Simon Callow’s one-man show, Being Shakespeare, took the U.K. by storm and is now making a short stop at Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse, courtesy of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s World’s Stage Series.

The multi-talented Callow is a deeply compelling performer, who clearly revels in the Bard of Avon’s prose and poems. At various points Callow, who’s 62, sprints across the stage with youthful vigor reciting verse while recounting the formative points in Shakespeare’s life that made him into the world-famous playwright. In Jonathan Bate’s dutiful biographical play, we learn how Shakespeare gained foundational writing technique at the demanding Stratford grammar school and get insight into his somewhat unconventional relationship with his somewhat older wife, Anne Hathaway. Callow explains the possible inspirations behind characters such as Macbeth and Hamlet and that he invented the work “puking.” And so on.

The audience eats it up, but I was left a little cold. Read full review on The Huffington Post >