Hail, Caesar

Friends, Romans, countrymen: Nathan Jefferson lends his ears (and eyes) to the immersive “Julius Caesar” production at Heritage Square Museum.

By Nathan JeffersonMay 8, 2025

JULIUS CAESAR, Heritage Square Museum, Los Angeles, April 11, 2025.

The Heritage Square Museum isn’t the first thing that comes to anybody’s mind when they think of Shakespeare. Located along the side of the Arroyo Seco Parkway in Montecito Heights, it’s a collection of historic Los Angeles buildings built between 1850 and 1950, later relocated from their original sites to Heritage Square for preservation as the city around them transformed rapidly in the postwar era.

Row Boat Productions looked around Heritage Square and saw a stage fit for Shakespeare. Their production of Julius Caesar was staged not merely in but around Heritage Square, moving between the porches of several homes and the interior of the Lincon Avenue Methodist Church to create an immersive theatrical experience. In Row Boat’s staging, Cassius schemed under the Corinthian columns of the Mount Pleasant House, built for lumber baron William Hayes Perry. Brutus decided to join the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar under a Second Empire mansard roof. A raven marked the transition between Acts I and II by soaring off from its nest as percussion crescendoed. The audience—60 strong the night I attended—moved slowly down the dark square act by act, the conspiracy’s path of no return made literal. A chorus of young women helped guide the audience through the square, functioning as members of the public, conspirators, and artfully choreographed fighters around and within the crowd. The performance hinged on a lot of moving parts, and even though I sometimes strained to hear a word or see the dancers, there were moments when the production managed to realize the full promise of immersive theater. 

Julius Caesar is a play about power and legacy, and in that regard, Madeleine Woolner, the director of this production, made several significant decisions aside from staging the play at a monument to a long-gone Los Angeles. She also flipped the genders. The original contains only two women—the wives of Caesar and Brutus. In this adaptation, all the characters were women/nonbinary save for Brutus’s husband (Angelo Santos), who appears in a single scene. Brutus (Britt Crisp) and Cassius (Erica Bitton) were standouts, brooding in business casual while Caesar (Tracey Dré) reigned in a purple blouse and platform boots. Julius Caesar is famous for private conversations and grand speeches and little in between; in this production, it was the smaller meetings between Cassius and Brutus that made an impression. With an engaged audience to play off, these moments offered just as many chances for humor and pathos as the speeches I already knew.

There’s a long history of using Julius Caesar to speak to the current moment; think Orson Welles’s 1937 Caesar, which drew explicit comparisons to Nazi Germany, or the Public Theater’s 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production that drew national headlines for putting Caesar in orange makeup and a blond wig, evoking the image of the recently inaugurated US president. Nothing here is quite so heavy-handed, but the conversations I overheard after the play made it obvious that republics past and present were on everyone’s minds. Watching Cassius descend from the front steps of an ornate house to hand her dagger to the audience member who would take her life, I thought about the past inside the present, about who really holds power and what legacies are left behind. The Arroyo Seco Parkway was a dull roar in the distance, and the audience leaned in closer to catch a final lament. Then Octavius emerged shining and victorious, and the play was over.

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Featured image: Photo of performance at Heritage Square by Peter Tomka.