Month: April 2009

http://opoyul.blogspot.com/2009/01/all-twittered-shakespeare-synopses.html This list is going around Twitter at a furious pace right now, so may have already seen it.  But then I realized that not everybody’s on Twitter :). You know the Twitter drill?  Get your point across in 140 characters.  So somebody went ahead and summarized each play in 140 characters:

H: Mommy issues are just the beginning for a prince with a murdered father and new Uncle/Step-dad. Most everybody ends up dead. HV: Bad-ass Henry V kicks France’s butt with a rag-tag army, many long-bows, and excellent speeches. Henry then marries a French princess.

It’s not entirely a comedy show, most of them are pretty straight forward summaries.  Of course, not wanting to devote characters to the titles, they are all abbreviated down to first letter and you have to figure out which one is which.  Sounds like a different game.

Just got back from my first ever “open Shakespeare mic” night in Salem, Mass (thanks to Keri from Rebel Shakespeare for letting me know about it, and thanks to my lovely wife for securing us a babysitter and actually sitting through it with me!) What fun!  At first it was awkward trying to figure out what the deal was – where to sit, how do you get food and/or a drink, etc… but eventually we answered all three, and could sit back and enjoy the performance.  I was pleased that I recognized almost everything, and even caught the occasional mistake :).  That’s not to say by any means that I have the memory for that kind of thing – most of the performers read from script, and I suspect I’d have to do the same thing.  That is, if I had the guts to get up there and do it :). What fascinated me most, I think, was the variety.  I walk into situations like that with the assumption that everybody knows everybody else and has done this 100 times.  But what I saw were people reading directly from script (and getting it wrong), people comfortably off book (but still needing the occasional cue), and confident professionals who looked like they’d done their particular parts 100 times.  I saw kids as young as maybe 10 not only getting into their roles, but saying things like “I couldn’t decide which monologue to do so bear with me while I do both.”  I saw a man with a prosthetic leg remove it so he could do Richard III, and another elderly gentleman do a simple performance of several sonnets that sounded like he might have dedicated them to his long lost love. I tell myself that some day I’ll get up and do something.  Of course, I’m 40 years old (next week) and the closest I’ve ever been to performing is getting dragged up on stage for the HAIR finale in Baltimore. I wonder if there’s more such events like that, or if this was a special birthday-only thing.  I could see myself hanging out at such events.

Confess, fellow Shakespeare Geeks, what did you do for Shakespeare’s Birthday / Talk Like Shakespeare Day this year? Though I found it a bit silly, I did some of my Twittering in my best Elizabethan. Gave away some books to the winners of my Sourcebooks Shakespeare contest. Got a new book, “Bardisms”, in the mail. Tried very hard to make as many posts to the blog as I could (8, counting this one, and the day’s not done yet). Snuck into my coworkers’ offices and put Shakespeare quotes on their whiteboards like a Shakespeare ninja: (misquotes on purpose for context)

For the military boss who never gives up, no matter how bleak the prospects:  “Yet I will try the last.  Before the ground I throw my warlike shield.  Lay on, MacDuff, and damn’d be he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” For the founder of the company, recently bitten by a strange dog in the middle of the office (trust me, a funny story):  “Cry Havoc!  and let slip the dogs of war!” For the young do-it-all programmer who could own the place if he really tried (who also happens to be the sort of skinny young guy who can down 9 pieces of pizza in a sitting and never gain any weight):  “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look…” For the programmer who never says much, but always manages to deliver twice as much as you asked, in half the time you thought it would take:  “How far the little candle throws its beams!  So shines a good deed in a weary world.” For the “technician” whose just is slowly being replaced by automatic scripts, who sees his role evolving into something new:  “We know what we are, but not what we might become.” In the break room, where we just had a catered lunch complete with cookies, cake…and beer and wine:  “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!’

Came home, played Midsummer Paper Dolls with my daughters. Tonight, going to a “Shakespeare Open Mic” night.  No idea how that’ll turn out, but it should be fun! [UPDATE: Typo fix, I did not write “so shines a good dead” on her whiteboard!]

http://www.masterofverona.com Here’s a story I bet not everybody can post :).  Hope he doesn’t kill me(*), but David Blixt, author of The Master Of Verona and regular contributor to my humble little blog, celebrates his wedding anniversary today, on Shakespeare’s birthday.  How cool is that?  The man’s a professional Shakespearean actor, a published author on the subject (historical novel, to be specific), and he even gets to live a life where he does things like getting married on Shakespeare’s birthday.  So I think that’s quite a nice story for a blog called Shakespeare Geek. :)  He did not, however, name his child Fleance. Congratulations David!
(*) Trained in stage combat as he is, I expect he could only pretend to kill me.  Very convincingly, but still.

http://www.google.co.uk/ Google UK gets in on the act with a multi-purpose doodle today showing St. George and the Dragon…acting out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.  Nice!