Joby Earle as Hamlet, 2016
August 11-13
In Shakespeare’s heyday at the Globe Theatre, plays went on under the open sky, capitalizing on the illumination of daylight or dusk while it lasted. For the past decade in Allentown’s Daddona Park, this fresh-air experience has been offered to picnicking audiences by Shakespeare in the Park’s free performances. This month marks the tenth and final production by the company, and they’re going out with a bang: the bloody plots of Richard III will have audience members clamoring for his much-deserved downfall.
Director Erik Pearson returns for his fourth Shakespeare in the Park (he directed Hamlet, Othello and The Comedy of Errors previously), and he explains why the venue is a dramatist’s dream come true: “I can’t think of anywhere else that can combine the epic scale of that stage [roughly twice the width of the Metropolitan Opera House] with the beauty of Daddona Park and its willow trees, rushing stream and broad lawns.” With a picnic dinner and a bottle of wine, any fan of the Bard would be in her glory.
In the most accessible of Shakespeare’s histories, the 30-year War of the Roses seems to be winding down with Henry the IV in power, but his brother Richard III is having none of it.
Deformed and bitter about being shunned for it, he fully embraces his role as the villain. “He’s a master manipulator,” Pearson says, “turning family member against family member and murdering his way to power. With this play, Shakespeare wrote us a delightful summer blockbuster complete with seduction, war, murder, betrayal and revenge—all within one dysfunctional royal family.”
Come celebrate as ten years of delightful stagecraft comes to an end, and see justice served to a power-hungry villain as only Shakespeare can.
Free | Live music: 7 p.m., Performance: 8 p.m. | Joseph S. Daddona Lake and Terrace | Union and St. Elmo Sts., Allentown | allentownshakespeare.org
