Six actors have memorized all the roles. YOU choose which part they’ll play.

Such is the pitch sent to me by Folding Chair Classical Theatre, which I’ve included below. This could be interesting. I’ve been watching a bunch of improv lately, and it sounds to me like a similar sort of thing. “Ok, freeze! We’re about to see the entrance of the King and Queen of the fairies. Who should play Oberon? You, sir, blue shirt in the third row, which of these actors should play Oberon?” Although that does make me want to add “And now give me a style of movie he should play it in, style of movie….anyone….film noir! I heard film noir. Ok, Oberon, you enter in the style of film noir.” 🙂
Folding Chair Classical Theatre presents

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare

Six actors have memorized all the roles. YOU choose which part they’ll play.

Tickets $18 for all performances at www.SmartTix.com or call 212-868-4444

Folding Chair Classical Theatre takes Shakespeare’s comedy of magical transformation to hilarious extremes as our highly-trained six-member ensemble takes on all 21 roles in a madcap, fairy-populated, magic-filled slumber party.

But just to keep things interesting, the company will not know which set of roles they will be playing that night until right before curtain time. Each performance promises a different fairy queen in love with different ass-headed weaver, as lovers woo and fairies fight (and some guys just want to rehearse in peace) in all sorts of new combinations, to the stylings of a psyche-funkadelic score. Which casting will you see? We have no idea.

Director Marcus Geduld and Folding Chair Classical Theatre return to Shakespeare with the small-cast, big-adventure aesthetic they brought to acclaimed productions of “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Winter’s Tale”. Join us for the magic!

Performances May 5-June 4, Thurs.-Sat. at 8PM, Sun at 2PM.Extra performance June 4 at 2PM.No performance May 8, 27, 28, or 29.At Access Theatre, 380 Broadway between Walker and White Street.

Tickets only $18. Click here to order or call 212-868-4444

…Let’s Fall In Love
I want to get back to something for a minute. Lost in the shuffle of last week’s Shakespeare Day celebrations was a new effort by our own BardFilm (aka KJ), where he rewrote Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love)” using all of Shakespeare’s favorite couples (and then some!) Not only did KJ write this, he sings it as well, and put together a video. It’s over 8 minutes long!

That is no small effort, and I wanted to make sure that everybody did get a chance to see it. You may not have a chance to watch the *whole* thing, I mean come on KJ, some of us have day jobs 🙂 … but you can always bookmark it and tell yourself you’ll watch it later.
Go watch! I’m deliberately not embedding the YouTube video because it’s only fair that he should get the traffic.
Nice work, K. It is appreciated!

We’ve mentioned Wordle, the engine that turns any stream of text into an artistic tag cloud, a few times in the past. And people have been throwing Shakespeare at it for as long as it’s been around.

But for the geeky among us, C. Laprade over at In The Web Of It went a different way. He put Hamlet in – in all its different forms. Q1, Q2, F1. And then he compared the clouds. Before you look, what would you find more interesting – their similarities, or their differences? Or are they all just slices of the one whole that is Hamlet?
Reminds me a bit a project of my own 🙂UPDATE: I had an idea, and made one of my own for King Lear. Here I took just the lines of spoken text – no stage directions, and no speaking characters’ names. So if somebody said “Hey Cordelia!” that would be included, but her response would just be “What?” rather than “CORDELIA What?” See what I mean? So it gets rid of the syntax that artificially inflates whoever has the most spoken lines.

See anything interesting? I like that “father” and “know” pop out so clearly, and if you look to the left you’ll see “daughter” right there as well.

I’m sure we’ve talked about projects like this before, and here it’s come around again : Subway Shakespeare. In this article, two twenty-somethings entertain a carload of passengers with the final scene from Romeo and Juliet. I like that they are interviewed right there in the subway.
What do you think? I’m torn – I think that at first I’d be fascinated to recognize what’s going on, just like I am when I hear one of my kids’ cartoons suddenly quote Henry V. But if I was a regular? And they did it every morning? And I had work to do? It might get a little stale. And what if they’re not really any good?
Anybody ever seen Shakespeare in the wild like this?