Caesar and Cleopatra

Julius Caesar and Cleopatra: Frankly, I think they were using each other.

Several of the ASC’s star actors, most notably the wit-exuding John Harrell, continue with the company, but the directorial ranks have been filled for the fall offerings with a band of nationally known directors: McSweeny handles both “Julius Caesar” and “The Willard Suitcases”; Sharon Ott, former longtime artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Company and now theater chair at Virginia Commonwealth University, stages “Antony and Cleopatra”; and Eric Tucker, who helms New York-based Bedlam, which devises clever cast compressions for classics on a shoestring, takes on “Caesar and Cleopatra.”

The ASC’s fall season offers up, in addition to its first original musical, some of the fare for which its loyal fans tend to turn up again and again: two of Shakespeare’s Roman plays — “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra” — and a thematically linked “Caesar and Cleopatra” by George Bernard Shaw.

He played Brutus, Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth at the Birmingham Rep, and in 1956 made his London debut in the Old Vic’s production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.

The exhibit vibrates with charismatic objects, among them portrait busts of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and several famous sculpted heads depicting Egyptian priests.