Make merry with the wives of Windsor

Delight in Shakespeare’s glorious comedy! In the middle-class and very English hamlet of Windsor, joyous revelry abounds as the ladies of the town—the ebullient Mistress Page and Mistress Quickly—band together to have the last laugh over the lewd, but loveable, Falstaff. The production is staged by foremost Shakespeare director Phillip Breen, who has quite literally written the book on Merry Wives and leads a Shakespeare Institute seminar entitled “Walking in A Windsor Wonderland: Some Ramshackle Reflections on Directing Shakespeare’s Greatest Comedy.” Breen’s eclectic range of work expands beyond theater to encompass opera, musicals, and cabaret, as well as being a regular collaborator with Vivienne Westwood for London Fashion Week.

“Merry Wives is by far Shakespeare’s funniest play, mainly because it is his most subversive, as well as being his most (egregiously and erroneously) underrated,” shares Director Phillip Breen. “It smuggles heresy into its chocolate box English setting. You know… all the things you shouldn’t talk about in public. Sex. Class. Money. Politics. Can there have been a better time to examine the repressed sadism of the monied bourgeoisie?”