Wicked tunes this way come

US writer, director and singer Whitney White's musical mashup All Is But Fantasy gives the fates of Shakespeare's women a thrilling twist

- By Arifa Akbar

Whitney White is practically swooning. "I have more respect and love for William Shakespeare than I can honestly communicate," she says on a video call from Stratford-upon-Avon. When she went to Holy Trinity Church to visit his grave, she says: "I just wept, because the language is so beautiful to me.

White's first encounter with Shakespeare's work was in Chicago at high school, where A Midsummer Night's Dream unleashed her inner “theatre nerd”, she says. “I remember thinking, 'Shouldn't all theatre have music and dance and text and fights and be as full as possible?' Then you grow up and start doing theatre - and we segment the business into musicals and plays.”

Except that White didn't. A Tony-nominated director (for Jaja's African Hair Braiding), performer and songwriter, her first exposure to theatre was at her grandfather's church, which had a 50-strong choir. So it follows that the musicality in Shakespeare is key for her, the metre every bit as valid as the meaning. She realised that when she took a theatre programme at Brown University in Rhode Island. “I was assigned what you call an epic speech. I will never forget the feeling when I finished it. It was like the sky clearing.”

Singing was “the first thing I ever did”, she says. “And I was like, 'Wow, Shakespeare makes me feel the same way. It feels like a song.'” Although she recognises so much of her world in his, she says that: “For so long, we were told that only some people could do these stories. I think that's not true. I think whoever Shakespeare was, he made them for all of us to be doing them.”