Blondie ambition: Then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson greets President Donald J. Trump at the United Nations General Assembly, Oct. 2 2017. White House photograph by D. Myles Cullen.
Graig Nettles, the great New York Yankees’ third baseman of the 1970s, once observed that if you want an entertainer, hire (comedian) George Jessel — meaning that he was paid to hit and vacuum up ground balls from opposing batsmen, something he was quite entertaining at.
But in today’s world, it’s not enough to be good at what you do. You have to be relatable.
Read MoreI am a collector of “Hamlets.”
My first stage experience of Shakespeare’s best play occurred when I was 15 and saw the now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival’s production with Brian Bedford in the title role. It was striped tights, codpieces and an emphasis on Hamlet’s friendship with Horatio. I can still see Bedford, whom I would later interview about the part, being carried off the stage at the end – his head thrown back, his long, dark hair cascading. I loved it, though that may not have been my first “Hamlet” experience. ...
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Much has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.
The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...
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