Shakespeare is taking center stage in New York now through August, 2011. A bevy of plays are  being presented off Broadway that are sure to please fans of the Bard’s works. The culmination of this run of plays is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s scheduled performances this summer at The Park Avenue Armory.

Productions currently scheduled:

*At the Theater for a New Audience, a new production of Macbeth is enthralling audiences. Starring John Douglas Thompson in the title role, the play runs until April 22. At The Duke at 229 W. 42nd St. Website: www.t fana.org.

*As part of its spring season, The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) presents Macbeth by the UK Olivier Award-winning company Cheek by Jowl April 5 to 16. The troupe presents a scintillating take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth that is physical, psychologically taut, and unsettling to the bone. Declan Donnellan directs, Nick Ormerod provides the elegantly restrained sets, and the exceptional Will Keen (Foyle’s War) delivers a wrenching account of the title role, conveying the doomed general’s emotional turmoil with chilling authenticity. Website: www.bam.org

*The Punchdrunk troupe, enscounced in the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea (530 West 27^th Street  ), is presenting a Macbeth—Hitchcock mashup entitled Sleep No More March 7 through April 16. Since 2000, Punchdrunk has pioneered a game-changing form of immersive theatre in which roaming audiences experience epic storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds. Blending classic texts, physical performance, award-winning design installation and unexpected sites, the British company's infectious format rejects the passive obedience usually expected of audiences. Sleep No More is an indoor promenade performance lasting up to three hours Website:  www.sleepnomorenyc.com .

*BAM is also presenting Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Learfrom April 28 to June 5. Acclaimed British actor Sir Derek Jacobi stars as King Lear in a major new production from director Michael Grandage and the brilliant team from the renowned Donmar Warehouse in London. Website: www.bam.org .

*Shakespeare in the Park returns this summer to the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park with two productions in repertory: All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure from June 6 to July 31. Daniel Sullivan will direct All's Well That Ends Well while David Esbjornson will direct Measure for Measure. Website: www.publictheater.org

*The long awaited appearance of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory (Park Avenue and 67^th Street) takes place July 6 to August 14, 2011. The company will present five Shakespeare plays in repertory: Julius Caesar, As You Like It, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale. This rare US appearance by the British company is being co-presented by Lincoln Center Festival and Park Avenue Armory, in association with Ohio State University. The plays will be performed by the critically acclaimed ensemble on a full-scale replica of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Website: www.armoryonpark.org .

*Tying in with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s unprecedented five-play, six-week residency this summer, copresenter Lincoln Center announces Bard Madness, possibly the first Shakespeare tournament of its kind.  Not unlike the brackets familiar to sports fans, Shakespeare fans can fill out a grid to determine Shakespeare’s greatest play – with prizes going to those players whose choices most closely line up with the winning brackets. Visitors until April 13 should visit www.Facebook.com/LCFestival or www.Facebook.com/Shuttlespeare  to enter the competition. Visitors will be asked to fill out an online bracket, predicting the fates of 32 of Shakespeare’s plays--does The Taming of the Shrew beat A Winter’s Tale? Is it King Lear or Macbeth? – whittling the candidates down to one final play.

Then, from April 14 through 23, the “games” take place.  A couple of the matchups will be decided each day, by a combination of 60 percent public participation and 40 percent on the decisions of a panel of experts that includes Lincoln Center Festival Director Nigel Redden; scholars David Scott Kastan (George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University) and James Shapiro (Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University); Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection; and British stage actors Tricia Gannon and Lloyd Hutchinson.

Participants are invited to come back to Facebook every day to make a case for their picks; participants can follow all the fun and advocate for their favorites by commenting on Facebook or using the Twitter tag #bardmadness. The cleverest comment each day will win a bonus copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, courtesy of Arden Shakespeare.  On April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday, Lincoln Center will announce the winning play and the players whose brackets came closest to the final results.

The prizes:

Grand Prize (one winner): Five pairs of tickets, one pair to each of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) plays in New York this summer; Two Round-Trip Airline Tickets* Courtesy of United Airlines, Official Airline of Lincoln Center, Inc.; plus a copy of the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works;

First Prize (five winners): One pair of tickets to a RSC performance in New York.

*The two round-trip, coach cabin tickets will be booked using up to 50,000 Continental Airlines OnePass® miles, provided by Lincoln Center. Terms and conditions apply. See rules for full details.

And at the Morgan Museum and Library an exhibition on The Changing Face of

William Shakespeare is being presented through May 1, 2011. n 2009, when the

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon- Avon, England unveiled a previously unidentified portrait with strong claims to be the only surviving contemporary likeness of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), it created an international stir. The Jacobean-era painting (photo) had hung unrecognized for centuries in an Irish country house belonging to the Cobbe family, and bore significant resemblances to the famous engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio of his plays. The exhibition is presenting for the first time the Cobbe portrait, together with a recently identified sixteenth-century portrait of Shakespeare’s patron Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Also on view will be three additional portraits of the playwright, including one acquired by Pierpont Morgan in 1910, an original copy of the 1623 First Folio, and a copy of Shakespeare’s 1593 poem Venus and Adonis, dedicated to the earl. Together, the works offer insight into the questions surrounding authentic images of the great playwright, an issue of significant scholarly interest and debate. Also on view for the first time in the United States are the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's recently acquired "Ellenborough" portrait of Shakespeare; the privately-owned Fitzgerald portrait of Shakespeare; and a copy of Venus and Adonis, the narrative poem Shakespeare dedicated to his patron, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, in 1593. Works from the Morgan's collection on display in the exhibition include an important New Year's gift roll that records the earl's gift to Elizabeth I in 1596; the Morgan's first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays (1623); and a portrait of Shakespeare acquired by Pierpont Morgan in 1910. Website: www.themorgan.org

                                                                                                -- PW Mooney

                                                                                                     3/31/2011