SOURCE: Isherwood, Charles. “Off Broadway, The Winter's Tale.” Variety 389, no. 11 (3 February-9 February 2003): 43.

In the following review, Isherwood acknowledges the difficulty faced by Barry Edelstein in directing a modern-day production of The Winter's Tale, but notes that the performance suffered not from the efforts to reconcile the two worlds, but from the lackluster acting of the cast.

With their preposterous, often gruesome plots and occasional dabblings in the supernatural, Shakespeare's late romances do not take easily to modern-dress productions. In Barry Edelstein's sober but sapless production of The Winter's Tale at the Classic Stage Co., for example, the oracle of Delphi makes its pronouncement via a reel-to-reel tape recorder wheeled onstage—a deflatingly mundane image, even if the voice, amusingly, is that of the aptly august Walter Cronkite.

The kind of topsy-turvy worlds these plays evoke is not easy to reconcile with business suits and modern technology, although Edelstein's...