http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/popsmart/2008/06/30/shakespeare-tavern-to-stage-15-plays-next-season/ If you’re anywhere near Atlanta, you’re going to have oodles of Shakespeare to choose from over the next year. The New American Shakespeare Tavern (which has no second stage) will certainly have its hands full with productions including Much Ado, Twelfth Night, King John, Anthony and Cleopatra, the Henry VI Trilogy, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Tempest … as well as a bunch of other plays by lesser playwrights (including a certain Doctor Faustus) thrown in the mix :).
These people are wonderful–I’ve been seeing plays at the Tavern since 1993. Just saw Much Ado there on Sunday night, in fact. Their real genius is for the comedies–Love’s Labour’s Lost last year had the audience howling.
Their use of a very consistent house style (no set, Elizabethan costume, limited lighting and special effects, lots of rapiers) and a small, repertory company gives you the feeling, over time, of what it must have been like going to the Globe or the Brackfriars, seeing the same actors and props and stuff come out week after week–a sense of the commonalities between the plays.
The Tavern has always got something playing–it’s worth seeing if you can extend that layover in Atlanta for a few hours.