The Return of Buzz Podewell

May 5th, 2010

While I am thrilled about the influx of new talent into our company, I would not be honest if I did not say that I am most excited about Buzz Podewell’s return to directing Shakespeare with Love’s Labor’s Lost. It has been over a decade since he helmed Pericles for Tulane’s Department of Theatre and Dance, making us all want to go on an adventure. And it has been even longer since he sat in the director’s chair for the festival to bring Antony and Cleopatra’s great romance to the stage in 1999. He has given this lover of Shakespeare two of his most thrilling moments in our seventeen year history: Mark Mclaughlin cackling and surrounded by wailing women at the end of Othello, and the mob scene to end all mob scenes in Julius Caesar. He was all set to present Romeo and Juliet for the department in the fall of 2005 with both students and members of the community until… well, we all know what happened. Offers have been made, schedules have been checked, and rebuilding has occurred, but we are never able to work it out. However, it seems the youth of his daughter and our new NOLA friends along with two-thirds of his favorite gang of actors are the spur he needed to put him back in the third row with his legal pad. Welcome back, Buzz. We missed you.

-Jim Fitzmorris

Read the original post