11/26/2015
Shakespeare 400 arts festival will turn Chicago into the world's stage - Chicago Tribune
Arts & Entertainment / Theater Loop / Theater News & Opinion
Shakespeare 400 arts festival will turn
Chicago into the world's stage
By Chris Jones • Contact Reporter
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Chicago to host huge Shakespeare 400 festival next year
NOVEMBER 12, 2015, 11:30 AM
I
n celebration of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Chicago will host
a huge interdisciplinary arts festival in 2016, dubbed "Shakespeare 400." Led by the Chicago
Shakespeare Theater, the extravaganza will encompass more than 60 local and about a dozen
international cultural organizations and entrepreneurs, ranging from the Royal Shakespeare
Company of Stratford-upon-Avon to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Shanghai Peking Opera to the
Joffrey Ballet, and from the Pushkin Theatre of Moscow to celebrity chefs and restaurateurs like
Rick Bayless and Alpana Singh.
"This will allow us to tap our strength as a city," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in an interview with
the Tribune on Wednesday, "utilizing all of our broad-based cultural institutions working across
fields, which is how Shakespeare worked himself."
To be officially announced Friday at a news conference on Navy Pier, the yearlong festival will
feature a fleet of visiting international companies on a scale and scope not seen here in years. More
than 850 ticketed performances will be scheduled for about 100 productions, and some 500,000
audience members are expected to attend.
Will not some say Chicago is an unlikely host city for one of the world's biggest celebrations of the
quadricentennial of the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon?
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"I do not accept the premise of the question, although I know what you are driving at," Emanuel
said. "We have our own version of Elizabethan English here. And we can be difficult to understand.
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Shakespeare 400 arts festival will turn Chicago into the world's stage - Chicago Tribune
But we are a big city of big shoulders, a city of the spoken word, a city of the humanities and social
thought. I think Chicago is the perfect place to celebrate Shakespeare's gift to the world, using all of
our collective cultural strength."
Criss Henderson, executive director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, said planning for the festival
had been in the works for at least two years.
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"We have been participants in other global celebrations of Shakespeare," Henderson said. "And we
thought Chicago should be the home to the definitive celebration of our eponymous playwright."
To a large extent, Henderson has shrewdly leveraged and branded the producing power of other
organizations such as the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (although, tellingly in
a competitive landscape, no other theater companies), which is a far more cost-effective way to
produce a festival on this scale than for one host organization to present everything, as was the
case with the now-defunct International Theatre Festival of Chicago, which eventually ran out of
money.
Shakespeare — whose influence is pan-cultural — is the ideal theme for such an enterprise. Thus,
Riccardo Muti conducting "Falstaff" is part of Shakespeare 400, as is the Lyric's previously
announced staging of Charles Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet" and the Harris Theater for Music and
Dance's presentation of the Hamburg Ballet's "Othello." The festival is also designed to bring
international attention to CST artistic director Barbara Gaines' upcoming two-part adaptation of
Shakespeare's six-play history cycle, which she is calling "Tug of War."
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Nonetheless, Chicago Shakespeare, which is raising its profile in advance of an expected
announcement of its own Navy Pier expansion into the space formerly occupied by the Skyline
Stage, has upped the ante on its own presenting of international work. Notable shows on their way
to town include the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre's production of "The Merchant of Venice" starring
Jonathan Pryce, the RSC's "Twelfth Night," Declan Donnellan's "Measure for Measure" (a radical
co-production of Cheek by Jowl and the Pushkin Theatre) and the Shanghai Peking Opera's "The
Revenge of Prince Zi Dan," which, like many things in the arts, is a riff on "Hamlet."
An expanded fundraising effort is still underway, although the MacArthur Foundation is to
announce Friday a special $250,000 seed grant for Shakespeare 400. Several city entities,
including the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Public Schools, are
producing partners in the project, although it appears no dedicated city money has been allocated
beyond the usual budgets for 2016 performances and exhibits, many of which will have the theme
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Shakespeare 400 arts festival will turn Chicago into the world's stage - Chicago Tribune
of the life, times and work of the famously mysterious and biographically self-effacing Stratford
man.
There are no plans for maverick events questioning the authorship of the plays — just as well when
the whole rationale is the anniversary of the established author's death in 1616.
There is, however, to be a scholarly dimension to the festival, led by the Newberry Library, which
plans an exhibit from its own extensive Shakespearean collection, in concert with materials
borrowed from the British Museum and the Folger Shakespeare Library. One of the more
imaginative ideas is to involve Chicago's plethora of theatrically minded chefs and restaurateurs —
several of whom will cook a culinary "complete works" at Chicago restaurants during 2016.
Given the nature of the festival, it is impossible to put an accurate price tag on the whole thing —
and the attempt is probably of little use, given the numerous separate budgets being tapped. Most
likely, the effort will be judged on its efficacy in drawing tourists to the city, its ability to raise
Chicago's cultural profile, which still lags internationally, and its overall artistic merit.
Still, one can imagine some cynical eyebrows being raised at City Hall at the notion of Chicago,
where mangled syntax is a point of honor, giving itself over to the master of the iambic pentameter.
So what does the Mayor of Chicago-Upon-the-River plan to say in rebuttal?
"I will say they're talking much ado about nothing," the mayor said.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
[email protected]
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune
This article is related to: Entertainment, Rahm Emanuel, Chris Jones, Barbara Gaines, Chicago Public
Library, Riccardo Muti, William Shakespeare
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