What goes into crafting the words that make up our favorite Broadway shows? How do Broadway playwrights and book writers make our favorite characters shine and our favorite scenes come alive? BroadwayWorld is finding out with Notes on a Script.
NAATCO returns to The Public with their production of Shakespeare’s trilogy, HENRY VI: A TRILOGY IN TWO PARTS, adapted and directed by Stephen Brown-Fried. Condensed into two parts and performed in rep, experience this saga of a nation spinning wildly out of control. Part 1: Foreign Wars kicks off with the funeral of King Henry V, leaving his infant son on the throne and sending the country into decades of spiraling chaos both abroad and at home. Part 2: Civil Strife picks up nearly 30 years later, as nascent domestic feuds rapidly metastasize into the full-blown civil war known as the War of the Roses.
“This scene is later when [my character, Cade] takes over London and he declares himself Lord of the City. He goes into this power frenzy, where he’s able to command people’s beheadings, etc., etc.,” explained Orville Mendoza. “And then ultimately, he is visited by Buckingham and Clifford and they’re telling him that he actually has no right to the crown and he’s false monarch and they appeal to the people around me.”
“One of the things I think that’s interesting that kind of comes to a head in this scene is, and then that made this scene particularly timely, are the different ways that Cade appeals to the commoners,” Brown-Fried told BroadwayWorld. “He first starts by declaring these kind of populist chestnuts like ‘We’re going to have free things and there’s not going to be money and everyone’s going to have everything they need.’ And then the thing very quickly turns violent and they start killing people and that violence becomes really the centerpiece of this latter scene.”
In this video, watch as Brown-Fried and Mendoza break down the scene in the newest episode of BroadwayWorld’s Notes on a Script.
