Keeping Time: Music, Mood and Shakespeare’s Duke of Jazz

Duke Ellington’s Shakespearean Suite, Such Sweet Thunder, uses jazz instruments, rhythms, and the superb artistry of individual musicians to evoke characters in Shakespeare’s plays, from “Lady Mac” to “Hank Cinq” (otherwise known as Henry V). In his program notes Ellington suggested that there were strong similarities between a jazz performance and the production of a Shakespeare play. 

Marjorie Garber will discuss Ellington, Shakespeare, and the varied roles of music in Shakespeare’s plays in conjunction with the Festival’s production of two modern works based upon them: the world premiere of Such Sweet Thunder by the Washington Ballet and STC’s presentation of Bard on the Beach’s Beatlemania imagining of As You Like It.