*

'Tis the season to be Julie, no doubt about it. Wherever you look, regardless of the medium, Julie Taymor is making her mark. In opera, The Met is reprising The Magic Flute, her 100-minute eye-popper from 2004, via eight weekday matinees for the holiday kid-crowd — all of it touched up by a team of elves and minions so Madame can do the heavy-lifting for Broadway: making sure Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark flies to his appointed Date with Destiny (1/11/11) at the Foxwoods Theatre.

Mastering Mozart and Marvel Comics would be enough for most mortals, but Taymor is also tackling Shakespeare with another "Ariel act." This one — a film version of The Bard's penultimate play, The Tempest — lifts off at movie houses Dec. 10, in NYC and L.A. before going wide.

Of her four feature flicks, half have been Shakespearean. After film-debuting with "Titus [Andronicus]" in 1999, "I decided, if I were to do another Shakespeare, it would be The Tempest. It's one of his greats. I fell in love with it in the theatre. I don't think I'd do a Shakespeare film without trying it in a theatre first. The paired-down minimalism — what you have to do in theatre — you'd have to really do it with the actors first. It lends itself to the cinema. It's extremely visual — and, in fact, his most visual play."

Poof! Enter Ariel, the high-flying fairy/sprite dashing across the sky in misty streaks, doing the bidding of Prospero, an exiled king with magical powers, lording over an enchanted isle in the Mediterranean. Taymor's advanced visual sense propels this character to properly fanciful heights — making him an ideal conduit for her cinemagic.

	Ben Whishaw and Helen Mirren
	photo by Melinda Sue Gordon ©2010 Tempest Production, LLC

Over the years, Ariel has been played by men, women and, on at least one occasion, by a robot named Robby (in the 1956 sci-fi "Forbidden Planet"). Here, Taymor has opted for the unisex look and cast Ben Whishaw, seen last year Off-Broadway in The Pride and on screen as the sickly John Keats of "Bright Star." He plays Ariel nude-but-not-so-you'd-notice — in a blurry series of lunges and artfully arranged poses, with ambiguous genitalia and, every once in a while, female breasts to further confuse matters.

There's more Taymor gender-bending: She also changed the sex and vowel of the lead. Prospero is now Prospera and played by Helen Mirren — without any discernible loss of authority or majesty — and, while this fem tack is hardly unprecedented (Blair Brown was a 2003 Prospera at the McCarter Theatre), it does shake up the work's foundation somewhat. "There are many things that haven't changed, but, once Helen Mirren went into the play, without changing the lines, things changed immensely," Taymor noted, "not just because she's a great actress but also because the dynamics were so different."

This unexpected casting came out of a casual conversation the actress and the director had at a party. Mirren had no idea Taymor was planning to film The Tempest when she mentioned that the first Shakespeare she ever did was as that play's Caliban, Prospero's monster servant. "Then," recalls Taymor, "she actually said to me, 'You know, I could play Prospero as a woman,' and I said, 'Do you want to?' — because I was already thinking about it, with exactly that in mind. Fortunately, she said, 'Yes,' and, at that moment, I said, 'Let's do it.' She asked if it would be in the theatre, and I told her film. Then we raised the money, cast it and did a reading to make sure it would work."

Now, Taymor points out, the relationship of Prospera and her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones), is different from a father-daughter relationship. The prince who courts Miranda, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney, Broadway's Spidey), is not viewed by Prospera as competition but as someone from whom to protect her daughter.

Helen Mirren, Felicity Jones and Djimon Hounsou

photo by Melinda Sue Gordon ©2010 Tempest Production, LLC