Month: November 2014

Girls Just Wanna Have Shakespeare

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Let’s talk about Cyndi Lauper, who my younger audience will know from her show Kinky Boots (Tony Award winning show, I believe), and my audience who is more my age will know her from her domination of the pop charts back in the 80’s with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Time After Time, True Colors and many others.

Today Cyndi Lauper did one of Reddit’s famous AMA’s, short for “Ask Me Anything”. It’s always interesting to see how these go. Typically with a celebrity there’s no point in asking a question as yours will almost never float high enough to be seen, but it’s fun to come in after and read the various summaries to see what you learn.

Check it out:

Cyndi Lauper’s Reddit AMA (click to enlarge)

Wait, what? Did Cyndi Lauper just drop in an entirely out of context Shakespeare reference? Her biggest regret (well, one of) was “not doing SNL (Saturday Night Live) with all the wrestlers, because she always wanted to see them do Shakespeare with her.”  (Brief bit of context for the confused, Ms. Lauper was the centerpiece in the 1980’s of what became known as the Rock n Wrestling Connection due to her friendship with real life WWF manager Captain Lou Albano, RIP).

Where’d this Shakespeare interest come from?  To the Google!

An excerpt from her memoir (which I have not read), where she appears to be talking about an old boyfriend:

Cyndi Lauper : A Memoir (click to enlarge)

This is unfortunately the only reference I can find. It’s obvious that she’s got theatrical experience/interest/connections, look at her success with Kinky Boots. But now I’m curious about her background in Shakespeare! She must have some signficant interest in the subject for it to jump right to the top of her “big regrets” list like that.

Other snippets from the book include a note that her mother, “…wanted to be a Bohemian. She went to museums and read about Chinese architecture and yogis and Shakespeare.”

Alas I can’t find any information that suggests she’s got formal schooling in Shakespeare, or that she may have ever acted in any of the works.  Neat idea, though. I know very little about Kinky Boots, but I hear it was very well received, so I’m left to wonder how much classic theatre practice went into its development.

Let’s Talk About Globe on Demand

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

Everybody and their Uncle Pandarus is reporting on the Globe bringing their plays online for rental or purchase.  As a fan? I love the idea. As a technology geek I think it’s a good first step, and for a number of reasons I hope they make some changes.

If you haven’t seen the player yet, it’s proprietary. Instead of teaming up with any of the plethora of other services available, the Globe is using their own. You register with them, pay them your money, and watch your videos on their player. This goes against what I see as the most common trends in this industry. As a consumer I want:

1) An “all you can consume” subscription option. You tell me you put 50 plays online and want to charge me $6.50 to rent each one, I can’t help thinking “It’s going to cost me over $300 if I expect to watch all of these.” But tell me that for $99 I can have a year long access to watch the plays whenever I want?  Much better deal, and also far more likely to get more money out of me because I may have high hopes about watching all of them, but let’s be realistic, I’m not doing that. Not only are many not available in my region, many are in foreign languages.  So if I end up watching less than about 15 of them, the $99 deal still puts the Globe ahead.

2) I want to watch on my television, not my computer. This is standard now. Between my Roku box and my Chromecast, anything that’s worth watching is worth watching on the big screen. I’m relatively certain they don’t have a Roku channel, but I’m honestly not sure if it works with Chromecast. It might.

3) If I choose to buy/own a video, do I get a DRM-free, downloadable version? I’m not going to try it to find out, but that’s what I’d want. I want a file that I’ll copy over to my home video system, where I’ll be able to play it on my television (see point #2). I get the funny feeling that buying the video from the Globe means you still get to log back into the Globe site, check out your account, and watch your videos from there.

Has anybody plonked down some money yet and taken this one for a spin? What do you think? What did you rent?

Where You From?

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I was looking at my site recently and while I noticed that the lion’s share of my traffic comes from the US, expectedly, but according to Google there’s 117 different locations where my readers have come from.

So I’m curious.  Where you from? What’s the Shakespeare scene like over there?

Collier Shakespeare

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On Halloween I asked for research into which edition added a stage direction for Hamlet to put down Yorick’s skull.  Bardfilm tells me it was added in the Collier edition, but then disappeared before I could ask for more info on Collier.  So, I had to go look for myself.

Interesting!  From the Wikipedia page:

Collier used these opportunities to effect a series of literary fabrications. Over the next several years he claimed to find a number of new documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and business. After New Facts, New Particulars and Further Particulars respecting Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), so called from a name written on the title-page. In this book were numerous manuscript emendations of Shakespeare, said by Collier to be from the hand of “an old corrector.” He published these corrections as Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare (1852) and boldly incorporated them in his next edition (1853) of Shakespeare.

More information here.  Did this guy just forge his sources? If there’s such controversy over his edition why would the Moby edition, which is based on the 1864 Globe edition (thanks JM), have this line?

I would have thought the authenticity of this edition would have been seriously called into question just by looking at the first scene of Romeo and Juliet, anyway:

SAMPSON 

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals. 

GREGORY 

No, for then we should be colliers. 

SAMPSON 

That would be awesome. 

GREGORY 

This is what I’m sayin, right? Colliers are the coolest. 

SAMPSON 

I hear you.  Ain’t nothing wrong with being a collier. Colliers rule. 

GREGORY 

You know who doesn’t rule, though? Montagues.

Paterson Joseph, Shakespeare Mastermind

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Personally I don’t know who this gentleman is, I had to go look him up on IMDB. Seems he’s done mostly work on UK rather than US features. Fair enough.  He popped up in my newsfeed this morning for a Shakespeare mention, and here’s what he had to say:

Mastermind specialist subject
Shakespeare. When I watch Pointless and there are any Shakespeare questions I nearly always get them all, and I feel like I’d probably know more about Shakespeare than I do about anything else, as a sort of general knowledge thing. So yeah, it would be Shakespeare, but I’d have to read all 36 plays again.

Anybody else notice something odd right at the end, there?  36? I hear 37 most often, and sometimes 38, but I can’t remember the last time I heard 36. When somebody says that, which play are they not counting? Henry VIII?