page_title: Caesar (Mercury Theatre)
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Caesar (Mercury Theatre) / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Martin Gabel (left, as Cassius) and Orson Welles (Brutus) in the Mercury Theatre production Caesar Act I, Scene 2
context_page_description: Caesar is the title of Orson Welles's innovative 1937 adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a modern-dress bare-stage production that evoked comparison to contemporary Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Considered Welles's highest achievement in the theatre, it premiered November 11, 1937, as the first production of the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented an acclaimed series of productions on Broadway through 1941.
context_section_description: Unable to attend on opening night, drama critic John Mason Brown asked to review the matinee preview of Caesar—"a troublesome request", wrote producer John Houseman, but one that was granted. At the end of the performance, Brown asked to be taken backstage. "Orson, sitting before his makeup table in his green military greatcoat, looked up in consternation as one of the country's leading drama critics burst into the dressing room and started to tell us such things about the production as we had not hoped to hear even in our most megalomaniacal dreams," Houseman recalled. In his New York Post review, Brown called Caesar "by all odds the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing of the season's new productions. The touch of genius is upon it."
  "Bard Boffola" read Variety. Heywood Broun called Caesar "the most exhilarating play in New York". "Greatly conceived and brilliantly executed, it is the most vivid production of Shakespeare seen in New York in this generation," wrote The Nation. In the New York Herald Tribune, critic Richard Watts called it "a production so exciting and imaginative, so completely fascinating in all its phases, there is nothing to do but let ourselves go and applaud it unreservedly. Here, splendidly acted and thrillingly produced is what must certainly be the great Julius Caesar of our time."
  Stage magazine awarded Welles the palm, its citation of excellence, and featured him (as Brutus) on the cover of its June 1938 issue:
  To Orson Welles, director, man of letters, disciple of classic repertory, for the season's most outstanding contribution to the American stage—the Mercury Theatre. For founding that theatre, with John Houseman. For the vision, the courage, the executive art which accompanied its founding. For establishing a uniformly excellent repertory company. For the editing, direction, lighting, presentation scheme of Julius Caesar, which made the Mercury's bare-stage, modern-dress production of that classic one of the most exciting dramatic events of our time.
caption: Cassius (Martin Gabel) and Brutus (Orson Welles) in Caesar (Act I, Scene 2)
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