Trailer Park Hamlet, Pro-Wrestling Midsummer, and a "10 Things..." Sequel
Plus: Did your Shakespeare company lose NEA funding?
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you click on the email headline or visit shakespearenews.com the footnotes will appear when you hover over them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible but you may encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive.
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Shakespeare theaters that have had their NEA funding cut:
Actors’ Shakespeare Project ($60,000 for a Salvadoran-American Hamlet)
American Shakespeare Center ($25,000 for ASL interpretation)
Chesapeake Shakespeare ($50,000 for their mobile unit)
Classical Theatre of Harlem ($60,000 for Memnon)
Hudson Valley Shakespeare2 ($ not shared, new play commissions)
Kentucky Shakespeare ($20,000 to support the summer season)
Marin Shakespeare ($20,000 for Cinderella Liberator and $20,000 for their Returned Citizens Theatre Troupe)
New York Classical ($ not shared, summer season)
Shakespeare Theatre Company ($20,000 for Kunene and the King)
Step aside Othello, a new contender has entered the lists for “worst reviewed Shakespeare of the year.”3
Panning a movie like “Juliet & Romeo” is a little like kicking a puppy….“Juliet & Romeo” seems primarily designed as a canvas for its relentless musical score (also by E. Kidd Bogart and Gray) — which, small mercies, drowns out much of the dialogue
However, the Hamlet-Radiohead mashup is…apparently mostly solid, except:
At times, the dialogue feels so incongruous with the mise-en-scène that it’s as though Hamlet has stumbled across a funereal tai chi troupe.
Please enjoy this man who has just shot a raw chicken with a pellet bow quoting Twelfth Night.
There are not one, not two, but three planned sequels to 10 Things I Hate About You. The first sequel, 10 Things I Hate About Dating, is inspired by Molière's Misanthrope.
“Traditionally, Lady Caplet (sp) is portrayed as outright villainous” (really?)
“I'm hoping that audiences will leave this theater wanting to lean into the love.” (really?)
Othello is coming to the West End this fall featuring David Harewood, Toby Jones and Caitlin FitzGerald.
A new radio play about Marlowe and Will Kemp conspiring to kill Shakespeare.
“Doctor Who has done it, Gandalf has done it. Sherlock, Moriarty, Voldemort...”
A British-Sign-Language-meets-pro-wrestling Midsummer and one at a Christmas Tree farm.
The 1989 season premiere of The Wonder Years “was viewed by more people than all of Shakespeare’s works in his lifetime.”4
Shakespeare and nepo babies. (“It might sound like a stretch, but bear with me…”)
Composer Douglas Moore wrote music for a Yale undergraduate production of King Lear in 1914.5 His Pulitzer-winning and rarely-performed opera, Giants of the Earth, recently premiered in South Dakota.
The producing artistic director of Elm Shakespeare Company on her “two headed monster” of a job.
You can visit Pietro Calvi’s sculpture of Ira Aldridge as Othello at the Schomburg Center.
John Adams’ score for Antony and Cleopatra includes a cimbalom.
“The way it’s organized is absolutely insane…it must’ve been made by Dracula.”
“In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon.”6
Your annual “stealing someone’s thunder” + Macbeth reminder.
“Why does Joe Reynolds’ goofy Paris have a white hat the size of Texas?”7
How to raise super-achievers: take them to Shakespeare in the Park.
Arthur Miller has had more 21st century revivals than Shakespeare.
There’s a Shakespeare Society of America in Monterey County, California.
“Snug as a bug in a rug” doesn’t come from Shakespeare but does come from the famously disastrous Shakespeare Jubilee.8
Recommendations
Kurt Vonnegut's Lost Board Game of WWII Themed Chess. (how to play)
The powerlifting librarian working on the DK Reclassification Project for the Baltic states at the Library of Congress. i.e. moving “Ukraine” out of the “Russia” classification.
Like this one.
Hudson Valley and New York Classical are not listed on the termination tracker but sent emails to their lists. If you would like to share updated info, email me.
“I kept talking about, you know, ‘We need someone like Derek Jacobi,' Bogart said. “And then one of his agents said, ‘What about Derek Jacobi?’ And he sent it to him, and the first thing I said was, ‘Make sure he knows I want him to rap.’”
This director origin story is *chef’s kiss:*
“I remember when I was an actor. I was a stage actor. And I love musical theatre. And I remember very specifically, I was in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” playing Judas, and I had my big death scene where I’m up on the scaffold, and the director decides there should be 15 dancers in front of me.”
“I remember going, ‘That’s weird. Why would you do that?’ And they couldn’t explain why they wanted dancers in front of my death scene. And I remember thinking, ‘I need to do that job’. And literally, that was the last show I ever acted in.”
Also, there’s apparently a sequel? Two? Oh god: “An entire trilogy of pop musicals inspired by Romeo and Juliet”? That are also Star Wars themed? The whole article is worth a read (“those moments of such authenticity jarred with a guy on a horse singing”) please join me in this hallucination.
If you can point me to the math on “how many people saw Shakespeare’s plays in his lifetime,” I’d be grateful.
While I can’t vouch for the quality of an undergraduate Lear, Moore seems to have had an excellent time in undergrad, befriending Thornton Wilder and Cole Porter and dressing up as Queen Elizabeth for an Elizabethan Club function. (“There are photographs,” the source takes pains to note.)
Because he’s A Good Guy.™ (See: astronaut Paul Rudd, requires “keep this holy kiss” to be not-creepy.)