We continue Shakespeare's Birthday Month of April with at the Queen’s own request, we’ll show Falstaff in love in The Merry Wives of Windsor! 

FREE EVENT RESERVATIONS ARE RECOMMENDED Many works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries require moments of stage magic – the appearance of ghosts, gods, and devils, statues coming to life, tempests, and battles.   While a practical mind may look for means to make these larger-than-life moments visually believable, Shakespeare took a markedly different approach that celebrated wonder but relied on unconventional means.  Shakespeare had an appetite for such moments, inserting fantastical moments in plays where they were unnecessary to the story.   In this talk we’ll discuss Shakespeare’s construction of these moments in plays like Hamlet, Henry V, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale. We will also note some influences on Shakespeare from the royal court where visual spectacle was utilized for political purposes.  

Surprisingly, Shakespeare never wrote the words, “All is fair in love and war,” but he certainly wrote a play that dealt entirely with the subject. “All’s Well That Ends Well” is what scholars call one of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, neither comedy nor tragedy, but a bit of both. Filled with unrequited love, philandering lovers, deception and disguise, it’s a story that confuses and elates the audience, and here at LBSC, we think you’ll love the way we attack it.

We continue with our dramatic reading series, Books on Stage. This year, we’ll be featuring Orson Welles’  Mercury Theatre radio script of Treasure Island, performed and webcast live, with sound effects performed by the cast.

As we’ve said, this year’s LBSC productions of Shakespeare’s rarest plays pays tribute sometimes to the man and not the machine. “Troilus and Cressida” is probably the most modern of his tragedies and prime material for today’s audience. Author and literary scholar Joyce Carol Oates remarked that it “strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century. ... This is tragedy of a special sort—the ‘tragedy’ the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy.” Join us, and open your mind to Shakespeare’s modern ideas.

The Horla “The Horla” was adapted from a Guy de Maupassant short story for Mystery in the Air, a 1947 radio series of spine-tingling tales showcasing actor Peter Lorre in some of his most intense performances. The Hitch-Hiker Few dramas make better use of radio’s penetrating powers of physiological persuasion than “The Hitch-Hiker,” by Louise Fletcher, one of old-time radio’s finest writers.

Mary Shelly’s iconic novel of horror and tragedy was a staple of early radio and film, most notably the 1931 Hollywood classic starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. LBSC revisits Frankenstein’s earliest radio adaptation, originally broadcast in 1935 on The Witch’s Tale, the much loved “grandmother” of old-time radio horror series. The story opens with the fabrication of the creature, continues as he seeks companionship, and culminates in a showdown between Frankenstein and his angry and forlorn monster. Like Shelly’s original, our narrative reveals an articulate being who accuses his creator of cruelty and neglect and, ultimately, exacts a terrible revenge.

LBSCs anniversary presentation of Orson Welles classic radio show, with live sound effects and music performed by the cast. The original 1938 broadcast covered the Martians invading the earth and created a nation-wide panic as a result.