Artistic Director Geoffrey Sherman’s final Shakespeare production at ASF, The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, crafted with themes of magic, illusion and music. PS: The Alabama Shakespeare Festival had the guts to actually mount the first "translation" of Timon of Athens undertaken at the start of this OSF translation project. I saw it. It had ambiguities and subtlety intact. It was a wonderful production and the audience was delighted with the evening. The "translator" Kenneth Cavender, whose work I observed while I was member of the Royal Shakespeare Company when they were "translating" The Greeks with John Barton, is a genius and didn't exclude the uninteresting. He has just "translated" The Tempest which is currently in rehearsal at ASF. While we all mourn the passing of the era of being able to show off our super scholarly devotion to and reverence for Shakespeare, I have to say that I recently realized while sitting dumbfounded at a production of Pericles with the most fantastic sea storm enactments I have ever witnessed, that Shakespeare really dashed this all off and the plots are quite flimsy! In fact, if you ever directed A Midsummer Night's Dream in it's entirety with no cuts you can figure out that it plays like a brilliant night of vaudeville! Since he stole almost all the plot pieces, the main thing he had going for him, having a gifted ear to the ground and being totally a man of his time, was the language and the political intrigue. You all know that. I love touching core with Shakespeare in every way, Damned if it wasn't the reason I lived in England for ten years and became a member of the RSC and see the world through the agricultural, fairyland, treacherous fantastical lense of Bill and am writing my heart out on crappy old Facebook! https://asf.net/project/the-tempest/