When you think of the theater capitals of the world, you think of London, with its famed West End, and New York, with its Great White Way and dozens of other highly regarded companies.
And at about this time next year, Miami will be one step closer to joining them.
GableStage announced yesterday that it's collaborating with two of those cities' most storied and respected theater companies -- London's Royal Shakespeare Company and New York's Public Theatre -- to produce Tarell Alvin McCraney's version of Antony and Cleopatra.
See also:
- Tarell Alvin McCraney: 100 Creatives
- McCraney's The Brothers Size Nails It at GableStage
The new staging, set in Haiti, will premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford-Upon-Avon in November 2013, with a Miami premiere to follow at the Gusman Center for the Performing arts in January 2014.
McCraney, born and raised in Miami, is a superstar playwright, and not just locally. He's studied and worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Yale School of Drama and Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble in Chicago, and his play The Brothers Size was widely regarded as the best show to hit Miami last year.
Tasked with staging a radical version of the Shakespeare classic, McCraney set the story in 1700s Haiti, on the eve of the country's revolution against the French. "Taking this equal parts tragedy, equal parts history, and setting it in the budding racial politics of the New World, a history ripe with pirating and battles over loyalty, we heighten the forbidden and passionate love affair between the conqueror, Antony, and colonized, Cleopatra," said McCraney in a statement.
The year 2014 is a long way off, but fans of both McCraney and Shakespeare won't have to wait that long to see what happens when the two meet. GableStage will stage McCraney's Hamlet in January 2013.
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