http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118000936.html?categoryid=15&cs=1 That explains it.  Just the other night I was flipping through the channels and happened catch the opening number to West Side Story on some random movie station.  I fell asleep shortly after. Waking up the next morning and turning the tv back on, which was naturally tuned to the same movie channel…I caught the end of West Side Story. Are we in some sort of anniversary year, or is this just coinicidence?  The article, by the way, points to West Side Story on Broadway in case you haven’t read it.  So it looks like we’re in a bit of a West Side Story Revival. Personally I didn’t like it.  I appreciate the retelling of the story, and how close they kept while still making an entirely new thing.  But without the text, as if they’re pretending it does not owe everything to the original, it just comes off as a pale imitation to me.  Birth to Earth, womb to tomb?  Bleh. Am I in the minority?  Do you other Shakespeare geeks love that one?   I do have a funny West Side Story…story…though.  My friend Brian is more the actor than I, and he did get to play Tony at one point.  However in the big final scene, where he’s supposed to rush across the stage to Maria?  The prop gun didn’t go off.  So instead of the big moment when he just gets there and then crumples at her feet, he reaches her and is like, “Ok, now what?”  So they faked it a bit with an extra long embrace, and then they got the gun to go off. Which reminds me of a different story, back in college, where some friends were doing Inspector Hound (by Tom Stoppard, oddly enough).  I get this story second hand, but I guess there’s a confrontation between the hero and the bad guy, and the bad guy’s supposed to get shot?  Well, the gun doesn’t go off.  So the bad guy, improvising, *runs for it*.  The good guy then chases him offstage.  Well, some handy producer sort grabs a couple of pieces of wood to make the required BANG! noise – only the bad guy, trying to stay consistent, now has to stagger back on stage to properly die like he should have in the first place.  I can only imagine how silly that looked 🙂

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7931823.stm Getting lost in the news about the new Shakespeare portrait comes word of the discovery of Shakespeare’s first theatre. Sorry for the short bursts, busy day at work today but I didn’t want to miss these big events!  Somebody with more time on their hands fill us in on all the details….

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/03/09/william.shakespeare.portrait/index.html CNN’s got the Cobbe portrait up, for the curious.  It definitely looks similar to the other portraits we already have, but different enough to be an interesting addition.  He seems pretty young in this one (odd, if it was really painted in 1610 near his death) – full head of hair, light colored beard and mustache.   What sticks out like a sore thumb (to me) is the lace doily wrapped around his neck, it looks like something under the lamp on my nightstand.  People really wore that?  Bleh. UPDATE : Watching Twitter today, it seems that “He’s a fox” outweighs “He’s not that attractive” by a good margin.  Also smatterings of “Looks the same as all the other pictures” and the occasional “Hey [random friend], he looks like you!”  Curiosity from folks who seem to think that he was a poor commoner his whole life.

http://www.buzz7.com/misc/only-known-picture-of-shakespeare-during-his-lifetime-to-be-unveiled.html Well well well, isn’t this interesting news for a Sunday morning!  It seems that a certain Cobbe family has had in their possession (for some 300 years, apparently) a 1610 portrait of one William Shakespeare.  At least, that’s who they believe it to be.  They’ve got Stanley Wells on their side, and he’s no slouch at this sort of thing. The unveiling is supposed to be tomorrow (Monday, March 9).  Stay tuned! Update:  http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5864845.ece  Better link.  Is that an image of the portrait at the top of the article?