Robert Wilson and Rufus Wainwright's Gender-Bending Take on Shakespeare
The Leonard Lopate Show | Oct 3, 2014
Director Robert Wilson and composer Rufus Wainwright discuss Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a contemporary take on 25 specially chosen sonnets from Shakespeare’s cannon set to a sweeping score. It’s a genre-bending mix of medieval German Minnesang, classical, pop, and cabaret rock is performed by Bertolt Brecht’s historic Berliner Ensemble. Wilson and Wainwright ruminate on beauty and eternity and embrace subversive gender conventions embedded in the sonnets, which move fluidly between male and female objects of desire. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House October 7-12.
