Madison's Shakespeare Theatre starts its season in May

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is getting ready to kick off its annual season which starts in May. Just this week, the annual Volunteer Evening took place in the F.M. Kirby theatre building which is on Drew University's campus in Madison.

The name of the season is Method & Madness. According to the Theatre's website, the season "dives headfirst into the thrilling tension between precision and passion - where discipline meets instinct, and order collides with chaos". That certainly is reminiscent of many of the Bard's plays, where things often go awry, where people and relationships are "out of sorts", and where the resolution of the characters' lives at the end of the play is akin to restoring order to the cosmos.

There will be five main stage productions. As is usual with the main stage, not every play will be a Shakespeare play, but some perennial classics of English and American drama will certainly be there. The five plays are 'Private Lives' by Noel Coward, 'Ken Ludwig's Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery' by Ken Ludwig, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' by Edward Albee, 'Hamlet' by Shakespeare, and finally, a musical by the name of 'The Gifts of the Magi'. Artistic Director of the Theatre, Brian Crowe, will be directing Hamlet.

This seems to be a good mix of theatre productions with the well-known Hamlet being flanked on either side by other classics. There will not be a performance on the outside stage of the College of St Elizabeth in the summer as has been the case before.In addition to the five plays of the main stage, the Theatre will also be putting on shorter, more bite-sized productions, and more information about these can be found on the theatre's website, at www.shakespeare.org.

One of the newer offerings of the Theatre is a bar service (in addition to the traditional concessions, coffee and gift shop. There are normally one or two cocktails available which are a playful rendition of whatever production happens to be on stage. During 'Mary Shelly's Frankenstein' in 2025, there were two cocktails on offer that reflected the grisly macabre quality associated with creating a monster of flesh and blood. It remains to be seen what cocktail ideas the Theatre will come up with to reflect the elegant world of Coward's characters in their Parisian hotel on the one hand ('Private Lives'), and the fraught tension in the court of Denmark as experienced by Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, and Gertrude on the other.