Halloween’s Coming …

We haven’t spoken of Halloween much, I realize.  Usually because it’s upon me too late and there’s no time to really do anything exciting (with three little ones, I rarely think about any sort of grownup costumes or parties). With over a month to go, anybody got good Halloween ideas?  Doing anything Shakespearey?  My kids keep telling me to dress up like Shakespeare, but I’m not even sure how one would do that without going full out and getting a relatively fancy/expensive costume.  They’ve also told me to dress up like Hamlet (all black, and carry around a skull?) or Romeo (no idea how I’d pull that one off).  My oldest daughter at one point had the idea to go as pasta (ziti, specifically), but she decided that nobody would really get it, and went with the old standby (Wonder Woman) instead.  But that makes me think how genius it would be to dress up like ….. Bacon.  I don’t love that particular costume, but man, if I can keep my eye out for a better looking one?  I might just do it. I could ride on that joke for years.  Could put a little nametag on it, says “Hello! My name is Francis.” UPDATED: Worth promoting, @Bardfilm wrote:

Boy should go as Lear; girls as Regan & Goneril. After each stop, they should "disquantity" him of his candy.

[Context : I have three children, a boy and two girls.  The boy is the youngest.] Both funny and tragic, I can see that whole scene playing out in my house.  “If you want to walk with me, Brendan, you need to give me half your mini-Snickers bars.” “Well then I’ll walk with Elizabeth!” “Half your Snickers bars, eh? That’s a good idea, you have to give me half your Kit-Kats.” I can just imagine my little 4yr old boy stuck in the middle with nowhere to go.  I guess I’d play the Fool? 🙂

B4RD(*)

Watching Glee with the kids.  For those that don’t recognize it or don’t watch, Glee is one of the most popular shows on tv right now due mostly to the tie-in to the iPod generation.  It’s the story of, well, a Glee club.  So every episode is a bunch of modern cover songs (just showed the kids the Lady Gaga episode), anchoring a terribly stereotyped high school soap opera.  (Seriously, it’s awful.  When it first came on I couldn’t finish an episode, until I realized it’s *supposed* to be bad, and then it got entertaining.  God I hope it’s supposed to be bad…?)   Anyway, every week you’ll find that whatever song the Glee kids sing rapidly climbs to the top of the iTunes download charts, raking in a dollar or so with every download.  It’s genius. Everybody loves a good spin-off, right?  I want to take this exact same formula and make Bard, about the drama club instead of the glee club.  The show works, exactly the same way – every week a theme, a lesson for the kids to learn, and 3 or 4 anchoring “bits” from the source material that show the lesson.  Instead of Gaga week, they have, I dunno, Taming of the Shrew week.  Instead of MP3 files on iTunes, you get video clips. Just dreaming, I know.  But I’d love such a show.  The whole gimmick is that the stereotype for Glee club is that it’s for losers, and the show will change that.  Well, show the drama geeks some love too, huh? (*) For those that have no idea what we’re talking about, the L in the Glee logo is actually a hand making the letter, the universal symbol for “loser”.  I needed something to mimic that, and it’s the best I could come up with :).

Blu-Ray Romeo+Juliet

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (sometimes known as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo+Juliet) is getting a Blu-Ray release on October 19.  Also released on this date will be the Blu-Ray version of Moulin Rouge (which, if you didn’t know, is also a Luhrmann project, only with Ewan  McGregor instead of Leo). I’ll tell you now, if somebody comes knocking on my door offering review copies again, I’m getting a Blu-Ray player! http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/news/09-2010/baz-luhrmanns-william-shakespeares-romeojuliet-mou_30546.html

SARAH : The Life of Sarah Bernhardt

When I was asked if I’d like a review copy of the Sarah Bernhardt biography, I said what some of you might have said: “Hamlet? That Sarah Bernhardt?”  Yes, that Sarah Bernhardt.  I said sure. Of course, that’s literally *all* I know about her.  So this was going to be enlightening. After receiving the book, all I can say is that anybody who thought writing a biography of Shakespeare was tough needs to try Sarah.  In the former case, there’s just no trustworthy information to work with because it doesn’t exist. In Sarah’s case that’s almost true – most of what we know about her came from her, and she made it all up.  So while Greenblatt’s Will in the World kept falling back on variations of “I imagine it went something like this …”, Gottlieb’s Sarah spends much of the time telling a story (typically a real doozy) and adding, parenthetically, “(then again we get this story from Sarah herself, so who knows how much of that if any is true).” This woman was so very, very much more than her Hamlet.  I’ll admit, I started by flipping to the index and looking for how much of the book would be spent on that role, and couldn’t even find Shakespeare or Hamlet listed.  I finally found it, though, in a very large section on Sarah’s Performances.  Answer?  5 pages are dedicated to Hamlet.  Did you know that an actual video clip of her 1899 performance exists?   Sarah’s life easily fills this book, and it never gets boring (and the nearly 100 images, including her Hamlet and Macbeth, beautifully decorate the stories as they are told).  On one page you have something out of a silent movie, everyone dressed to the nines during a Sunday brunch … and on the next page you read about the granddaughter’s firsthand account about how a dispute over politics resulted, literally, in the family smashing plates over each other.  Good times. There’s an amazing amount of information here, about an amazing woman.  It’s going to take me a long time to get through it, because I’m learning something new on every page. It would not do justice to the book to keep this post on the shelf until I’ve read it cover to cover, nor would it be fair to rush my reading to rush out the post.  So I’m being honest.  This is the first English-language biography of Sarah Bernhardt, and it is wonderfully informative as well as entertaining.  I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to experience it, and will never again think of her as just that woman who was famous for playing Hamlet.

Dirty Jokes in Shakespeare

[ This could turn not-safe-for-work (NSFW) pretty quickly, so beware …. ] We’ve had Bawdy Shakespeare and Filthy Shakespeare.  Whether or not you believe that every other word out of Shakespeare’s mouth was a euphemism for naughty bits, the simple truth is that these topics have long been one of the most popular Google searches. So, to have some fun and make it easy for the high school kids who want something to giggle at in English class, I ask : what’s your favorite Shakespeare dirty joke? One of my favorites, I can’t even really do justice here – but I’m talking about the scene in Comedy of Errors between Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse.  Claiming that his newly discovered wife is “spherical like a globe” and that he “could name countries in her”, they do a hysterical schtick where Antipholus asks “Where was Ireland? What about Spain? France?” until finally getting in a big finish when he asks about her Netherlands.  Here’s a link to the full script, I can’t at the moment find a better link. I count this among favorites because, when I saw it performed, I laughed hysterically.  Malvolio’s comment in Twelfth Night about “her C’s, U’s and T’s” might be more filthy, but I don’t know that it’s as funny.  And I’ve always assumed that Hamlet was trying to be offensive, not funny, when he asked about country matters.