Much Ado About Nothing...By Joss Whedon?

Yup!

Andy Griffith...and Romeo and Juliet

Familiar Faces Wear Classic Roles

The New York Times looks at the theatre season and the preponderance of King Lear shows (and, also, Kevin Spacey in Richard III? Cool!).

From the article...

SHAKESPEARE’S saddest monarch will be out on the heath again this fall, yelling at the elements and courting death by lightning, when the Public Theater opens its new production of “King Lear,” starring Sam Waterston, in November. New Yorkers may feel that this demented curser of the gods has been hanging out a lot in their neighborhood recently. You could even say he’s become sort of a cautionary fixture in this town, like that homeless guy on the corner who talks to space aliens and throws rotten fruit at passers-by.

Mr. Waterston’s interpretation, as it happens, will be the third to grace a New York stage in six months, following two imported British productions: Derek Jacobi’s version for the Donmar Warehouse (seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May), and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King Lear” of this summer, with Greg Hicks in the title role. It was only four years ago that Ian McKellen played Lear at the Brooklyn Academy (in another Royal Shakespeare Company production), while Christopher Plummer wore the same painful crown at Lincoln Center in 2004.

What gives?

The Old King Hamlet - Gay Pedophile?

Yikes!

From a piece in the Guardian about a novel that depicts Hamlet's father as such...

A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.

Hymned by the publisher Subterranean Press as a "revelatory" retelling which shows "what's really going on" in Shakespeare's play, the story suggests Hamlet's father wasn't murdered by his brother Claudius, but Horatio, in revenge for being molested by him as a child.

The book is not a new release, having been published twice before, for the first time in 2008, but an explosive review at the Rain Taxi Review of Books has unleashed a wave of criticism.

"Here's the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people," writes William Alexander. "The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy – along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay … Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: 'Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be.'"

Who Was William Shakespeare?

That's the question posed on 60 Minutes with Shakespeare. An online conference, it's sixty questions for sixty scholars as 60 seconds each.

Enjoy!

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads from Othello

Shakespeare...on the L Train

Coriolanus

Shakespeare and Country Music

There's a tie between them? Indeed!



From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...



Why haven’t Shakespeare and country music come together more often?



“Country music deals so unabashedly with big feelings — just like tragedy,” Chalsma said. “I thought the audience would connect to the song.”



Country music has long been a place where songwriters explore romantic tragedy using language as compact and colorful as the Bard of Avon’s. Clever couplets, vivid imagery and unexpected turns of phrase are the stock in trade of both.



In modern times, Shakespeare’s work is often placed among the pinnacles of high art in the Western world; just the opposite of country music, which is strongly rooted in the lives and concerns of regular folk. But the two are, historically speaking, closely connected.



“It’s always ironic to me when people start talking about Shakespeare as being so highfalutin’,” said Thomas Bradac, founder of Shakespeare Orange County and a theater professor at Chapman University in Orange. “The poetry was always considered high art, and the sonnets, but the plays themselves were the dime novels of their day. That’s why the royalty didn’t go to them, and why they got kicked out of London and moved to the South Bank, next to the whorehouses.”



Some directors have set productions of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Old West to help audiences connect better with Shakespeare’s treatise on gender stereotypes, while the Bard’s best-known themes and characters have occasionally surfaced as country song fodder.



Taylor Swift’s hit “Love Story” may be the most recent example, one in which the young singer-songwriter cast herself and her would-be love as Shakespeare’s star-crossed couple. Except she added a happy ending.

The Incomprehensibility of William Shakespeare

Can we understand Shakespeare in real time? When we're watching "Titus Andronicus" on stage, can we really follow what the actors are saying?

From a piece in the New Republic...

I was interested in testing my convictions under what many consider the ideal conditions for experiencing Shakespeare: I am often told that the comprehension problem all but vanishes when the plays are performed with top-notch British actors. Even the acoustics were right, as the RSC has actually reconstructed their theater inside the Park Avenue Armory (ah, real government subsidies for the arts).

First, however, I should dispel two possible misimpressions. I am not arguing that Shakespeare’s language can be too “dense” or “poetic,” but that it can be simply incomprehensible because of the passage of time. Also, I am referring to taking in the language through the ear during a live performance, not reading and referring to footnotes. In any case, the question at As You Like It: When an excellent and highly trained British actor delivers Shakespearean language a few feet away from us, can we always understand the basic meaning of the sentences he or she utters?

I found that the company’s high level of skill, including the lucid staging and direction, indeed did much to get across the language’s meaning. It left me still uncomfortable that it takes these kinds of chops to pull it off: After all, there are only so many companies like this. But more to the point, in more than a few places, even in this production, it was quite impossible to follow the meaning. Not because the actors weren’t doing their job, but simply because time has passed.

Shakespeare's "Richard III" Like You Haven't Yet Heard