CUPID'S REVENGE and LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST Lead Bad Quarto's 2017 Season

Bad Quarto Productions, a theatre company specializing in performing modern theatre using Shakespearean staging techniques, announces its 2017 season. The season includes Cupid's Revenge, a rarely performed play by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, the earliest printed version of Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labour's Lost, and Anna Karenina Lives! A new musical play by Germaine Shames.

First printed in 1615, Cupid's Revenge is a tale of love, revenge, and mortal folly that was highly influential to post-Shakespearean playwrights. When the Duke of Lycia prohibits the worship of Cupid, the god of love decides to take revenge on his entire kingdom, putting the future of Lycia in peril.

Angelina LaBarre, a California based director and Shakespeare scholar will guest direct this lost classic of the English Renaissance this spring. Some of LaBarre's most recent credits include Exit, Pursued By a Bear, The Laramie Project, Almost, Maine, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged with Contra Costa College and The Merry Wives with Big Idea Theatre, and Julius Caesar with Darkroom Productions.

Our summer offering will be a production of the earliest printed version of Love's Labour's Lost, one of Shakespeare's early comedies that we know primarily through the Folio version. The first quarto of Love's Labour's Lost was printed in 1598. When the King of Navarre and his friends decide to isolate himself from the world to study philosophy, they think they've created the perfect way of understanding the world, but their plans are foiled when the Princess of France and her ladies arrive on a diplomatic mission, the four gentleman discover the weakness in monastic philosophy.

Alex Dabertin, who directed 2015's What, Lamb! What, Ladybird!, and has previously appeared onstage as Hamlet in our production of Hamlet: The First Quarto and as Polidor in The Taming of a Shrew, will direct this rarely performed version of one of Shakespeare's most beloved comedies.

Our regular season comes to a close with Anna Karenina Lives! by Germaine Shames. Anna Karenina Lives! is a new musical comedy that sees a young Mae West join forces with Sophia Tolstoy to save Anna and the Russian aristocracy from themselves through the power of love and vaudeville.

Bad Quarto Artistic Director, Tony Tambasco, who most recently directed our production of The Life and Death of Jack Straw, will direct Anna Karenina Lives! this coming Fall.

About Bad Quarto Productions: Bad Quarto Productions was founded in 2010 to explore the rarely performed plays of Shakespeare's time, and the ways in which Shakespeare's staging techniques can inform modern theatrical productions. The company has produced the earliest printed version of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of a Shrew ("a shrew" not "the shrew"); the first performance of The Merry Devil of Edmonton in the modern era; and The Ballad of Dido, an original musical developed using Shakespearean techniques. Bad Quarto's performance style has found favor with audiences wherever we've played, and we continue to look for new ways of bridging the gap between Shakespeare's theatre and our own.

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