Music
The Globe Sessions
(Entertainment Weekly, July 30, 1999)
The Bard suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune in
a boxed set that tragically forgets the play's the thing.
By Ty Burr
…
The accompanying booklet offers little help, since there are no
production dates or any other information about the selecitons. The last
two CDs contain a fine, full performance of Romeo and Juliet with
Claire Bloom and Albert Finney as the lovers—but from when? Staged
where? The DeCaprio–Danes Romeo and Juliet reminds us that each
pop-culture generation reinvents Shakespeare to suit its time, so it
might have been nice to include an essay on how performances have varied
over the years—on why Barrymore’s Hamlet, for instance, now sounds
absurdly melodramatic while Robeson’s ahead-of-its-time Othello is a
revelation of banked power. Instead, we get strained attempts to make
the canon seem cool—“Romeo and Juliet would be excellent guests on any
daytime talk show”; Titus Andronicus is “the Texas Chainsaw
Massacre of its day”—and a smugly shallow précis of each play by
noted scholar Michael Macrone (Naughty Shakespeare, Cader Books,
1997).
…
