this kind of part was her turn as Colin Farrell's mother (despite a one year age difference) in Oliver Stone's "Alexander."

Elizabeth Taylor most famously played the regal role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "Cleopatra," which was the highest grossing film in 1963 yet lost money for 20th Century Fox due to its then-enormous $44 million budget.

More recently, director Steven Soderbergh was developing a 3D musical version with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hugh Jackman, Ray Winstone and a score from Guided By Voices, but that production was put on the back burner when Sony pitched "Moneyball" to the Oscar-winning filmmaker, who swung and missed the chance to direct.

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