The well-acted, somewhat bloated production is about jealousy, ambition, and religion. 

Graham Hamilton as Hamlet. What a difference a little emphasis makes. Suddenly an innocent phrase like “country matters” sounds suspiciously like the c-word. A flick of the hand toward the stomach renders an afflicted Ophelia pregnant. It’s with light touches, not a heavy hand, that director Joseph Haj puts his mark on a streamlined production of Hamlet now being staged at the Folger. The production has its accents – a spare, white, clean-lined set,…

Twyford and Sullivan in Orestes: A Tragic Romp. When talking Greek tragedy, the first description to come to mind usually isn’t “zany.” But Folger Theater’s production of Orestes: A Tragic Romp manages to blend unexpected humor and melodrama into a bizarrely innovative package. Anne Washburn’s adaptation of the Euripides tale doesn’t worry too much about acting as a literal translation. She’s too busy binding the story’s trajectories, from the fallout from Orestes’ murder of…

Never is the contrast between comedy and tragedy so pronounced in Shakespeare as with The Winter’s Tale. Once the dancing and colorful costumes come out during Act 2, we’re in for a whole new play than the brooding, horrifying first half would lead us to believe. After all, we’ve just seen a king develop a seemingly out-of-nowhere obsession that his wife is cheating on him, and then take drastic measures to punish her for…

Folger Theater’s production of Henry IV Part I, with its grand design and pedigreed actors, lends itself nicely to marketing such as “Rick Foucheux IS Henry IV” and “FEATURING Delaney Williams as Falstaff.” And while those familiar faces are undeniably excellent, the marquee headline really belongs to a less recognizable actor whose role isn’t quite so flashy: David Graham Jones as Hotspur. Jones, a D.C. newcomer, is riveting as the ambitious Hotspur, rival to Hal…

Sure it’s got magic, but the Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) co-directed Macbeth has something even more unusual – it manages to inject a sense of wonder, terror and even fun into a work that is most often played as a rather dour tragedy. The blood-soaked Teller-Aaron Posner Macbeth, now at Folger, is a lot more interested in making the Weird Sisters gruesome (and boy, do they) than it is meditating on the title…