Shakespeare

Even during a nagging heat wave, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival provides two awfully good reasons to embrace the elements — kinetic outdoor productions of "The Comedy of Errors," by the ensemble's namesake; and "Scapin," by Moliere. Both plays, performed on a meadow behind the Evergreen Museum and Library and running through Aug. 1, feature the same ensemble of finely honed actors. The Moliere farce from 1671 concerns the knavish title character, whose inventive schemes help two pairs of lovers — Octave and Hyacinth, Leander and Zerbinette — achieve their marital plans despite paternal objections.

Shakespeare and the out of doors go together naturally — not surprising, given that many Elizabethans got their first exposure to his plays in an open-air amphitheater. For the better part of 15 years, Bard fans and fireflies have taken in the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's al fresco season on the meadow behind the Evergreen Museum and Library. And, for nearly a decade, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company has celebrated the greatest English-language playwright with performances given at the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute on a hilltop above Ellicott City.

The 19th-century British actress Fanny Kemble was among the most influential women in America and simultaneously one of the least powerful. She argued politics over dinner with a U.S. president and inspired such seminal literary works as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Henry James' " Washington Square." She wrote plays, poetry and memoirs, and became an abolitionist. And yet, she was kept away from her two daughters for most of their childhoods. "She had a phenomenal life filled with contradictions," says Tom Ziegler, whose two-character play "Mrs.

Something might be rotten in the state of Denmark, but the future is looking brighter for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. The festival, which has a new artistic director, a revamped mission and - in its current production of Wittenberg, a modern day "prequel" to H amlet - one of the strongest shows the troupe has mounted in years. For much of the year, the troupe has taken a performing hiatus, while it tended to administrative matters, such as hiring Michael Carleton as the artistic director to replace the departing James Kinstle.

Chazz Palminteri and his bus-driver dad, Lorenzo, became expert at keeping secrets. They could be gregarious, even expansive, but they knew when to shut their traps. For instance, Lorenzo Palminteri withheld crucial information about a murder that his then-9-year-old son witnessed from the family's Bronx front stoop in 1961. "At the time, I thought those men were fighting over the parking space in front of my building," says Palminteri, an Academy Award-nominated actor who specializes in playing thugs.

Were William Shakespeare, the most famous English writer, to reappear on the streets today, chances are no one would have a clue who he was. That's because, 400 years after his death, our impressions of what the Bard really looked like remain wedded to a few images created years after his death, in an outmoded style that makes it hard to even imagine the author of the great comedies and tragedies as a flesh-and-blood human being. So this week's unveiling, in London, of a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare - painted during his lifetime, then squirreled away for centuries in the private collection of an aristocratic family who had no idea what they had - comes as a revelation.

The ambitious Chesapeake Shakespeare Company spent more than six months putting together its current production of The Country Wife - much of it mastering the intricate movement style required of Restoration theater. And every single minute of the troupe's hard work shows in this glittering version of William Wycherley's bawdy comedy from 1675. Restoration theater is among the most difficult acting styles to master, but what's most impressive isn't the way the performers flip their fans or mince around stage with their feet turned out. Under Heather Nathans' sure direction, the mannerisms never overwhelm the acting.

It isn't love that makes the world go 'round, but jealousy. That's one conclusion to be drawn from the Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Way of the World. The characters drift around the stage in coats and dresses in various shades of emerald and hunter and lime. Costume designer Jane Greenwood wanted to reflect the characters' obsession with money; indeed, every man and woman on stage resembles a dollar bill with legs and a wig. But the color palette also mirrors the characters' moods.

In a year that saw a woman get remarkably close to a presidential nomination and a realistic chance at reaching the White House, it may be harder than usual to swallow the notion, expressed in the closing moments of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, that the female sex shouldn't "seek for rule, supremacy and sway, when they are bound to serve, love and obey." But there has long been a way to deal with viewpoints in this play that now give offense to our gender-respecting souls - rev up the farcical side.

As the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival prepares to celebrate its 15th anniversary with the production of Twelfth Night that opens Friday, it is grappling with major decisions that could change its fortunes. After a decade and a half, the company has yet to establish a real foothold in Baltimore. It continues to struggle artistically and, as a result, doesn't attract a large audience. Many productions have been emotionally remote, or earnest and plodding. Directors have cast skilled actors but have failed to make the best use of their talents.