Macbeth at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Timothy D. Stickney playing Banquo as a twentieth-century European general in Africa

Macbeth deals with historical figures in 11th-century Scotland, and they call it “the Scottish play.” So why would any director place its setting in central Africa, circa 1950? We knew there couldn’t be any good reason. But we figured something must have triggered director Des McAnuff’s thought process.

Colm Feore as Macbeth with Yanna McIntosh as Lady Macbeth

At first we thought this was another unfortunate case of clumsiness in dealing with a racially mixed cast. (The same director bungled this elementary task in 2008′s Romeo and Juliet, as we observed in this post a year ago.) Could McAnuff have thought that audiences would never “get” a Macbeth with black actors in key roles (Lady Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, and Lady Macduff) unless it were set in Africa?

Anyway, that’s not our theory anymore. We think now that the seed was sown when McAnuff was watching the second season of the sadly short-lived Slings and Arrows television show, which we dug out of our stack of DVDs after we got back from our last visit of the year to Stratford, Ontario.

As many of Emsworth’s readers will know, this Canadian show, which ran for three seasons beginning in late 2003, chronicles three seasons in the history of the fictional New Burbage Shakespearean Festival, an Ontario repertory company that bears hilarious similarities to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The second season of Slings and Arrows deals mostly with the Festival’s production of Macbeth.  As the season begins, the Festival’s artistic director, Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), is being pressured to put Macbeth on the playbill for the upcoming season. Reluctant to do it, he talks it over with his friend Nahum (Rothaford Gray), a security guard at New Burbage who once directed theater himself in his native Nigeria:

Tennant: They want me to do Macbeth.
Nahum: Dammit!
Tennant: Why does that bother you?
Nahum: I do not like that play. It teaches us nothing.
Tennant: It teaches us about evil.
Nahum: No! It shows us evil. It’s a portrait of a psychopath. Where I come from in Nigeria, it is a familiar sight. I’ve had my fill of psychopaths.

Bingo! Nigeria! Macbeth reimagined as the rise and fall of a murderous, monomaniac, twentieth-century African dictator!

It wasn’t a good idea, anymore than this sort of thing usually is. (For instance, we’ve talked to several people who were so distracted by the contemporary-ish costumes and machine guns in this year’s Julius Caesar at the Stratford Festival that they seemed not to have noticed how superbly acted that show was; they judged the show a failure based on how it looked.)  Post-colonial Africa had almost nothing in common with eleventh-century Scotland.  Did McAnuff seriously think it would help audiences understand this challenging play to have King Duncan hold a press conference (complete with an array of microphones and photographers with bulky flash cameras) to welcome Macbeth and Banquo back home? Or to have Macbeth’s armies fighting Malcolm’s on a battlefield with an army jeep and soldiers wielding automatic rifles?

And didn’t it occur to McAnuff that audiences would find it odd to hear Banquo’s assassins report to Macbeth that they’d cut his throat, when we’d just seen Banquo mugged and shot?

There was so much good acting in this year’s Macbeth at the Stratford Festival that it’s a shame the overall production wasn’t more satisfying. We found the unmodulated high pitch of the play wearing, not enervating. The sets, the props, the costumes, and the special effects were distracting and incoherent. We were given a series of memorable visual images, which is something, but telling the story of the play seemed to be the last thing on the director’s mind.

The performance we saw got off to a poor start. We could hear only a little of the dialogue in the stage-setting opening scenes, in which many of the play’s principal characters are introduced.

Now, in some Shakespeare plays — Julius Caesar and Richard III, for instance — the playwright helped audiences keep track of who’s who on stage by having the characters repeatedly address each other by name. Unfortunately, he did very little of that in Macbeth, in which help would have been especially welcome because of the play’s large cast of characters. It is therefore all the more important that a director of Macbeth ensure that the opening scenes are not only lively, but audible. But in this show most of the actors in the first scene (after the witches) failed to project well enough for us to hear — and we weren’t far from the stage. Sometimes the problem with audibility was due to the background music, which was a lot like a movie score. Did McAnuff think that would make the play feel more comfortable for theater-goers who are more used to watching motion pictures?

At any rate, it was a great relief when Macbeth (Colm Feore) and Banquo (Timothy D. Stickney) appeared on stage. Both have strong, expressive voices, good diction, and the indispensable ability to make Elizabethan English heard and understood in the too-big Festival Theater.  (The talented Feore also had a wonderful role in the second season of Slings and Arrows — but not as Macbeth; he plays a wacked-out marketing consultant hired to “re-brand” the financially struggling New Burbage Festival.)

Tom Rooney as the Porter

rooThey were by no means the only actors we especially appreciated. Tom Rooney was wonderful in his brief appearance as the Macbeths’ porter; now we understand, for the first time, why this comic philosopher’s scene belongs in the play.  Also strong were Geraint Wyn Davies (Duncan in the play; he played an actor playing Macbeth in the second season of Slings and Arrows), Gareth Potter (a much better Malcolm than he was a Romeo a year ago), and John Vickery (Ross), who had the challenging task of breaking the news to Macduff (Dion Johnstone) that his family had been slaughtered.

For all that, the narrative power of the play just wasn’t there. We’ve commented before on the Othello we saw in Chicago a couple of years ago (directed by Marti Maraden, who is, thankfully, returning to Stratford in 2010 to direct The Winter’s Tale). Simply reading the text of Othello, we always found it hard to understand how the noble Moor could so quickly become so morbidly suspicious as to believe that his new wife was doing him dirty. On stage, however, his transformation was absolutely convincing, to the credit of both the director and Derrick Lee Weeden, who played Othello.

We’ve had a similar problem wih Macbeth.  Reading the play, we find it hard to understand how Duncan’s trusted general could so suddenly be overcome by ambition that he would embark on a series of savage murders to achieve what the witches had already pronounced as his destiny. (We don’t buy the notion that a soldier like Macbeth is such a “killing machine” that murdering friends in cold blood isn’t much different from what he does on the battlefield.) We hoped this Macbeth would show us how, but it didn’t.

P. G. Wodehouse quoted from Shakespeare more than any other poet, and (we think) from Macbeth more than from any other work of Shakespeare.  See this post.  Other posts from Emsworth about shows he saw during the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

Jean Racine’s classic French drama on the ancient Greek tale of Phèdre (see this post)

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

Emsworth’s list of his own ten favorite Shakespeare plays (see this post).

The hilarious musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at this post

Not enough color at the Shaw Festival?

(October 2008) To his dismay, Emsworth has belatedly learned that the diversity police have been hectoring Jackie Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, for not bringing more actors of color, more directors of color, and more plays by playwrights of color, to Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The hue and cry is being led by one Andrew Moodie, who is apparently a Canadian playwright of some distinction. (Emsworth makes no pretense of being up on contemporary theater, especially in Canada.) Moodie’s campaign, which he calls “Share the Stage,” was seconded not long ago by J. Kelly Nestruck, the redoubtable theater critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, who claims he was “suddenly struck” earlier this year with how “white” the Shaw’s company was.

The wedge here is the Shaw Festival’s friendly competition with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, an institution which Nestruck patronizingly says is now up to snuff, diversity-wise.  Jackie Maxwell gets credit for “gender diversity” (what an dreadful phrase!) at the Shaw Festival, but they’re blaming her for not trying hard enough on race.

Well, now — how is she to do this at the Shaw Festival? It’s an institution whose every season is anchored around two plays by Bernard Shaw himself, a white guy who wrote plays about white folks. And all its plays (per the Festival’s “mandate”) are supposed to have been written, or at least set, during Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950).

We pause for historical reflection.  Here in Rochester, we’re steeped in the American suffrage movement, because Susan B. Anthony lived here and her 19th-century home, now a museum, is here.  History tells us that before the Civil War, abolitionists and suffragettes made common cause.

But Anthony’s relationship with Douglass (together again in bronze in a Rochester park) cooled when black leaders wanted to put women’s rights on hold while civil rights for black people were being consolidated. So there’s a tiny touch of irony when Jackie Maxwell is accused with putting racial diversity on the back burner now that she has gotten “gender diversity” at the Shaw.

There are plenty of new plays by and about people of color. But unless they’re set before 1950, they’re not plays that the Shaw does. So how, exactly, is the Shaw Festival supposed to diversify, color-wise?

Well, Moodie and Nestruck want the Shaw Festival to feature more actors of color in plays by Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward. After all, when The Glass Menagerie is played in Bombay, doesn’t it have an Indian cast? When they do Blithe Spirit in Lagos, isn’t the cast Nigerian? There are people of all ethnic backgrounds in Ontario (as in New York State). So if Denzel Washington can play Brutus (see the picture above, with Stratford Festival veteran Colm Feore, in the foreground, as Cassius, in a Washington, D.C. production last year), why can’t there be a black Undershaft at the Shaw Festival?

If that were to be, Emsworth would nominate Derrick Lee Weeden. On the basis of his breath-taking performance as Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last winter (with Paul Niebanck as Iago), Emsworth ranks Weeden with the best actors we’ve seen in Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake, not excluding Christopher Plummer or the late William Hutt. But Weeden is, regrettably, not part of the Shaw’s repertory company, and the Shaw Festival is at a disadvantage in trying to recruit an actor of his ability. (He’s acted with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for many years; see this link.) The Shaw Festival doesn’t do either Shakespeare or contemporary plays, and from 1856 to 1950, there just weren’t that many important plays written by or about people of color.

There’s no reason why actors of color can’t be cast in many Shaw plays, as indeed they sometimes are. As Mr. Nestruck points out, Nikki M. James has one of the lead roles in Caesar and Cleopatra at the Stratford Festival this season. But in many cases, color-blind casting in a Shaw play would tend to confuse audiences and to distort social relationships that are at the heart of the plays.

And many Shaw plays are largely concerned with subtle gradations of class, and with interactions between English people of different ranks of life. Pygmalion is the story of a poor flower girl who encounters a rich, upper-class intellectual. Getting Married (one of the highlights of the Shaw’s 2008 season, highly recommended by Emsworth) has a lot to do with a lower-middle-class greengrocer’s relationship with the family of an English bishop.

The precision with which Shaw sketched class relationships in his plays is at the core of his genius. So how disorienting would it be for audiences if a person of color were cast as either the greengrocer or the bishop in Getting Married? In 1902, could a black greengrocer possibly have been on such familiar terms with an upper-class white family? — we’d be asking ourselves. Or would a white greengrocer really relate in such a way to a black English bishop and his wife? The didactic Bernard Shaw fervently wanted people to think about his plays — but those are not the questions Shaw wanted his audiences to be asking. A director shouldn’t interject race where it would confuse.

Or take Mrs. Warren’s Profession, also at the Shaw Festival this year (see the Emsworth review). The most interesting relationships in the play are between Mrs. Warren, the former courtesan with lower-class origins, and her middle- and upper-class friends (and former clients) in the aristocracy, the arts, and the church. What would happen to the already challenging social dynamics of these relationships if either Mrs. Warren or the men were black actors? Indeed, since the paternity of Mrs. Warren’s daughter is in question, how would it be anything but confusing if all these actors were not of the same race?

Race is already an element in many American plays that the Shaw Festival performs, just as it is in many plays by contemporary black playwrights (like Mr. Moodie, one assumes). Where a character’s ethnicity is part of the play, an ethnically appropriate actor is needed. Would anyone cast a white actor in an August Wilson play? Of course not — black actors are needed to portray African-American culture. Mr. Moodie says one of his plays wasn’t considered by the Shaw Festival because it called for more black actors than the Shaw could muster. I’m betting that Mr. Moodie wouldn’t be happy if white actors were cast to play black characters in his plays.

In The Little Foxes, playing this year at the Shaw Festival, Lillian Hellman’s key lines about the Hubbard family’s exploitation of black people wouldn’t make much sense if the actors portraying the Hubbards were themselves black. On stage, To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t make sense unless Atticus Finch looks like a white man and Tom Robinson looks like a black man. In fact, since interracial marriage was rare in England and North America before 1950, casting a husband and wife as persons of different races in Shaw-era plays would often be jarring and incongruous.

Mr. Moodie and Mr. Nestruck might argue that audiences today simply overlook an actor’s skin color. Maybe so. After all, every theater performance requires an audience to suspend disbelief to one degree or another.

But a director needs to be careful how far she imposes on audiences. As I commented in an earlier post, one of the problems with Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival this year was the director’s decision to make both sets of parents of Romeo and Juliet mixed-race couples. It was a seriously distracting element.

Theater is visual, and appearance has always mattered in casting. We audiences strain if an actor doesn’t look the part. We wouldn’t buy the Shaw Festival’s Michael Ball as Jack Tanner, because he’s too old. We wouldn’t buy Deborah Hay as Tanner, either; she’s too female. (But at the Stratford Festival next year, we’re going to buy Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell!) We don’t buy Eliza Doolittle unless she’s truly pretty enough to dazzle a prince at the Embassy Ball.

Ethnic appearance won’t be important for every Shaw-era play or character, but it matters often enough that a director usually has little discretion as to the racial composition of her cast. Sometimes, of course, the question of race can be neutralized by choosing all-black casts, as was done, apparently with success, for a recent Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring James Earl Jones, among other distinguished black actors. Could the Shaw Festival mount an all-black production of Private Lives or Waiting for Godot? It could happen, one supposes — they’re plays with small casts.

But in general, the Shaw Festival’s perennial need for a relatively large company of white actors will tend to preclude all-black casts. To Emsworth’s sorrow, for the late August Wilson, a fellow native of western Pennsylvania, is one of his favorite playwrights, that probably means that Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays comfortably within the Shaw Festival’s mandate, aren’t likely to be presented there. But you can’t have everything everywhere.

Couldn’t the Shaw Festival hire well-known actors of color for particular productions? That’s not its policy. The Shaw Festival casts from its own repertory company. So even if Morgan Freeman were willing to commit several months to acting in Niagara-on-the-Lake (don’t we wish!), it’s not the Shaw’s practice to bring in “stars” to play lead roles. Should the Shaw Festival redefine itself or change its policies to placate the diversity establishment? This member doesn’t think so.

What to see at the Stratford Festival in 2009

We scanned the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s announcement of its 2009 season with interest. If its 2008 lineup lost a lot of money, as was reported, will the 2009 lineup do better? (See my recent post on the artistic director debacle at the Stratford Festival and what it wrought.)

For Emsworth’s take on the shows the Stratford Festival has just announced for its 2010 season, which include Peter Pan, the musical Evita, and Christopher Plummer in The Tempest, see this post.

More selfishly, how many of the 2009 shows will Emsworth personally want to trek all the way to Stratford, Ontario from Rochester, New York to see? Let us compare this year’s lineup with next year’s (my matchups are arbitrary) and judge:

Hamlet (2008) vs. Macbeth (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

At the box office, it should be a draw. Hamlet is the world’s best known and most popular play, and Ben Carlson gives a strong performance. (See my review of 2008′s Hamlet.) But Macbeth isn’t nearly as long (or as demanding on audiences), and it has witches, Banquo’s ghost (will we see him, or not?), and moving forests. According to the Stratford Festival, Colm Feore has been cast as Macbeth and Yanna McIntosh as Lady Macbeth. Geraint Wyn Davies will be Duncan; Gareth Potter will play Malcolm; and Sophia Walker will play Lady Macduff.

Will we see the 2009 show? Maybe. Macbeth isn’t very high on our list of favorite Shakespeare plays, but we’d like to see Colm Feore as Macbeth. We hesitate when we see that Des McAnuff is directing 2009′s Macbeth; he made a mess of 2008′s Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet (2008) vs. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

The 2009 show should be more attractive to audiences. Both plays appeal to the romantically inclined, but people will expect, and will probably get, crowd-pleasing Lion King-style special effects from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And it’s bound to be better than the 2008 Romeo and Juliet production, which was a dud. See my review. Geraint Wyn Davies has been cast as Bottom and Tom Rooney as Puck (that’s something to anticipate!). Dion Johnstone will be Titania; Sophia Walker will be Hermia; Gareth Potter will be Lysander.

Will we see the 2009 show? We hope so. It’s not our favorite Shakespeare comedy because we don’t get its jokes soon enough to laugh in real time. But we’re ready to give it a chance.

The Taming of the Shrew (2008 at the Festival Theater) vs. Julius Caesar (2009 at the Avon Theater)

The 2009 show will be a better draw. A lot of people know Julius Caesar from school. And it’s better crafted than The Taming of the Shrew, which some people may avoid because they see it as misogynist.  (They shouldn’t miss the Shrew, though — see my review.)  A first-rate cast for Julius Caesar has been announced: the 2008 season’s Hamlet, Ben Carlson, will be Brutus, Jonathan Goad will be Mark Antony, and Tom Rooney, whom we especially liked this year in All’s Well That Ends Well, will be Cassius. Geraint Wyn Davies will be assassinated.

Will I see the 2009 show? For sure. I love Julius Caesar, and I’ve never seen it on stage. But if there’s one Shakespeare play that ought to be at the larger Festival Theater, it’s Julius Caesar.

Update: See Emsworth’s July 2009 review of Julius Caesar at this post.

Christopher Plummer as Cyrano in a 1962 show

All’s Well That Ends Well (2008) vs. Cyrano de Bergerac (by Edmond Rostand) (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

No clear audience favorite. There have been enough different versions of the Cyrano story over the years that audiences will come, especially to see Colm Feore as Cyrano. But will they come in large enough numbers to fill the Festival Theater?

As for me, my level of interest in Cyrano just isn’t that high. (We liked this year’s All’s Well That Ends Well. See my review.)

Love’s Labour’s Lost (2008) vs. Bartholomew Fair (by Ben Jonson) (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2008. The general public doesn’t know either play, but Shakespeare has more fans than Ben Jonson, and this year’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is a delight.

Will we see Bartholomew Fair? We hope so. Undeterred by an eye-glazing Edward II several years ago, we’d like to try another Elizabethan playwright.

Fuenta Ovejuna (2008) vs. The Three Sisters (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

Martha Henry

The 2009 show will draw more. Theater-goers who only want to see “cheerful” plays will steer away from Chekhov. But they’ll see Chekhov before they’ll buy tickets for a 400-year-old Spanish drama they never heard of.

Will we see the 2009 show? Maybe. We saw a remarkably fine production of The Three Sisters at the Shaw Festival several years ago and look forward to seeing the play again sometime. But it may be too soon. It’s been announced that Adrienne Gould, Irene Poole, and Lucy Peacock (as Masha) will appear as the sisters — a promising trio. Kelli Fox, another of our favorites from her days at the Shaw Festival, will play Natasha. Martha Henry will apparently not be acting, just directing. Update (August 2009): In fact, Adrienne Gould is not part of the Stratford company in 2009 after all; Dalal Badr was cast as Irena.

Caesar and Cleopatra (2008) vs. The Importance of Being Earnest (2009) (both at the Avon Theater)

Bedford

In probable popularity, an edge to 2009. Sure, Christopher Plummer is a great draw, but who’d want to miss Brian Bedford in drag? Stratford Festival patrons love Oscar Wilde.

As for us, we thought the production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival several years ago couldn’t be improved upon. But we love the play and can’t see it too often. And Bedford slays us.

The Trojan Women (2008 at the Avon Theater) vs. Phedre (by Racine) (2009 at the Tom Patterson Theater)

Jean Racine

The 2009 show may do better. Classical plays have narrow appeal. But one would also guess that interest from French-speaking Canadians would make the Racine play a better draw. And an impressive cast for Phedre has been announced by the Stratford Festival: Seana McKenna as Phedre, and also Tom McCamus, the scrumptious Adrienne Gould, the erstwhile Music Man Jonathan Goad, and Sean Arbuckle. Veteran actress Roberta Maxwell will return to Stratford to play Oenone.

We most definitely want to see Phedre. Our interest in the French classics was whetted long ago by a college course in French literature (in translation), and we are sorry we’ve missed other promising opportunities to see plays by the French master dramatists.

The Music Man (2008 at the Avon Theater) vs. West Side Story (2009 at the Festival Theater)

Two equally popular shows. The Music Man was great, as I reported in this post. But more tickets will be sold for West Side Story in the larger Festival Theater.

We must confess West Side Story leaves us cold, as mentioned in an earlier post praising Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, which is playing at the Shaw Festival this year. But the wife of our bosom is anxious to see it.

Cabaret (2008) vs. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2009) (both at the Avon Theater)

The 2009 musical won’t outdraw Cabaret. We love Sondheim’s A Funny Thing, but Cabaret has been hot on Broadway, in Toronto, and on the movie screen for the last ten years.

We want to see the 2009 show. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a hilariously funny musical with a great score. And we’ll need something lighter after a heavy dose of the classics.

Brian Bedford as King Lear

There Reigns Love (2008) vs. Ever Yours, Oscar (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2009. The combination of Oscar Wilde and Brian Bedford will pull them in.

Will we see the 2009 show? Somehow, we find we don’t go to see performances made up of readings.

Hughie/Krapp’s Last Tape (2008) vs. The Trespassers (by Morris Panych) (2009)

Palmer Park (2008) vs. Zastrozzi (by George Walker) (2009)

Moby Dick (2008) vs. Rice Boy (by Sunil Kuruvilla) (2009) (all at the Studio Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2008. People know and like Brian Dennehy (Hughie/Krapp’s Last Tape), and everyone’s heard of Melville’s novel. It may be that the three Canadian playwrights scheduled for 2009 have constituencies in Canada, but Americans in general don’t know them.

Will we see any of the 2009 shows at the Studio Theater? Probably not. If so, it might be the Panych play. We’ve seen his work as a director at the Shaw Festival. The Stratford Festival’s affirmative action program for Canadian playwrights is fine, but the Festival should understand that its numerous American patrons don’t care whether a playwright is Canadian or not.

Ben Jonson

Frankly, looking at the 2009 season as a whole, we don’t see why the management at the Stratford Festival would expect a bigger box office than in 2008. It’s a smart financial decision to put a big musical back in the Festival Theater. And personally, we’re glad to have a chance to see Racine and Ben Jonson. But besides the Shakespeare plays, the only straight play that seems likely to draw full houses is The Importance of Being Earnest.

And we’re disappointed that only three Shakespeare plays will be presented in 2009 — a bit ironic, now that they’ve changed the name to the Stratford “Shakespeare” Festival. We wanted a history play this year, like Richard II or Henry V, and are not mollified by the Festival’s explanation that the two musicals have roots in Shakespeare. That’s weak.

And we’re seriously disappointed that no Shakespeare play is scheduled for 2008 in the Tom Patterson Theater, which is where we like our Shakespeare best.

AUGUST 2009: Emsworth has now seen a number of the shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season and offers the following thoughts about them:

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)