Nights with Shakespeare

To Our Nights with Shakespeare Audience

Classes for Antony and Cleopatra began on Tuesday, October 3rd at 6:30 pm and will run through December 19th, 2023.

November 21st
November 28th
December 12th
December 19th

R. D. Scinto is thrilled to be welcoming back Leo Schaff and Shakespeare to the Shelton Corporate campus. Bob Scinto has been supporting and presenting Shakespeare for over 20 years in Fairfield County. Nights with Shakespeare is returning Oct. 3 with one of the greatest love stories in the canon and one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays!

Antony and Cleopatra was first performed around 1607, by the King’s Men at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe Theatre. Its first appearance in print was in the First Folio published in 1623, under the title “The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra.”

The plot is based on Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Lives (in Ancient Greek) and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony from the time of the Sicilian revolt to Cleopatra’s suicide during the War of Actium.

The main antagonist is Octavius Caesar, one of Antony’s fellow triumvirs of the Second Triumvirate and the first emperor of the Roman Empire. The tragedy is mainly set in the Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Egypt and is characterized by swift shifts in geographical location and linguistic register as it alternates between sensual, imaginative Alexandria and a more pragmatic, austere Rome.

Many consider Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, whom Enobarbus describes as having “infinite variety”, as one of the most complex and fully developed female characters in the playwright’s body of work.

Cleopatra: “To her Egyptian subjects she was a loving daughter of her country, goddess, liberator, fertile mother-figure, a symbol of resistance to the aggression of the West.”

“To her Roman enemies she was a barbaric debauchee, a whore, drunk and mistress of eunuchs.” – Projecting the Past, M. Wyke

Judi Dench has written a memoir titled Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. In it she describes playing Cleopatra as the greatest female role in the canon.

“Of her many professional peaks and troughs, ‘the Kilimanjaro’ (as O’Hea describes it) remains the role of Cleopatra, a part she played to huge acclaim opposite Anthony Hopkins at the National Theatre...”

About Nights with Shakespeare

Leo Schaff

Leo Schaff is an actor, singer, songwriter, and poet, with a great passion for Shakespeare. Named “New Yorker of the Week” by Time-Warner Cable TV’s NY1 for his extraordinary contribution to the community through his Shakespeare classes, Leo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and is a member of The Shakespeare Society of New York. Studied with Stella Adler, classically trained at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, performed at The Actors Studio and The Public Theater, toured the country in the plays of Shakespeare, and has appeared in film and TV (Law & Order).

As a songwriter, his work has been heard from Carnegie Hall to C.B.G.B.’s to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where his co-written composition “Give Us Hope” – a children’s choir classic – was performed at President Obama’s First Inauguration. Guitar in hand, his one-man song/spoken-word creations, Found, and Won, played to sold-out audiences at New York’s Emerging Artists Theater Festival. He currently teaches Shakespeare at the 92d St. Y, and looks forward to sharing his sense of Shakespearean wonder and bottomless study with one and all.

Nights with Shakespeare

To Our Nights with Shakespeare Audience