Rufus Wainwright celebrates Shakespeare and Judy Garland, who rekindled his love for USA
Singer/songwriter’s new album features stage and screen stars reciting Shakespeare sonnets, and after recording a Garland tribute album, he’ll revive that homage in two Carnegie Hall concerts
Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright was introduced to William Shakespeare’s sonnets by his mother, the late Kate McGarrigle.
“It was after she got the inkling I was masturbating,” he recalls. “She very subtly said to me, ‘You know, Rufus, Shakespeare wrote about what you’re doing in your room,’” Wainwright says, citing Sonnet 129: “’The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action...’ I’m still dying for someone to tell me if she was right or not. But I think something’s going on there.”
The album has roots in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a 2009 German-language stage production directed by Robert Wilson for the Berliner Ensemble, for which Wainwright composed music.
“It’s still playing in Europe,” says Wainwright, 42, over pasta at a favourite restaurant near his Manhattan apartment. He had spent a lot of time in Berlin – where he met his husband, arts administrator Jörn Weisbrodt – during a period of disenchantment precipitated by 2003’s invasion of Iraq.
“I actually contemplated leaving [the USA],” says Wainwright, who was born in the US but raised largely in McGarrigle’s native Canada. He found “a kernel of light and hope” in a live album by anotherfavourite artist he’s celebrating this year.
